Author: Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, Nov. 20, 2024—What Trump did in his sweeping presidential victory had reverberated to a local Japanese gubernatorial race in helping the disposed governor win back the seat thanks to explosions of fake and defamatory social media postings against his rival candidate who was leading the election with a comfortable opinion poll margin until shortly before the voting.

Motohiko Saito, 46, the former Hyogo prefecture governor resigned in September for his power harassment acts against prefecture officers and accepting grafts from businesses. In the Nov. 17 election to choose a new governor, Saito won by a wide margin as an independent to Kazumi Inamura. 

Saito told reporters after the results were out that his victory ‘enormously’ owned to social media. It was an about-face to what Hyogo voters had felt about Saito when his power harassment and graft accepting news surfaced: anger, frustration, disbelief. Santo’s acts led to the death of two prefecture officials.

Inamura’s supporting group’s X account was frozen twice, first on Nov. 6 and then on Nov. 12 even though the sight contained no postings that infringed on X rules, according to Japanese news reports. It was around that time when Saito’s campaign office began social media postings aggressively, some saying that Inamura had supported giving voting rights to non-resident foreign nations and labeling her as ‘traitor of Japan’ and other derogatory language, according to media reports.

On Nov. 18, a prefecture assembly member abruptly tendered his resignation, and reporters that interviewed the member said he was asked by his family to quick because of threats from pro-Saito people, including Takashi Tachibana, who heads an errant self-claimed political party called the party to protect citizens from NHK.

Some news reports said Tachibana visited Inamura’s private house aboard a truck equipped with loud speakers, threatening Inamura to step down.

The head of the prefecture’s special committee investigating Saito recently quit. The committee is scheduled to continue its hearings of Saito and others but it’s obvious that it cannot be tough against the reelected governor – just like Jack Smith’s committee investigating Trust as well as numerous other American entities are taking a long pause in their investigations.

Trump tactics work and Saito borrowed it.

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TOKYO, Nov. 3, 2024—Dozens of years and how to dispose of high radioactive substances await for completion, but on Nov. 2, 2024, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said its engineers succeeded in their experimental extraction of a fraction of highly radioactive debris from one of the out-of-control reactors of Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station.

TEPCO pulled out less than 3 grams of debris at 09:50 a.m., Nov. 2, putting the substance in a special container for moving it out of the power station to gauze its radiation levels and other data to ensure safe storage outside the compound.

The successful extraction paves the way for taller tasks over the years and/or decades to come as the Fukushima nuclear power station is sitting on an estimated 880 tons of nuclear fuel debris, which is believed to be compounds of concrete and metals that melted in extraordinary heat in the reactors. 

TEPCO and the Japanese government must figure out how to extract debris by much larger quantities, reduce radioactivity, how and where to dispose of it. 

The work has been delayed since the scheduled start period of 2021 because of defective cameras and other mechanical issues.

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OKYO, Oct. 18, 2024—Since the beginning of 2024, sJapan’s chipmaking industries have been buzzing with hopes of recovery, and smart-chip startup Rapidus Corp., Oct. 18 reportedly secured the initial investment threshold of 100 billion yen ($666 million) thanks to additional funding commitments of Toyota Motor Corp. and Denso Corp.

Rapidus, founded in 2022, is invested by 8 Japanese and one American companies including the two automotive manufacturers, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. and Softbank Corp.

Toyota and Denso offered to make fresh additional investments to Rapidus following commitments of four big Japanese banks for a total of 25 billion yen, on top of 7.3 billion yen initial investment commitments. In the second tranche of investments, IBM Japan is expected to join, according to the Yomiuri newspaper Oct. 18.

Rapidus is planning experimental manufacturing and assembly line operations in April 2025 in a prelude to commercial production in 2027 with a GOJ money infusion of 920 billion yen for R&D and chip fabrications. 

BUT it would ultimately need 5 trillion yen ($33 billion) to become a competitive chip maker, or short of 4 trillion yen to have its production facilities moving. Who’ll fund the gaping gap is anybody’s guess, and one reliable jinx about Japanese companies infused with government money is that all have been cursed with failures or become zombies.

Elpida Memory, renamed from NEC Hitachi Memory, that had been under GOJ rehab programs in the 2010s, is a DRAM, flash and other memory chip maker that now is Micron Memory Japan, a unit of an American maker. It went bust in the mid-2010s with 450 billion yen debts, including taxpayer money.

