2010-8-13
From the front page of this morning’s Nikkei… At the end of the year before last, Nissan President Carlos Ghosn warned, “If the yen rises too far, Japan’s position as a manufacturing powerhouse will be shaken.” …
Nissan has already moved production overseas, and the March now comes from Thailand.

An exchange rate in the mid-80-yen range to the dollar is a path Japan also traveled once in 1995, when trade friction between Japan and the United States intensified.

Compared with that time, however, the risk of industrial hollowing out—manufacturing bases shifting overseas and jobs being lost at home—has certainly grown. …
There are now few things that “can only be made in Japan.”

Passage omitted… Japan’s footing as a manufacturing nation is already considerably unsteady.
Another factor is the sense that restructuring and cost cutting at home have been taken as far as they can go. …
For further cost reductions, overseas expansion is almost the only promising option.

Despite the fundamental weakness of Japan’s economy, the yen has risen this far partly because of inaction and a lack of policy on the part of the government and the Bank of Japan.
Led by the Obama administration in the United States, which has set a goal of doubling exports, countries around the world are seeking weaker currencies and making the expansion of external demand a pillar of their economic policies.
Against that background, Japan is seen as a country whose “government shows no interest in its own currency’s exchange rate” and which “cannot embark on bold policies because the opposition holds a majority in the House of Councillors.”
The Bank of Japan, too, took no new action at its monetary policy meeting on the 10th.

Japan has not even become a financial powerhouse. If its status as a manufacturing and technological powerhouse—the only things supporting it—falters and vanishes, Japan will meet its end.
An age will come again when people whose minds belong to some group or cause raise their voices loudly.
Who will bring that about, you ask?
You will, the media.
Or you so-called prominent people who lean on the media and profit from it…
Scholars, television personalities, musicians, and so on.

You alone, secure in your own positions, understand nothing…
You think that even if Japan ceases to be a manufacturing or technological powerhouse, your “100-watt bulb in a toilet” media—especially television—will remain secure. Newspapers, after all, must already be gasping for breath and close to their end.
That is what it means to be truly incorrigible and foolish.

Last night, I watched a program I had recorded with a young friend of mine, aged thirty.
It was World Documentaries: The Century of War, a Japanese-French co-production shown in consecutive late-night broadcasts on NHK BS1 at around 11:45 p.m. It is a painstaking work.

It uses modern technology to colorize black-and-white films recording the major battles of the Second World War.

I think this:
If my proposal is put into practice and we complete a democratic nation founded on true freedom and the highest intellect,
commercial broadcasters spread among seven major regions may make entertainment-oriented programs if they wish.
After that, it will simply be a matter of the intellectual level of each region.

Why?
Only now, at my age, did I see those films for the first time—even if I had known of what they showed through my imagination. My thirty-year-old friend was seeing them for the first time, too. “If I hadn’t watched this today, I think I would have gone my whole life without seeing it or knowing about it.”

Programs like this are what should be broadcast during prime time. Programs made by people comfortably secure in their own positions, who make inaccurate statements day after day and lead the country further astray, should not be broadcast during prime time.