Author: Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, Jan. 30, 2021―Though hardly a surprise, China Jan. 29 announced that the country would expand its home-grown electronics industries, particularly in high-tech semiconductor areas, over the next three years, the resolve that seems to pivot on its successful conquering of the global solar power panel market and surging capturing of white electrical product sales worldwide.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the ‘the breakthroughs are expected to be achieved in major sectors such as smart terminals, 5G and industrial internet, and the annual total sales of electronic components are expected to reach 2.1 trillion yuan (about 324.5 billion U.S. dollars) by 2023.’

The ministry circulated ‘the three year action plan’ to provincial governments and autonomous regions, the announcement said.

China had captured 65 percent of the global solar power panel market and is on the way to dominating the global market for refrigerators, washing machines, and other so-called electrical white goods. Hair, Midea Group, Hisence and other Chinese newcomers are rapidly expanding world shares.

Yet, China continues to lag behind in the manufacture of semiconductors to South Korea and Taiwan, as well as smart chis to be imbedded in smart phones, 5G technology, automobiles, and defense. Precision parts and components as well as materials are also China’s weakness.

These are technologies that China has been relying on the United States and other developed economies. Tech author Bill Holstein wrote in his book last year that the Chinese government planted industrial intelligence cells in U.S. research institutions, universities and other places to steal advanced U.S. technology.

The weak Chinese areas are the areas where Japanese excel, exporting such products to China even during the current pandemic and cushioning the adverse impact on the country’s economy.

(http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-01/29/c_139707600.htm)

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TOKYO, Jan. 28, 2021―The Japanese government’s Covid-19 policy is so out of synch with reality that the country is in the process of collapsing, Takero Morimoto, the anchor of a popular morning radio news show criticized prime minister Yoshihide Suga Jan. 27, 2021, as the country’s vaccination minister retracted earlier comment and now said he doesn’t know when vaccines can be sufficiently stockpiled for national vaccination.

The 19 trillion yen ($190 billion) supplementary budget, the third amendment to the fiscal 2020 budget, is so fraught with outlays to special interests that only 4 trillion yen will be used for battling the Covid-19 pandemic. 

While spurning opposition’s calls for more generous spending and curbing Covid-19 related outlays as planned by the bureaucracy, Suga allocated more than 1 trillion yen for the controversial Go To Travel tourism program to encourage the Japanese to travel more and far in Japan. He also stonewalled to criticisms during the Jan. 26 parliamentary session that his government should call off the Tokyo Olympic games this summer and allocated additional money in the supplementary budget ― while crimping on outlays for rebuilding the 2011 earthquake-hit areas.

Suga’s attitude is raising the public’s ire and causing his public support threatening to tumble below 30 percent, yet he’s not likely to yield at all as he is not serving as a real leader, the role that’s controlled by kingmaker Toshihiro Nikai, finance minister Taro Aso and others. ‘Japan is collapsing,’ Morimoto bemoaned during the Jan. 27 morning radio show.

Yet, Suga is not likely to dissolve the Diet (parliament) soon despite his slipping popularity, and instead he’s resolved to continue holding on to his seat until this fall, when law requires a general election of the lower house. He seems to believe in the ‘follow the money’ theory with the thinking that Nikai, the war chest guardian of the ruling LDP party, can support him, plus Taro Aso as finance minister to grease with taxpayer money to get popular votes, instead of using the same money to spend for fighting Covid-19 and help medical and essential workers. Suga, Aso and Nikai see medical workers as members and/or supporters of the communist and socialist parties.

Vaccines are not coming to Japan! Diet session interpellations and investigations into the Japanese government and healthcare industries revealed that Japan is not likely to be able to start Covid-19 vaccination in late February as claimed by Suga as ‘the largest historical undertaking.’ True to that, Vaccination minister Kono Jan. 27 retracted his earlier comment and now said vaccination won’t start before April 1 at the earliest. He’d said it would start from February and mass vaccination for the seniors from March.

Japan’s vaccine supplies are a totally unknown story: On Jan. 20, the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare announced the ‘formal signing’ with Pfizer to receive 144 million shots ‘within the year’ ― a significant delay from the end of June, by which Japan was to secure 120 million. Many Japanese are asking now, ‘Didn’t the government sign a contract earlier? ― apparently not.’

While Japan is at a standstill or backtracking on vaccination, India and China are fielding their active vaccine diplomacy to their neighboring countries as well as to other parts of the world, according to news reports. That has prompted radio anchor Morimoto to declare that Japan is losing to the two countries and even Russia on the diplomatic front. ‘What’s wrong with those politicians!”?,’ he decried.