In September 2024, Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (PSMC) abruptly called it quits to start a chipmaking joint venture with Softbank of Japan in the northern Japan prefecture of Miyagi – apparently miffed by the GOJ demand that the PSMC commit to operate no less than 10 years in Japan in exchange for a GOJ subsidy.

SO, it looks that the early 2024 hullabaloo about Japan’s chip recovery was a day dream…

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TOKYO, Oct. 10, 2024—Prices have been spiraling in Japan across the board over the past few years, well above the Bank of Japan’s 2-percent year-on-year target, but from the prime minister to the Bank of Japan governor, the powers that be say the country has yet to come out of deflation — a perfect schizophrenic pattern.

Consumers and businesses are screaming about high prices, complaining that a bowl of ramen amounts to more than 1/10^th of daily income and asking for government action to harness prices and give them support. In response, the government has promised to extend more childcare subsidies, pump government monetary to subsidize gasoline and utility bills, and the central bank had raised short-term interest rates a little.

So, effectively, the government – from the prime minister and other ministers to the BOJ governor – is admitting that Japan is experiencing inflation that’s well above its 2-pct target. Yet they unanimously yodel that Japan remains mired in deflation and is in need of proactive policy shift.

The new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, explained his economic policy in an address to dissolve the Diet (parliament) at an Oct. 9 presser. ‘A cost-cutting economic policy (price and labor cuts) needs to end (and in its place) value-added creative economy should come in, where people would want to buy goods and services even paying (high) prices… Unless consumer spending grows, Japan cannot get out of deflation,’ he declared.

Oh, Yah? Consumers are screaming about rising prices but Ishiba said Japan still is in deflation and labor costs and goods and service prices need to rise further. It’s as if Ishiba has inherited the two former prime ministers that had introduced active price spurring policies, most notably instructing the BOJ to continue zero interest policy. Schizophrenia? The three of them have it.

Deflation is defined in academia as ‘a decrease in the general price level of goods and services, and is the opposite of inflation. It occurs when the inflation rate falls below 0%.

‘Deflation can be caused by a number of factors, including:

• A decrease in the supply of money and credit;
• A decrease in demand for products; 
• An increase in the supply of products;
• Excess production capacity.’

Except weak demand for products, other factors are nowhere to be found in Japan: BOJ continues its near-zero policy: product supplies are tightening, rather than increasing, because of labor shortages, the climate change, regulation-cheating production stoppage and poor quality control; factories and operating at regular or tighter capacity but adding new capacity is discouraged by labor shortage.

On the back of this, headline inflation has been climbing a few percentage points every quarter prompting manufacturers to raise their outgoing prices.

The earnings report of Aeon Corp., the top general merchandise and retailer, reported on Oct. 13 vividly and accurately reflects the plight of producers, wholesalers, retailers (Aeon), logistics operators, and consumers.

The company reported revenue growth of 6 percent for the March-August half-year period from the same period a year ago, an all time high, and net income plunging 76 percent. It attributed the performance to labor cost rises resulting from wage increases, logistics, higher incoming costs and inability to raise outgoing prices.

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TOKYO, Sept. 28, 2024—Why it took so long? An 88-year-old death-row Japanese man Sept. 26, 2024 was acquitted by a local Japanese court after having served prison terms since his 1968 arrest for multiple murders, the world’s longest serving death-row inmate.

Iwao Hakamada spent 46 years behind the bars. His was the fifth not-guilty sentence delivered on murder trials in post-WWII Japan. 

Hakamada broke the record of Sadamichi Hirasawa who spent 39 years in prison and never came out before dying in 1987 for a mass-murder of Imperial Bank branch employees in Tokyo that prosecutors said he committed in 1948.

One explanation/analysis provided by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper Sep. 27, 2024:

Former death row inmate Iwao Hakamada cuts a profoundly tragic figure in the annals of Japan’s deeply flawed justice system. He was a victim of a gross miscarriage of justice that took decades to set right.

In a high-profile retrial, the Shizuoka District Court on Sept. 26 acquitted the 88-year-old Hakamada of the stabbing murders of four members of a family in Shizuoka Prefecture 58 years ago.

He was wrongfully convicted based on evidence fabricated by investigative authorities. In the absence of a court rectifying this error, Hakamada spent nearly half a century in a solitary cell in a detention house, constantly facing the frightening prospect of execution.

