More on Japan

In yesterday's Financial Times, David Pilling wrote that many Japanese are pining for Japan's pre-industrial days, "Japan harks back to an age of innocence":

On a visit to Tokyo this week, on more than one occasion when I asked how Japan should tackle the economic crisis, my interlocutor turned with ninja-like alacrity to the topic of pre-Meiji Japan. The period before American warships forced the country open in the mid-19th century was regularly invoked as a prelapsarian idyll, a time when Japan did not have to deal with the grubby business of earning its crust in the world.

Eisuke Sakakibara, the former vice-finance minister indelibly branded Mr Yen, describes a country that was peaceful, orderly, unspoilt and friendly. “That was what pre-Meiji Japan was like. We should go back to that,” he says.

His invocation of a more innocent, pre-industrial age could easily be dismissed as idle chatter were it not for the fact that it keeps coming up.

[...]

There is now much talk of putting more emphasis on agriculture and de-emphasising the manufacturing industries on which postwar wealth was built. “Japan, having major strength in manufacturing, will probably suffer most,” says Mr Sakakibara, who argues that, even after this economic crisis subsides, the world will never return to previous levels of material consumption.

Japan’s farm industry is commonly regarded as heavily protected, but the Japanese worry that they only produce 40 per cent of their calorific requirements. Mr Sakakibara supports the DPJ’s proposals massively to increase subsidies to agriculture and to industrialise the family-run farming industry. He has been trying to persuade Toyota that cars are a dying industry and that it should turn its engineers on to farming efficiency instead. The era of just-in-time carrots could soon be upon us.

A Local Business That Seems to be Doing Well

The NJ location of the Japanese Mitsuwa Marketplace (pictured above) features these specialty shops and restaurants, along with a Japanese supermarket. We stopped in last Saturday and picked up a six pack of Asahi beer, and then had lunch the next day in the food court (which offers a riverside view of Upper Manhattan). The Asahi beer was actually brewed in Canada by Molson, under Japanese supervision (according to the label), but many of the other products sold in the supermarket are imported from Japan. Mitsuwa was packed on both days, with customers queuing up for noodle bowls, black sesame ice cream (which is excellent, by the way) and hot Cream Yakis (also tasty) in different parts of the food court.

"Unable to Read the Air"

In yesterday's Financial Times, letter writer Takashi Ito introduces a Japanese idiom to describe ousted Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's recent behavior:

Sir, The hot new word in Japan is “KY”. An abbreviation for “kuuki-yomenai”, it literally means unable to read the air. For an ex-Goldman Sachs partner, John Thain was astoundingly KY. He decorated his office as he laid off Merrill Lynch employees, and then he asked for a $10m bonus when the whole country had turned against excessive executive compensation. There was also the little detail that his company was not doing that well.

The height of his KY was the fact that he was buying company stock the day before he was ousted!

Now a true believer (in Goldman superiority) may say that he was buying stock because he knew his departure would ignite the share price, but I am not willing to give Mr Thain that much credit. Anyway, the stock dived on the news.