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TOKYO, Jan. 25, 2021―There has been little Bide administration response to what could embolden Xi Jin-ping to act expeditiously before Washington starts its first line of action against Beijing: On Jan. 22, China’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the highest Chinese legislative body, enacted the China Coast Guard legislation that authorizes Chinese coast guard ships to use firepower, according to Xinhua News Agency’s report from Beijing Jan. 23.

The legislation, which would be enforced Feb. 1, 2021, coincided with the flyover into the Taiwan airspace of Chinese air force planes Jan. 24 and new U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s assurances to his Japanese counterpart in a Jan. 24 phone conversation that the United States would defend Japan in the event of Japan’s conflicts with China over the Japanese claimed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

The Chinese legislative move also came amid the continuing salvation of sand by a large fleet of Chinese civilian vessels along Fujian province coasts. presumably for building a runway for large military aircraft to prepare for conflicts with Taiwan.

The Chinese legislation authorizes coast guard ships ― which are naval vessels camouflaged as patrol ships ― to use weapons; empowered to operate defensive military action by receiving Chinese military command orders; are responsible for the defense of China’s exclusive economic waters, sea water shelves, manmade islands (such as the Chinese-built runways and installations on Spratly and other South China Sea shoals, underwater reefs); limit and/or ban the passage of ships in Chinese control waters, according to Japanese and Chinese media reports.

Over the past several years, China has been infringing into Japanese exclusive waters around Senkaku, its invasion having become far more aggressive after Trump became the former U.S. president and trashed important multilateral arrangements including APEC, TPP, and WTO. China seized on Trump’s naive policy by trumpeting multilateralism, intimidating Asian countries with a wide array of threats.

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Tokyo, Jan. 21, 2021—For decades, Japanese public offices have been using the ‘Hanko’ stamp for all administrative documents for certification and approval, a symbol of bureaucracy’s authority requiring the private sector to emulate the practice. New administrative minister Taro Kono is demanding that the Hanko tradition be repealed for good, replaced by digital certification
methods.
As many as 15,000 national government documents require using the Hanko stamp now. Those are blood-orange color seals that are stamped on such important papers as the Emperor’s certificate to the new prime minister and deeds on property transactions, as well as internal and inter-bureaucracy documents on tariff rates on imports and exports, tax codes, and so on.
Kono is not saying that nationally important documents should not use the Hanko. He is saying that day-to-day administrative documents that currently require small Hanko stamps, known as Mitome-in, should be replaced by digital authorization methods. He also says the Hanko registration system with the government should be abolished.
Here’s a hitch: What to do about the Hanko stamps that the private-sector uses for inter-corporate transactions and submitting to the government and other public-sector entities.
Chances are that the bureaucracy would welcome the Hanko repeal if digital certification systems can be developed replacing the Hanko stamp procedure – without resulting in the loss (while welcoming a decrease) of bureaucracy work.