This constitutes nothing less than the worst violation of human rights by the state.

THE ‘EVIDENCE’

The district court decision determined that the key evidence submitted by prosecutors all those years ago was falsified by the investigative agencies, and denied its admissibility.

Five items of bloodstained clothing found in a miso tank near the crime scene at the company where Hakamada worked, and a scrap of cloth claimed to have been found at Hakamada’s home, were cited by prosecutors as evidence directly linking him to the murders.

The bits of clothing turned up more than a year after the slayings and while Hakamada was on trial.

But after a rigorous examination of the testimony and “supposed” evidence, the court denied that these pieces of “evidence” bore any relation to the crime.

The focus of the examination was on scientific evidence concerning “reddish” blood stains on the clothing and the circumstances in which the items were found. An experiment by the defense lawyers showed that the blood should have turned blackish after being immersed in miso for so long.

The ruling also dismissed a record of Hakamada’s confession as an “effective fabrication,” pointing out that it was extracted through “inhumane interrogation.” The court concluded that Hakamada could not be identified as the perpetrator.

The absence of Hakamada in the courtroom best conveyed the unfairness of the case.

Since the Shizuoka District Court agreed to a retrial 10 years ago, Hakamada has been living with his sister Hideko, 91. But the psychological symptoms of confinement apparent at the time of his release have persisted, making it difficult for him to have normal communication. He was exempted from appearing in court for the retrial.

As a “hosanin” (assistant in court), a person who is granted the rights to consent, annul, or act as an agent to protect the rights of someone whose decision-making capacity is impaired, Hideko sought “true freedom” for her brother. Speaking to her while handing down the ruling on Sept. 26, Presiding Judge Koshi Kunii said, “The door to freedom has been opened.”

What is urgent is the finalization of this acquittal and the redress of Hakamada’s rights.

WHAT WENT SO TERRIBLY WRONG?

The court’s acknowledgment that key evidence against Hakamada was fabricated is bound to undermine the foundation of trust in investigative agencies.

The Shizuoka District Court and the Tokyo High Court made similar points when they decided to start the retrial, but the prosecution vehemently argued in the new trial that there was no benefit in fabricating evidence.

Prosecutors will only deepen the public’s distrust of the criminal justice process if they turn their collective backs on the judiciary’s recognition of evidence fabrication for a third time.

Even in not-so-serious cases that do not warrant the death penalty, instances of fabricated evidence by the police and prosecution have been disclosed in recent years.

An unrepentant attitude among law enforcement authorities may have led to a cycle of mistakes.

The prosecution should not appeal the latest decision. Sixteen years have already passed since the second petition for a retrial was filed. The admissibility of the five articles of clothing as evidence was also scrutinized in the retrial petition proceedings, including by the Supreme Court.

The decision for a retrial in Hakamada’s case was made after the presence of new “clear evidence that would lead to an acquittal,” which is required by the Code of Criminal Procedure for a new trial, was recognized by the judiciary.

The legitimacy of the death sentence handed to Hakamada has long been lost. Once carried out, capital punishment cannot be reversed, even in cases where new evidence emerges that could have exonerated the convicted individual.

What is required of the prosecution is not to delay the finalization of the acquittal through an appeal but to start a rigorous review of the processes of how the original investigation, trial and retrial procedures were carried out.

The court, too, cannot evade a serious re-examination of both the first trial, in which Hakamada was erroneously convicted at every stage of the three-tier system, and the whole process from the first retrial petition to the actual retrial.

Even the first-instance court that convicted him during the first trial called into question the lengthy, intimidating interrogations that extracted a confession from Hakamada. There must have been strong doubts from the beginning about the way investigations were conducted.

The court seems to have lacked a solid commitment to scrutinizing fundamentally core evidence for truthfulness.

Particularly in the 1980s, when Hakamada first filed for a retrial, there were four cases where the death row inmates were exonerated in retrials, including the 1954 rape and murder of a 6-year-old girl in the city of Shimada, Shizuoka Prefecture, which was handled by the same Shizuoka police.

Judges, in particular, should have been more sensitive to the implications of these cases and paid more attention to the importance of reviewing past convictions with fresh eyes.

At that time, biased news reports on the Hakamada case spread prejudice, viewing him as the perpetrator. News outlets also need to learn bitter lessons from the case.

