Japan’s nine leading electronics manufacturers each employed over 100,000 workers and supported vast networks of small and medium-sized companies. Yet media-led policy misdirection, chronic yen appreciation, and preferential treatment of Korean conglomerates created a fatal cost gap, triggering mass layoffs and the collapse of Japan’s middle-class society. This essay exposes the structural forces behind Japan’s industrial downfall.

Japan’s nine proud electronics manufacturers are each companies that employ on the order of one hundred thousand people.
Beneath them lie countless small and medium-sized enterprises forming a vast industrial base.

As they were reduced to merely producing the “box-like shells” of personal computers, they were exposed to ever greater inequality.

The truly childish, vicious, and foolish media, led by Asahi Shimbun—despite the fact that they themselves earned annual incomes exceeding ten million yen from a young age as Japan’s elite high-paid class—began to brandish such shoddy arguments as the so-called “philosophy of frugality,” which in essence differed little from the wartime slogan “Luxury Is the Enemy.”

They completely buried the policies that the Miyazawa administration attempted to resolve in one decisive stroke.

Thus began the “Lost Twenty Years,” and the greatest inequality-generating machine was set into motion.

The greatest inequality-generating machine consists of governmental policy failure and the tyranny of the media.

As noted earlier, even though there is no country in the world that takes seriously the outrageous demands suddenly put forward by South Korea—an actual totalitarian state in practice—Asahi casually writes “Sea of Japan (East Sea)” without the slightest sense of impropriety.

Asahi, which is hardly an exaggeration to call a Korean newspaper in substance, continued to support a strong yen.

During this period, the South Korean government not only maintained a weak-currency policy but also extended every conceivable preferential treatment—beginning with electricity supply and pricing—to chaebol conglomerates represented by Samsung.

Between Japan’s electronics manufacturers and Korea’s chaebol corporations, an almost unimaginable original cost gap emerged.

Under this relentless succession of foolish policies, Japan’s electronics manufacturers began massive restructuring.

They reduced employees, cut regular employment, expanded non-regular employment, and other manufacturers followed suit in unison.

It is no exaggeration to say that the middle-class society which Japan once boasted collapsed in an instant.

Meanwhile, Son Masayoshi—the principal figure who brought all of this about—did not stop there.
He repeatedly attacked NTT, one of Japan’s proud great enterprises in both scale and technology, labeling it a monopoly at every opportunity, and ultimately positioned himself on the side of monopoly.

The assets he accumulated quickly exceeded 500 billion yen.
On the other hand, the workers who, through his actions, were subjected to restructuring and cast down from the middle class now number twelve million who, even at the age of thirty, cannot secure stable employment and earn less than two million yen a year.

More than twenty years later, one in six children in Japan is now raised in poverty, in households with annual incomes of roughly 1.8 million yen or less.
In a country that remains, in practical terms, the world’s second-largest economy, an unbelievable level of inequality has been created.

Who created it?
The two figures mentioned above.

They have proven, in the worst possible form, the truth that I was the first in the world to point out:
“All things begin with a single individual.”

This column continues.