Japanese media, particularly Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei, undermined Japan’s capital markets by fostering hostility toward equities. This essay traces how such narratives contributed to declining domestic investment, rising foreign dominance in the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the long-term weakening of Japan’s economic sovereignty.

2016-03-14

That Asahi Shimbun was literally a traitorous newspaper has already become a historical fact.

When I recently read a short column in the Nikkei, I felt even more strongly that Asahi had also been a truly traitorous paper in matters of economics.

Even Nikkei itself is wholly inadequate as the economic newspaper of Japan, a country in which the Turntable of Civilization turns.
This is evident from the fact that they failed to notice even my own theory of the stock market.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that their level was that of elementary school students.

Thus, over the past thirty years, Japan’s market—while politically kept in a prisoner’s position by Western powers—became, economically speaking…
Here I digress slightly from the main topic.

Newspapers such as Asahi and Nikkei, which cooperated with and served anti-Japan propaganda pursued for regime maintenance by countries that exploited the United States’ postwar treatment of Japan as a “political prisoner,” especially China and South Korea—states that in reality are fascist or Nazi regimes—were not merely foolish enough to fail to recognize this reality.
They were further entangled in one of the worst evils: a façade of moralism.

Japan’s market, dominated by these low-level newspapers, became one of the world’s most economically developed and stable markets.
Yet the Japanese elites who grew up reading them continued to despise the stock market, despite having chosen a capitalist society.

As a result, while in other advanced countries public assets such as pension funds were invested in equity markets, Japan did not follow suit.
On the contrary, in inverse proportion to Japan’s Lost Twenty Years, there was a movement to withdraw the funds of Japan’s world-renowned life insurance companies from the stock market.
Consequently, the approximately 50 trillion yen that had been invested as stable, long-term capital in Japan’s leading corporations has now fallen to about 14 trillion yen.
It goes without saying that foreign capital exploited this gap.

As a result of these thirty years, foreign investors now account for roughly 70 percent of daily trading volume on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

It is no exaggeration to say that Asahi and Nikkei created this condition of the Tokyo Stock Exchange—a market that should have led the world alongside the United States.
Yet 古舘伊知郎 repeatedly speaks of volatility.
Few people are as incorrigible as this.

With a simple mechanism—strong yen and falling stock prices—profits can be made with absolute certainty in the Tokyo market, something obvious even to an elementary school student.
Those profits are then poured into high-risk, high-return emerging markets to earn even more.
Over these thirty years, this process produced only an increase in people holding absurdly vast fortunes that have no meaning in an individual human life.

What enabled this was the harmful effect of elementary school–level economic theories propagated by newspapers such as Asahi and Nikkei—newspapers that lacked even the most basic patriotism, to say nothing of any national strategy.

In the opening short column, however, there was—rarely—a commentator who wrote something entirely correct.
That will be introduced in the following chapters.