DYSFUNCTION OF RETRIAL SYSTEM

It has taken such an enormous amount of time to correct this miscarriage of justice. The procedures to decide on the admissibility of a retrial take time, often denying the individual in question the chance to receive a fresh trial.

Under Article 39 of the Constitution, which prohibits pursuing criminal liability after an acquittal, a retrial can be held only for the benefit of a convicted criminal. So, a retrial is not a simple redo of a trial but an institutional arrangement to preserve the rights of a person who has been wrongly convicted. But it is clear that the system is not fully functioning as such.

The backdrop to this problem lies squarely with the Code of Criminal Procedure, which barely mentions retrial procedures. Decisions on a retrial tend to depend on the attitude of the presiding judge. Lawyers contend there is what they call a “retrial disparity.”

In the Hakamada case, the decisive factor was that during the second retrial petition proceedings, the Shizuoka District Court persistently and successfully urged the prosecution side to disclose for the first time color photos and negatives of the five pieces of clothing, which had not appeared in the first trial.

Ensuring the proper handling of evidence, which has been at the discretion of investigators, is also an urgent task. Although the introduction of the “saiban-in” lay judge system has institutionalized evidence disclosure, it has not extended to retrial procedures.

Judges are human, and it is impossible to eliminate judicial mistakes completely. Therefore, it is vital to expedite efforts to establish a more efficient and effective retrial system that can correct a wrongful conviction as quickly as possible.

Without this step, it is impossible to eradicate the terrible damage of wrongful convictions that Hakamada experienced over so many years.

–The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 27

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TOKYO, Sept. 28, 2024—Voters are expressing disbelief, anger and frustration at Motohiko Saito, 46, the governor of Hyogo prefecture who announced that he will not resign after the prefecture assembly unanimously moved a no confidence motion against him, and instead seek reelection. Prefecture assembly members and voters also were puzzled as to why Saito had been maintaining his quiet, Noh-mask-like composure during the past few months of his scandal.

Saito is being criticized for power harassment and graft acceptance, and his acts led to the death of two senior prefecture officials.

I’ve been wondering why this guy looks so clean and statue-like and looking unwavering to loud criticisms. I now know the reason: His confidence that he’s an elite bureaucrat who prides himself as a much-needed doyen of public service administration for the prefecture’s citizens.

Contemporary Japanese bureaucrats — while some trace their roots to samurai clans — have been taught in post-WWII Japan to shed the sense of shame and embarrassment, the ethos that samurai so loftily respected (I think, by the way, it’s precisely what Clint Eastwood wanted to show to movie viewers in his ‘Letter from Iwojima’ epic).

So it must have been the reason – which was just for the sake of declaring his reelection bid – why he said at a Sept. 26 news conference that he had decided to run ‘at the urging of a junior high school student’ apparently to cover up his arrogance. In fact, he said ‘resignation was not my option… It fringes on my moral responsibility’ totally ignoring the fact that literally the entire prefecture populace was demanding his resignation. Saito is without a sense of shame and embarrassment.

Saito is a University of Tokyo School of Economics graduate. He joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications as a so-called ‘career’ officer, hop-skipped a number of municipalities, including Fukushima Prefecture for the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown restoration support, before returning as a senior officer of the ministry’s tax bureau. He then went to the Osaka Prefecture office and after 3 years, while giving up returning to the ministry, run for the Hyogo gubernatorial race and was elected. 

His career track underscores that he joined the ministry as a career officer but had lost the race to climb the bureaucracy promotion ladder and probably did not have posts in a governmental corporation or the private sector that was struggling for survival in the COVID-19 pandemic economic stagnation.

Saito now must be finding himself being cornered and no option other than to seek reelection because the private sector of course won’t hire him nor municipalities for a man who served as a governor. 

The man has no place to go.

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TOKYO, Sept. 26, 2024—For the first time in the post-WWII period, a Japanese warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and mainland China, adding tension to the Japan-China relationship and the East Asian region that’s strained even more by the Sept. 25 firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the recent murder of a Japaneses school children in China, Chinese military planes flying inside Japan’s airspace, and numerous other incidents.

China is deploying what analysts described as ‘gray zone tactics’ of repeatedly invading into an adversary’s territorial airspace and waters and their contiguous areas with false publicity of sovereignty over those areas.

