Japan cannot rely solely on being a manufacturing and technology powerhouse; it must also rise as a global financial superpower. Drawing on episodes such as the political crushing of Professor Ken Sakamura’s TRON project, the timing of BIS regulations and Japan’s mishandled “bubble” cleanup, the ski jumping rule change that crippled Japanese dominance, and America’s public humiliation of Toyota, the author argues that only nations with overwhelming financial and market power can resist unfair rule changes and protect their national interests. With the world’s largest pool of private savings, Japan should build its own 21st-century model of capitalism, channel trillions into its own markets and world-class companies, and “send money like water” to the poorer half of the world—repaying its true elites in industry and labor and claiming its rightful place as a civilizational and economic hegemon alongside the United States.

Why It Is Important to Become a Financial Superpower
2010-07-22

Because it is dangerous to remain nothing more than an industrial nation and a technological giant.

When Professor Ken Sakamura of Keio University discovered and developed a concept that everyone acknowledged to be superior to Microsoft’s Windows, and it had been decided that it would be adopted for PC education in Japan’s elementary and junior high schools…
“TRON” is the general name for a grand project proposed more than twenty-five years ago, which foresaw the cyber society of the future.
Its proponent is Ken Sakamura, now a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Within this TRON project, the best-known part worldwide is ITRON, and BTRON, developed far beyond the now-celebrated Windows concept, was its operating system.

When it was first proposed, it took the world by storm, and BTRON was on the verge of being adopted as Japan’s educational OS, but it was abandoned after falling into an unfortunate adverse environment.
For more than a decade it lay dormant, yet TRON survived.
Like a mammal that outlives the age of dinosaurs called Windows, it managed to live on and finally begin to see the light of day.
It is now marketed under the product name “Cho-Kanji” (“Hyper-Kanji,” from Cho-Kanji 4 to Cho-Kanji V), and at times it has even ranked within the top five in Yahoo! Japan’s weekly sales rankings.
(“What is TRON?”)

Bill Gates, who was plotting to conquer the world with Windows and make it the global standard,
and naturally the U.S. government as well,
applied intense pressure on the Japanese government, determined not to back down on this point.
It is said that there was even someone who helped carry Bill Gates’s palanquin at that time and has since built the status of a major business magnate.
Japan yielded because it was hinted that, if it did not comply, high tariffs would be imposed on automobiles and other products that formed the heart of its manufacturing-driven economy.

Or, even if we take the position that, when the “turntable of civilization” came round to Japan and Japan became, in terms of GDP, an overwhelming economic superpower second only to the United States—750 trillion yen for America, 550 trillion yen for Japan—and even if we assume that Europe and America had no intention of preventing Japan from growing any larger…
According to Wikipedia, the collapse of the U.S. Illinois bank triggered the implementation of BIS regulations,
and that timing overlapped with the period when, due to our mistaken method of bringing what the Japanese media called the “end of the bubble,” Japan was saddled with massive non-performing loan disposal.

At such a time, if Japan had stood tall as a major financial power equal to the United States,
if the world had been moving in response both to the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges and to the NYSE and Nasdaq,
we would have been able to make the world understand Japan’s circumstances.

Even in a field unrelated to the economy, such as sports, when Japan had soared to the top ranks of the world in ski jumping and swept the podium at the Sapporo Olympics,
Europe, which prided itself on being the true home of skiing, suddenly decided on a rule change—determining ski length by height—that made it physically impossible for Japan ever to become champion again.

At that time, Japan’s opinion was probably treated as nothing more than a puff of air.
But if Japan had been a country where ten trillion yen moved through the stock market every day, where one hundred trillion yen was directed toward acquiring shares in excellent Japanese companies,
if it had been an overwhelming global giant in terms of stock market capitalization,
and if it had possessed a multitude of enormous global corporations through acquisitions and partnerships by leading firms in every field,
I am convinced that such things would not have happened.
Because of Japan’s presence in equipment, and its presence in advertising, Europe would not have been able to defy Japan,
and would have been forced instead to say, “We have no choice but to refine our jumping techniques.”

Because of the memory of the worst war in history, which the world experienced in the mid-20th century, the century of fascism,
an absolute consensus of intelligence was formed around the world that such a great war must never again be allowed,
but in arenas such as economic competition, every country except Japan prioritizes its own national interest above all.

And in those situations, the only thing that can ultimately speak with authority is when three powers are combined: overwhelming financial power, overwhelming stock-market capitalization, and technological supremacy.
Military power is something that hegemonic nations—whose currencies are also widely circulated around the world—maintain only as a last resort,
and in reality both people and nations move according to the economy and obey those who possess large economies.

There are countless examples close at hand to confirm this.
There was a time when SoftBank, alongside Orix, was a champion of deregulation and opening.
But after the huge success of the iPhone and its own rapid rise to greatness, now that it has become an undisputed major corporation, it opposes the current move to deregulate SIM cards.
Yet not a single media outlet will accuse it, saying, “You are wavering in your stance.”

No one complains about those who enrich their companies—expanding employment—and who enrich their nation—expanding domestic demand and internal and external employment.

