2010-7-19
No one would oppose the City of Osaka offering tax advantages for the last remaining land capable of bringing about Osaka’s renewal.
Even if anyone did oppose it, they would only be people acting according to partisan political interests.
That is because everyone knows perfectly well that nothing other than the North Yard can drive Osaka’s renewal.
When every major American city affected by structural change sought to regenerate itself and drew up a new urban plan, it offered tax advantages to people who purchased new homes and moved there and to companies that established operations there; in the same way, what a government office can do is provide tax advantages.
That is the one and only point.
The Asahi Shimbun wrote on September 23 that the City of Osaka should exercise leadership, but this is precisely the pitfall into which they fall.
There is probably not a single genuine elite in the present Osaka City government capable of exercising leadership, nor is there any need for the government office to exercise such leadership—I will discuss this later.
What the government office should do is devote itself to serving the private sector.
Their salaries do not produce our salaries; only the reverse is true.
A small article appeared in the Nikkei Shimbun under the headline, “Phase Two of the North Yard: Association of Corporate Executives Calls for Green Space.”
Through this affair, I feel as though I am witnessing firsthand how Japan commits its mistakes in precisely this manner.
Whose land is the North Yard?
Is it not land belonging to the Japanese National Railways Settlement Corporation?
In the breakup and privatisation of Japanese National Railways, neither the “waiver of some debts,” commonly seen in the liquidation of large corporations, nor the “suspension of interest payments” was implemented; meanwhile, there was not only no “income from the continuation of business operations,” but the additional burden of personnel expenses related to the liquidation process and the poor progress of asset sales meant that, despite the disposal of almost all saleable assets and the imposition of additional debt burdens on the JR companies—particularly the three companies on Honshu—approximately 30 trillion yen in long-term debt remained unpaid and in fact increased because of interest payments and other factors, and the corporation was dissolved on October 22, 1998, together with the repeal of the Japanese National Railways Settlement Corporation Act.
After its dissolution, assets to be disposed of, including fixed assets and shares in the JR companies, were succeeded by the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation.
Meanwhile, under the Act on the Treatment of Debts and Other Liabilities of the Japanese National Railways Settlement Corporation, the debt was transferred to the national government’s general account and became debt owed by the national government itself—which means that the people would bear it in the form of “taxes.”
The above is from Wikipedia.
Since Heisei 2, have you not, led by the mass media, repeatedly talked about the people’s hard-earned tax money?
Is the matter of Japanese National Railways not also a matter of hard-earned tax money?
Is it different now?
For the second-phase land, the doors should be opened to every foreign country, competitive bidding should be conducted, and the land should be sold to the sovereign wealth fund or major global corporation that submits the highest bid, thereby reducing the burden on the people’s hard-earned tax money by even a single yen.
To achieve that, the government office should promptly relax the floor-area ratio and take other measures to increase the value of the land, thereby contributing to making it possible to sell the land for the most astronomical price attainable; it should carry out the administrative measures that a government office is capable of taking.
That is all that needs to be considered.
I would add that a consortium should be limited to no more than approximately two companies.
As a basic condition, the successful bid should be made by a single company.
If one company had moved several hundred billion yen, it might commence the project as quickly as possible, but it could never postpone the start of construction for as long as eighteen months.
That is because it would be pursued by enormous interest charges.
The postponement of construction on the first phase occurred only because the twelve-company consortium consisted of groups of highly profitable major corporations, the burden on each company was small, and the interest burden resulting from an eighteen-month postponement meant nothing to them, enabling them brazenly to engage in such shameless conduct.
Now, as for the central question concerning the second phase, the only entity capable of producing the finest ideas and results for this location is the company that wins the bid by paying several hundred billion yen.
That is because, in order to recover such an enormous investment, it must maximise the site’s attractiveness and its ability to draw visitors.
The successful bidder will strain every conceivable faculty and produce the finest answer.
No fool would invest several hundred billion yen and turn the site into a pachinko parlour or a drinking establishment.
Why do you fail to realise that no best answer for the second phase can possibly come from people led by the mass media, who have for some reason forgotten on this occasion that this is their own hard-earned tax money, or from business leaders whose stability of life was never once damaged despite the enormous decline of Osaka’s economy over more than twenty years until virtually nothing remained of it?
Deregulation is something that you yourselves have continued to advocate.
Its implementation will be splendidly achieved through competitive bidding for the highest price for the second-phase land, with the doors opened to foreign countries.
A green forest… Do you still not realise that there could be no greater self-serving pretext?
During “Japan’s lost twenty years,” for which the mass media bear the greatest responsibility, directly in front of Osaka City Hall and the courthouse stands Nakanoshima Park, a splendid park that would bring no shame wherever in Japan it might be presented.
For more than ten years, many people who had been forced to fall into the lower class or below settled there, yet City Hall took no measures whatsoever, and I repeatedly saw them lining up beneath the cold sky for rice porridge and other food distributed by volunteers from the YMCA and other organisations.
What do you propose to accomplish by turning the second-phase land into a park?
Are you confident that you will be able to remove the people who have no choice but to live there?