China employed that tactic in waters around Senkaku Island, where Japanese fishermen used to live for centuries in the past.

Japanese media reports said that the destroyer ‘Sazanami’ passed through the Taiwan Strait from the East China Sea to south in the September 25 morning time and completed the sailing the same day night. Australian and New Zealand battleships also cruised through the strait, they said. German naval ships passed through the strait in September.

The Japan Self-Defense Navy plans a joint drill with the Australian and New Zealand warships from Sept. 26.

China claims the Taiwan Strait as its territorial waters, while the United States and other countries say it is an international water. 

The Chinese defense ministry Sept. 25 announced that it fired an ICBM at 08:44 a.m. China time toward the Pacific ocean. The ICBM was carrying a dummy warhead, the ministry said. On Sept. 23 night, China announced setting the Philippines northwest, northeast, and Australia’s east waters as danger zones for what it argued as areas where ‘space dust’ would fall. The ICBM is rumored to be Dongfu 41 (DF41) that, with a range of up to 12,000 kilometers, can reach the U.S. mainland’s targets.

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TOKYO, Sept. 24, 2024—As they have successfully executed in forcing the world to rely on Chinese-made solar panels and now weighing on doing the same on EV batteries, the Chinese have been building intra-Japan communities in Japan where Japanese are unwelcome, the Japanese language need not be spoken and everything is completed by China hands.

That’s hardly a surprise given that more than 820,000 Chinese – one-third of all ‘official’ registered foreigners – were registered with the Japanese immigration office as of the end of 2023 as the number continues to bloat. Kei Nakajima’s book, titled the ‘China inside Japan (Nihon-no nakano Chuugoku)’ describes how the Chinese have achieved the iron-strong intra-Chinese communities that offer all conceivable services and generate enviable mounds of income.

The Chinese population – 820,000 – is a formidable number exceeding those of several Japanese provinces such as Yamanashi (803,000) and Sago (801,000). By province, Tokyo has the largest number of Chinese residents followed by the neighboring provinces of Saitama and Kanagawa. In most provinces, Chinese residents began growing visibly after 2000.

The Japanese government has been implementing more stringent immigration controls on Chinese people than for other nationalities, yet that does not deter the Chinese to enter Japan: They arrive for ‘permanent residency’ as relatives of resident Chinese, ‘academic learning’ at Japanese schools, engineers and other skilled ‘for contributing to Japanese society,’ according to Nakajima.

Those jobs can range widely, mostly far from the images of wearing spiffy clothes in neat offices and instead metal and other industrial recycling, construction, and varieties of other ‘dirty’ work that young Japanese shun, plus of course Chinese restaurants. More recently, they are expanding into tourism, hotels and other hospitality businesses for Chinese tourists visiting Japan – where Japanese language is hardly spoken.

In other words, many of the 820,000 Chinese residents are building intra-Chinese circular economy structures where almost everything is procured from Chinese suppliers to make ends meet without relying on Japanese transactions.

Rich Chinese visitors to Japan often buy old, decaying Japanese old and historic accommodation facilities for almost nothing and then invest to reform them as hotels and inns for incoming Chinese tourists. They are doing exactly that in Kyoto and other famous tourist spots.

In the past, local Japanese would object to selling historic facilities, but now such voices are rarely heard. Residents are getting too old to take action, and municipal office bureaucrats also do not want to stand in the way of foreign acquisitions that give them much-needed tax revenues. 

So, it’s a win-win, anything goes for the Chinese situation. In fact, the Chinese now are operating Uber-like taxi services without Japanese transport ministry registration but the Japanese government is giving a blind eye to it because of worsening taxi driver shortages.

International and language schools have become an easy-to-apply visas avenues for the Chinese. In a matter of several years, many of those schools’ Chinese enrollment skyrocketed. Over the next decade, the Chinese population may double, no matter how tense the Japan-China relationship becomes, analysts said.

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TOKYO, Sept. 13, 2024—No matter how many of his potentially illegal acts emerge, a Japanese prefecture governor is lying, denying and refusing to step down, the attitude that he clearly learned from Donald Trump.