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TOKYO, Jan. 17, 2020—In December 2020, as reported earlier, the Japanese government blared a new industrial policy for the first time in years, a sharp green shift to next-generation energy sources by 2050 from fossil fuels. Corporate responses to the announcement was muted as they saw the plan as next to impossible to achieve and costly. More than that, history of similar Japanese government plans all failed, leaving the world’s fastest aging country with hardly any industry to general much-needed income.
Yoshihide Suga, the increasingly unpopular prime minister, told a Dec. 25 news conference that his ‘green growth strategy towards 2050 carbon neutrality’ to achieve carbon neutral in 2050 would create a new dynamic economic and environmental paradigm. (https://www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2020/1225_001.html) It seeks to generate up to 60 percent of electric power generation with renewable energy, now at 20 percent; ban sales of gas-powered motor vehicles in mid-2030; significantly boost hydrogen production to be used for motor vehicles, plus numerous other measures.
Shortly before the announcement, the gist of it was released a few days earlier. Industry responses were that the plan was unrealistic and difficult to do. Toyota Motor Corp. CEO immediately blasted: ‘the auto industry’s business model will die’ if motor vehicles’ powertrains are replaced by electric motors.
Akio’s comment reflected his concerns that Toyota’s suppliers would be critically impacted by the powertrain shift as EVs use far fewer auto parts than conventional engines so the automaker won’t need as many suppliers as now, as well as doubts about the government’s measures to switching all new cars to EVs in the mid-2030.
True to such skepticisms, anecdotal evidences point to many hurdles for Japan to clear for the grand plan, e.g., whether the country can build sufficient numbers of off-shore windmills and how to lower EVs’ lithium-ion battery prices of Japanese battery makers that are few and unproductive.
Given that Japanese industry’s history since the country ended its locked society policy and opened its ports to imports and foreigners in 1854 has been one of failure after failure, and defeat after defeat, the green growth strategy looks hollow and a work of bureaucrats that must have wasted hundreds of hours to draft it, all on the desk and drawing on data and information from the internet.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which wrote the new strategy is infamous for drafting all sorts of papers that they brand as ‘vision,’ ‘policy,’ ’strategy,’ ‘’plan,’ and ‘program,’ This is the government entity that presented to the former prime minister, Abe Shinzo, the ‘Go To Travel’ and ‘Go To Eat’ campaigns that subsidize Japanese tourists’ domestic travels and dining and ended up spreading the Covid-19 virus across the country – an undeniable, clear disastrous failure.
The first failure since Japan’s opening in 1854 to the world was the silk-making industry. Japanese silk yarn dominated the world in latter half of the 19th century through 1929, commanding the top share in key export destinations like the United States and Europe. Silk exports accounted for 40 to 70 percent of total Japanese exports in that period. The industry suffered a devastating damage after the 1929 Great Depression and it is now nonexistent.
The industry, which was started by a private, Eiichi Shibusawa, was put under government controls over decades and given a gradual decimation to death.
Cotton yarn and fabric-manufacturing also underwent a similar destiny and disappeared in the 1970s, as well as numerous other industries that still are surviving but positioning near the bottom of global ranking, including steel and electrical products, despite the fact that the trade ministry tried to promote them to dominate the world.
One has to wonder why the Japanese industries that listened to the government failed. The reason can be traced to the fact that Japanese bureaucrats have not been immersed in real manufacturing and business practices, drafting ‘visions’, ‘policies,’ and ‘plans’ as their desk work in search of greater added value industries. To their eyes, silk and cotton were thin value industries.
So, the Japanese industry with the government at the helm next went to steel, metal fabrication such as toys and kitchen ware, then on to electrical and electronics including ‘transistor radios’ that made Sony world-famous, television sets and audios, further to semiconductors, PCs and smart phones.
Those industries are still producing but when compared with China and other countries, at a pittance and likely to vanish like silk and cotton in several years as they will be overwhelmed by imports from China, Korea and elsewhere. And bureaucrats of course are not helping their demise.
Few new industries are remaining for bureaucrats to cultivate added values but as they have done with the green growth strategy, they will continue churning out papers that few bother to read so bureaucrats can continue creating their own jobs.

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Chino, Japan, Jan. 8, 2021—In Japan, newspapers, magazines, TV, and website media are flooded with ads promoting classes and lessons for vocational certification and licenses for a whole gamut of jobs and pleasure.
Those qualifications, many of them certified by the government, range from pharmacy back office specialists, financial planners, food and dietary advisors, Microsoft Office specialists, cooks, vegetable professionals, smart phone ‘smart use’ specialists, and even road construction safety flagging workers.
The Japanese people, many in their mid-careers, attend vocational classes and lessons offered by qualification schools for steep fees. Those schools are thriving as the people looking for next jobs are eager to obtain government-recognized certificates’ and/or ‘graduation certificates’ issued from those schools — no matter what their academic reputations are and that the certificates carry hardly any legal power like the driver’s license.
Of course, there are serious qualifications that require years of studying and experience and demand strict licensing standards: CPAs, tax accountants, school teachers, doctors, nurses, driving schools, and so on.
The fresh addition to those traditional certification and licensing schools are precisely what Japan’s bureaucracy-tilting society is about now: No matter how they look like and behave off the main societal norms, Japanese Gen-Z are far more conformist-oriented than the post-WWII generations. Few attempt to take risks of dropping out of college and go on global trotting or venture start-up businesses. The thriving vocational schools underscore precisely their conservatism attitude.
The bureaucracy clearly recognizes the the public’s popularity of certification and licenses. The government is encouraging, for example, security companies to form associations, recommending that those lobbies offer lessons, seminars and classes about the works of private security guards and how to become one. A government-certified NPO in Nagano Prefecture in central Japan requires people that want to join obtain prefecture-issued certificates to use chainsaws. Numerous other kinds of qualifications and licenses-in-kind are asked or made compulsory for work and even pleasure.
Analyzing why the Japanese people are willing to obtain such licenses and qualifications, I have come to speculate that, on top of using them as tools for securing jobs, the people nurture their job and pleasure skills with them. Certificates for flower arrangement, old songs and instruments, tea ceremonies have been around for centuries, and even now, people are willing to pay steep tuitions to teachers to get a certificate.
Ever savvy at creating work for themselves, Japanese bureaucrats seized on this old system loved by people for their interventions, typically by forming associations, non-profits and so on, on which they surreptitiously install retired bureaucrat OBs and OGs.