Or are you making this proposal because you have some means of preventing the site from becoming like Nakanoshima Park, where, once night falls, couples covertly indulge their pleasures?
That location will become an even more difficult place than Nakanoshima Park.
Will you lock it at five o’clock in the evening?
Will you surround it with walls so high that no one can climb over them?
Not a single citizen of Osaka—apart from people like you who live comfortably within guaranteed circumstances—is thinking about greenery or anything of the kind.
Osaka Castle Park, Nakanoshima Park, and Utsubo Park are sufficient as parks within the city, and do you not understand that people simply and earnestly want Osaka to regain its vitality and its economy to be restored, and that they are single-mindedly hoping for even one more workplace to be created and their salaries to rise by even one yen?
I was filled with profound despair by the opinions of Kansai business leaders who are effectively my contemporaries, speaking from their own comfortable positions—opinions that are the very embodiment of theories formulated at a desk, or rather, opinions offered by detached spectators looking down from above…
However, I can remain silent no longer, and this time I am prepared to fight without retreating even a single step.
I had been an avid reader of the Asahi Shimbun ever since I became old enough to understand the world, but I found myself thinking, “So this is what kind of newspaper the Asahi Shimbun really is.”
I am rendered speechless by the childishness of both the Asahi Shimbun and yourself in genuinely believing that merely creating a park in front of a railway station will enable you to send some kind of message to the world.
Recovering my composure enough to point this out, it would at least make more sense to present Osaka Castle Park to the world, since it is far larger and the presence of numerous wild birds and other living creatures has only recently been confirmed there.
After all, it contains the magnificent Osaka Castle.
It goes without saying that the entities that would gain the greatest benefit from turning the second-phase land into a green forest would be the developers responsible for the present first-phase project.
When Tokyo redeveloped the former railway land in Shinagawa, did it create an uproar like the one all of you are creating?
It simply relaxed the floor-area ratio and introduced other measures, increased the value of the land, opened the bidding to foreign countries as well, selected the bidder offering the highest price, and the successful bidder constructed buildings commensurate with the enormous amount of capital invested.
As a result, not only did the capacity of Tokyo, one of the world’s leading business cities, increase further, but the number of internationally renowned luxury hotels—an important measure of whether a city is truly a global metropolis—also increased.
The scale of available investment opportunities for foreign investors expanded still further.
The restoration of Osaka’s economy—which is also the Kansai economy—after its enormous decline over more than twenty years requires bringing the head-office functions of Osaka-born global corporations back to Osaka once again—in the age of the Internet, there should be no reason why they must be in Tokyo; are the head offices of America’s global corporations not dispersed throughout the country?—and attracting the world’s leading companies in every field to Osaka; the office buildings of the North Yard are ideally suited to this purpose.
There is only one measure that cities suffering economic stagnation because of changes in industrial structure, or states and regional cities that cannot survive unless they revitalise themselves, should take.
They should introduce preferential tax measures to encourage companies to establish operations there.
Have cities and regions throughout the world not demonstrated that this alone is the most effective means?
The Osaka City official replied that such measures were already being implemented, but because I knew what those measures involved, I interrupted and said:
“I am not talking about preferential treatment for the developers. To put it bluntly, they were able to acquire the land for practically nothing, at a price guaranteeing them pure profit, so why is there any need to give them further preferential treatment? Moreover, anyone capable of acquiring the North Yard would do so even without preferential treatment. The way the preferential measures are being granted and directed is wrong. They should be given to the companies that will move in as tenants; because that perspective was missing, this wretched situation has arisen.”
The only two remaining policies that the Osaka City government must now implement are preferential tax measures for incoming companies, thereby bringing the head-office functions of Osaka-born global corporations back to Osaka, and encouraging the world’s leading companies in every field to establish operations in the North Yard.
Everything else is nothing more than self-serving rationalisation peculiar to a region or city that has declined and become second-rate, and you must take deeply to heart that such rationalisation will inflict a fatal wound.
In the first place, despite the fact that the project was decided after more than twenty years and that the Urban Renaissance Agency, which serves as the project’s administrative point of contact, has already distributed excellent project brochures for both the first and second phases, why did people suddenly begin calling for the second-phase land to be turned into a green forest, beginning with Mr. Shimozuma’s remarks on the front page of the Asahi Shimbun in January this year?
We cannot help finding it extraordinarily strange that people like you, who live in fine detached houses with gardens and are also blessed with privileged welfare facilities, keep talking about greenery and more greenery.
If you are so immersed in the arrogance of material satisfaction that, no matter how many times we tell you, you remain unable to understand that all we desire is a vibrant economy through which everyone can find employment and salaries can rise by even a single yen, then I can only conclude that nothing could be more incorrigible.
Finally…
With a firm determination to turn Shanghai into one of the world’s great financial centres, the mayor of Shanghai not only reduced the income taxes of senior employees by more than 20 percent in order to attract global financial institutions, but also provided high-quality housing at exceptionally low rents.
As a result of such policies, financial institutions from around the world established operations there, and HSBC entered Shanghai with a workforce of 5,000, its largest staffing presence outside its home country.