In this world, it is always those who tell the most lies who say things like, “I have been consistent from beginning to end.”
The trap of the media lies in this almost incurable mindset:
despite neglecting the daily, lifelong honing of intelligence that elites are supposed to undertake, they still imagine, “We have always been correct.”
They have become so low-minded that they cannot even grasp the obvious fact that, “The statements of those who only chase after each event and look only at the present will, by their nature, always waver,” and yet they say with a straight face that they do not waver.

The world of stocks is full of people whose positions fluctuate wildly,
but the Japanese media naively believe that the current market, dominated by short selling driven by greed, is somehow correct,
and they worship a kind of market fundamentalism that claims “the market is always right.”

True market fundamentalism would mean that money born from the market is recycled back into the market,
making the market stably larger,
and that, like water, money would flow into the poorer half of the world,
with small streams becoming large rivers after a hundred years.
The more stable this is, the better—naturally.
Therefore, as the country where the “turntable of civilization” has come to rest and as the nation that still holds the world’s largest pool of private savings, Japan should as quickly as possible construct its own unique form of capitalism.

Japan must wake up to this fact at once and rapidly become a financial superpower,
spend the next 170 years sending money out into the world like water,
and keep that flow going.

At the same time (and even America is not one hundred percent pure)…
When I saw on television that scene of a Midwestern housewife testifying in Congress during the Toyota affair, I immediately thought, “What on earth is this? It is no different from McCarthy’s red hunt.”
I also thought, “So America too has plenty of politicians who do everything for the sake of votes.”
How shabby those politicians’ faces looked.

Toyota, which has led Japan’s postwar sixty years and become a world-class corporation,
is also, for anyone who has ever driven a car, the representative of the most outstanding automobiles.
Even in Germany, home of Mercedes and BMW, they were astonished by the Japanese cars that never neglect the details and have an extraordinary narrowness in their door gaps,
and they imitated them.

To expose the president of such a global firm, which has represented Japan,
to that low-class, so-called “white-court” venue is something that must never be allowed to happen again.
In a case like BP, which caused an obviously catastrophic oil spill, it would be expected.
But not in Toyota’s case.

Was I the only one who sensed, in the attitude of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation who visited Japan, a scent similar to America’s attitude toward Japan sixty years ago?

Looking at our media and politics from outside, particularly the way they behave now,
there is nothing strange about seeing that, in the depths, nothing has truly changed.

The missing piece of the puzzle—the rapid realization of Japan as a financial superpower—
once that is in place, the world’s attitude will instantly change.

It is something the media people themselves should recognize in a heartbeat, because it is exactly how they have behaved from long ago right up to recent years.
People strike the small, but they do not strike the huge.
No, they submit to it.
If it is a scholar, they listen in reverence;
if it is a “notable,” they pay homage.

If this essay of mine were read by as many capable people throughout Japan as possible,
I am convinced that Japan could, as soon as tomorrow, assume its proper position—
as a nation that stands alongside (or more precisely, complements) the United States as a global hegemonic power in the realms of the economy and civilization,
and could spend the next 170 years contributing to the world.

Until the “turntable of civilization” moves next, probably to Brazil, and soon after that or immediately thereafter to Africa,
there can be no true peace on earth.

We have no time to waste on hypocritical pretexts.
First, we must channel ten trillion yen into the market every day,
and simultaneously steer one hundred trillion yen into acquiring shares of the many excellent large corporations in Japan that possess world-class technology
(by making dividends and capital gains tax-free when accompanied by receipts proving that the money was spent on consumption, as I previously described).

The era when “politicos” could make private use of this pool of personal assets is long over.

We must repay and support the great corporations—“the correct ten percent of elites”—who created this wealth
(those who have embodied the basic principle of intelligence, “learning from the old to know the new,” and who have ceaselessly devoted themselves to research and technological innovation),
and the ninety percent who are the so-called workers—diligent and attentive to detail, endowed with one of the world’s finest senses of beauty.
We must protect them from gratuitous greed and from irrational attacks born of others’ national-interest-first attitudes.
That is what Japan must do now.
In the favorite phrase of politicians and bureaucrats, this is the true “urgent priority.”

Let us have children in great numbers,
become a nation of consumers whose population rivals that of the United States,
and finally reach a point where no one can complain.
The prosperity of regional cities will also advance at tremendous speed.

Capitalism, as its name implies, is a doctrine in which “capital” stands at the center, not a doctrine in which human beings are the protagonists.
Where do we ourselves stand?
We stand in democracy—just as its name says.

We have no need to remain forever imprisoned in twentieth-century capitalism.
No one will object if the nation that holds the world’s greatest private wealth creates a twenty-first-century form of capitalism.
On the contrary, as I have already said, that is precisely what Japan, as the nation to which the “turntable of civilization” has come, ought to do.
Even America will not complain this time; it will welcome it.
And even if America did complain, this time there would be no need to listen.
We would, together, save the world with the only kind of economy capable of doing so.

Even at my age, when I was close to being crushed by trial after trial,
owning nothing,
living a life far removed from that of an elite with a guaranteed existence—marrying a well-born young lady and living happily as a family of four or five—
there came an event that gave me energy once again.

A certain type of commentator, whom the media began to favor from a certain point in time, called the workers who supported our sixty postwar years “corporate livestock.”
In response, I always thought, “Then aren’t you a ‘pseudo-moralist,’ no, a ‘Marxist livestock’ yourself?”

(274) John Lennon – Help Me to Help Myself – YouTube