And like the January 6 commission, the special committee investigating Motohiko Saito, the 46-years-old Hyogo governor, is finding it frustrated and almost powerless by his obscure answers to interpellations, unable to even draw hints of resignation.By Sept. 13, the entire Hyogo government assembly agreed to support a resolution to demand his ouster from the governor’s chair. Even so, Saito isn’t likely to budge, probably forcing the assembly to a referendum to collect 2/3^rd of public support to force him out, the process that’s costly and time-consuming.

Why Saito can continue digging in his heels and stonewalling to demands for explanations and his resignation for his power harassment that allegedly forced two close aides to commit suicide and dozens of others to report his harassment acts? The man had been well trained to withstand pressure from politicians when he was working as a bureaucrat of the Somusho (the ministry of internal affairs and communications), being prompted steadily and at one time working for the 2011 earthquake and nuclear power meltdown reconstruction team. He must have learned a lot about planning and execution, his capacity that Hyogo voters liked.

But Saito was a power hungry bureaucrat, obsessed about elevations, reputations, and money for comfy living. After he sat on the governor chair, all his ambitions took off, acting like a king, forcing deputy governor and others to be loyal, obedient and subservient beyond the roles of royal family butlers. Those are the experiences he cannot rid of so is resisting resignation.

His manner is giving textbook lessons to young and upcoming Japanese bureaucrats, who are seeing themselves being left behind by their schoolmates joining financial services and hitechs making multiple times more than government pays for fast cars, high-rise condos and beautiful women and men. ‘My hope is Mr. Saito comes out of this grilling unscathed and continue as governor,’ a young government official from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said.

Continuing as a bureaucrat in Japan means job security (they cannot be discharged by law, practice and tradition), an important trait in the Japanese society that’s gearing fast to the gig work economy. But it also means long, tedious hours preparing speeches for Diet (parliament) members, and dull.

So, young and bright ones these days often spend the first several years in government, then go to the private-sector, and/or join politics such as ministry-dispatched advisors to local government offices – like Saito did once – collect name cards, then run for local assemblies, small city and prefecture governors. Eventually, they go to national politics, like 1/3^rd of Japanese Diet (parliament) members.

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TOKYO, Sept. 2, 2024—A data stream tells a whole story about Japan’s wealth distribution: That the rich is getting richer and less well-to-do poorer is underscored by soaring sales of luxury cars, especially imports, and in contrast, overall car sales remained sluggish, inevitable for the country’s progressing population contraction.

In 2023, a total of 7,406 cars priced above 20 million yen ($135,000), nearly a 7-times growth over 1,146 in 2013, according to Jaapan Automobile Importers Association statistics. Total imported car sales were 246,735, shrinking 12 percent from 2013.

Japan’s aggregate domestic new car sales in 2023, domestic makes and imports combined, rose 13.8 percent to 4.779 million, the first rise in 5 years owing to the easing of the semiconductor crunch gripping the industry since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.

The overall car sales rise is seen in the industry to be short-lived, lasting only a few years, as the Japanese population moves to de-motorize amid progressing urbanization from rural areas and experiences growing poverty resulting in recent years from spiking inflation, prompting people to give up owning cars and instead rent when needed.

The numbers also underscored a tale of two cities: the rich accumulating more wealth to enabling them to be squanderers for Ferraris, Aston Martins, Lamborghinis, McLarens and other supercars.even though drivers must struggle to negotiate through narrow streets so it doesn’t make sense to own expensive ones other than for show-off and expectations for storing value. Those four brand sales skyrocketed over the 10 years. 

Is this Lamborghini vs. VW Golf gap a sign of wealth divide of people that welcome inflation to increase their net worth and those that are huffing and puffing about spiraling grocery prices? Will supercar sales be sustainable as the wealth divide accelerates further? And what kind of people buy those super expensive cars?

The answer to the first two questions is a resounding Yes.

A former imported car industry official Sept. 1, 2024 told me that while the landscape is complex, one trend stands out: Real rich Japanese people do not buy such cars. ‘They are shy about showing their wealth, in fact, they tend to hide it,’ he said, explaining that Porsche Japan laments about selling their cars to many contemporary buyers. ‘Their knowledge about Porsche is almost zero but they have the money.’ 

Recent buyers’ profiles are something like this: Young tech types that started successful websites; those that inherited assets from their parents; the elderly that do not want to leave what they have behind when they dies and go on a spending binge. Plus, foreign nationals, particularly Chinese that succeed in running businesses, such as scrap metal collection, merchandise trade, restaurants.

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