Those that challenge often are disappointed as in the old adage, ‘The nail that sticks out shall be hammered’ — and reeducated as ‘an ordinary person’ like Mao did to the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution.
Shusaku Chiba (1793-1855) is one of those: A master swordsman during the closing era of the Edo period, Shusaku in 1822 easily beat Yahei Koizumi, who was nationally renowned as the best and strongest samurai and head trainer for Tokugawa Shogunate samurai and the head swordsman of the Maniwa Nenryu School.
Shusaku was chased by hundreds of Koizumi’s Maniwa Nenryu proteges and gangsters who attempted to recapture the school’s national fame. Shusaku managed to escape and the Tokugawa government authorized to manage swordsmanship schools in recognition of his skills while helping the Maniwa Nenryu school redeem its dmaged fame. Both Shusaku’s and Maniwa’s schools were said to have drawn many students that were vying to obtain respective swordsmanship’s licenses.

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Chino, Japan, Dec. 28, 2020—China is apparently racing to expand its seawater reach in the Pacific to disable Joe Biden to confront Beijing to end its hegemonist Belt and Road policy. The Japanese newspaper Sankei reported on Dec. 28 that Chinese government survey ships have been circling around OkinoTorishima Island, a tiny speck surfaced two decades ago by underwater volcanic eruption, south of Tokyo’s Ogasawara Islands.
For years China has been arguing that OkinoTorishima is a rock above the sea level, not an island as Japan has been claiming by building a sovereignty marker. The island is yet to be recognized as Japanese sovereign territory, only that ‘the rock’ is Japanese land but that Japan cannot claim sovereignty on the surrounding reef.
Chinese government ships apparently have been conducting research based on this provision of the 1994 United Nations Law of the Sea conference and build a long runway and building structures in Spratly Islands in the South Pacific over the past several years. The archipelago is being claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and China.
Pacifist Japan, or the country dominated by confrontation-fearing bureaucrats about national policies, has been taking a wait and sea attitude about OkinoTorishima. Japan has assigned the address to the island, postal zip code, and telephone area code. In 19888, New York Times and later in 2003 and 2005 Wall Street Journal naively have printed op-ed articles in support of China’s argument that OkinoTorishima, which Japan first named so in 1929, that it is a rock, not an island. Japan and China held a bilateral talk in 2004 about the island but both fielded their respective arguments and nothing conclusive emerged as a result.
OkinoTorishima is close to Palau Island, so it is strategically important for the United States. China has been violating Japan’s exclusive sea zone around Senkaku Islands in the Sea of Japan for years, and Japanese lawmakers and bureaucrats have been taking hardly any action against the invasion allowing China to start arguing that the island is China’s sovereign land.

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TOKYO, Dec. 21, 2020—Bureaucracy is back at Toyota. This time, it’s going to be tougher than before to fight it as the rank and file of the entire corporate group, not just top brass, are mired in support of the establishment’s management policy.
It’s vital for Toyota to address problems of the return to bureaucracy and conservatism and shedding fossil fuel-powered engines, which requires layers of hierarchy and so is a symbol of bureaucracy.
But illustrating the company’s reluctance to change, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, who also serves as the Japanese auto industry lobby Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association chairman, Dec. 17 told an on-line news conference that eliminating gasoline-powered powertrains means ‘the auto industry’s business model will die.’ Toyoda expressed frustration at the Japanese government’s recent announcement to ban sales of all new gas-powered motor vehicles as part of the zero emission policy by 2050;. Toyoda said EVs generate lots of carbon dioxide in the electricity generation process, asking whether prime minister Suga and other lawmakers want to eliminate gas vehicles ‘with that knowledge.’
Is that how Japan’s largest company CEO’s views automobiles!? — that cars should be powered primarily by internal combustion engines, even beyond 2035, the year when the Japanese government wants to ban manufacturing gas-powered cars altogether, so that parts and components suppliers can survive and their jobs protected. I thought Toyoda wanted his company morph into ‘a mobility’ platform, not just manufacturing and selling cars, but traveling to the space, as the company has signed with the Japanese government’s space program, and build an experimental mobility city called the Woven City. And many more non-auto undertakings. But what he said yesterday was that Toyota will not leapfrog to the next dimension. Too bad.
The surrounding global and industry situations were so much different in 1997 than now. In that yearend, while world environmental leaders gathered and signed a CO2 reduction accord called the Kyoto Protocol in the ancient Japanese city at the conclusion of week-long negotiations, Toyota released the first-generation Prius model, the world’s first gas-electric motor hybrid car, with an ad campaign of ‘We got there in time for the 21st century.’
The man who engineered the hybrid drama was Hiroshi Okuda, who served as CEO from 1995 to 1999. Among many accolades and criticisms he received were the launch of the Prius, the overhauling of the Toyota board, replacing 17 of its 19 members, and the China business. The bottom-line of Okuda’s philosophy was to rid bureaucracy and infuse new ideas.
Akio Toyoda has introduced lots of great new ideas to his company, including the Woven City, e-Palette EV bus/transport system and countless others. He also downsized the boardroom. And yet, he’s failing to rid the corporate structure of bureaucracy like Okuda and other predecessors did. As if to epitomize this, two of his confidants who directly advise (or do nothing so bureaucracy encroaches in the company as in many others when nothing is done) remain as chairman and vice chairman, Takeshi Uchiyamada and Shigeru Hayakawa. Both have been directly reporting to Akio for years, much longer than what officers in comparable positions serve. Some insiders say that they are known for doing nothing. Akio has been CEO since 2009.
Toyota Motor Sales, which was merged into Toyota Motor in 1982, commanded reputations as active — and aggressive — sales company. When a dealer locked horns in selling its brands in competition with Nissan Motor, Toyota would flood the dealer with incentives that Nissan could not possibly match to win customers. It relied a lot on referrals from existing Toyota customers for new sales clues as part of its winning strategy.
Thanks partly to the return of bureaucracy and perhaps with a streak of arrogance and over-confidence, such referrals are no longer treasured by Toyota for selling cars in Japan. When someone who had known Toyota for decades has asked for the company’s intervention for his purchase of a Toyota brand car at a Tokyo dealer, that person would be disappointed as he is likely to be told that Toyota no longer makes such interventions to its dealers. A Toyota spokesperson told me recently that while the company would be amenable to talk to affiliated Toyota sales companies, it cannot guarantee whether the intervention would accommodate purchases. I’ve talked to another Toyota public relations person but was told that since the company classifies me as a member of the foreign media, the person could not talk to me — despite the fact that I’ve known that person, as well as the first person, for years!
The experiences reminded me of the stuffy Toyota corporate culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Working as a U.S. wire service reporter, there was no way that I could compete against the Nikkei newspaper that fielded dozens of reporters and editors to cover Toyota, in Toyoda City (it was renamed later to Toyota), Nagoya and Tokyo. Nikkei would ‘scoop’ that Toyota would merge Toyota Motor Sales with Toyota Motor　Manufacturing. As a foreign journalist, there was no way but to call up Toyota Tokyo’s public relations for comment but was told, unsurprisingly, to physically ‘go to’ Toyoda city and Nagoya for comments.
Maybe history is repeating itself.

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https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/03/business/economy-business/japan-gasoline-cars-ban/

TOKYO, Dec. 4, 2020—In 1985, Jaapan streamlined its telecom law for privatizing the former national telecom company, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, and liberalizing the industry. In December 2020, the Japanese government would launch a new body for intervening in telecom carriers’ business to lower smart phone user costs, in a move departing from decades of laissez-faire policy.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Consumer Affairs Agency would form the new body that would collect business and technical data from smart phone carriers and publicly release the information to pressure carriers to lower user costs.
Establishment of the new body, which is et to be named, contravenes the liberalization and deregulation policy that Yoshihide Suga, the prime minister, pledged to enforce as his core work.
Since the 1985 law amendment, dozens of telecom carriers came into the market, from both Japan and overseas. Over the intervening years, those with deep pockets acquired smaller ones and now, there are only three big carriers — NTT, which spun off from the national telecom; KDDI, the former government-sponsored carrier for overseas telecom; and Yahoo. the unit of Softbank and the new and only independent carrier. Rakuten, which is managed by Rakuten group, is offering services by leasing landlines and bands from NTT’s subsidiary NTT DoCoMo and KDDI’s au unit trying to become the fourth major carrier. In addition, there are hundreds of MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) that borrower NTT DoCoMo and au lines to offer lower priced services than the major ones.
Japan’s smart phone user costs are much higher than in other countries, roughly double that of Verison and ATT, so the country needs to lower costs further. Yet, doing so with government intervention is raising the public’s eyebrows.

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