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TOKYO, Dec. 12, 2019—The top Japanese business lobby’s head, Yoshihiro Inayama, once said, ‘Iron is tantamount to humans.’ With it, the late business leader meant to remind the world that Japanese industry that drew global awe for rebuilding the country from war rubbles to the second largest economy in barely 30 years were uncontested elites and the core was steel making technology – undeniably the world’s most advanced at the time.
During Japan’s go-go era of the 1980s, when serving as the chairman of the former institution of the current Japan Business Federation, Mr. Inayama would tell regular news conferences that without steel, countries and industries could not anticipate to prosper. He even said that without steel, modern industry would die.
The late 1970s to early 1980s were the period when the steel industry ranked the largest and most powerful in Japan, and electric/electronics and autos were relegated to distant second and lower.
Symbolic of the Japanese steel industry’s dynamism, at the prodding of the United States government, Japan’s trade ministry in 1977 intervened to curb runaway Japanese steel exports to the U.S. market with what was known as the ‘voluntary export restraint’ telling the Japanese steel industry to voluntarily limit steel exports.
Long before acceding to the VER, world demand for high-quality Japanese steel and steel-making technology were a well-sought-after commodity, particularly from China and South Korea – which was of little surprise given Japan’s ability to build the Yamato, Musashi and other battleships during the war. Over the late 1960s to 1970s, the Japanese steel industry extended technological and financial assistance to help build China’s Baoshan and Korea’s Posco steel mills, as well as Brazil’s Usiminas and other countries.
The time has changed and for the worse for Japan: Over the past three decades, the Japanese steel industry has been on the defensive, its global market share being nipped steadily and without respite by Chinese, Korean, and Brazilian exports.
Nippon Steel Corp., which Japanese university graduates rated as their No. 1 nob application targets in the 1980s and early 1990s, would consolidate its 16 domestic steel mills to only 6 next spring, according to the Sankei newspaper attributing the decision to ‘a double whammy of sluggish (shipment) prices and high costs, and the impact of natural disasters that hit several mills over the past year.
Who can deny that the next victim would be autos, the powerhouse of Japanese economic growth the past four decades. The Japanese electric and electronics industry has past its crest in the 2000s, with primarily electronic parts makers – save computer chips that had gone to Korea and Taiwan a long ago – operating quietly.

–Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, Oct. 8, 2019—In 1975, the Vietnam War drew to a conclusion with the evacuation of last flock of Americans and South Vietnamese on choppers from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. While the United States has plunged into a prolonged period of defeatism, something that hardly anyone had imaged began and continued well into the 1990s: Altogether, as many as 800,000 South Vietnamese hit the South China Sea on makeshift boats during that long spam of time reaching neighboring destinations, including Hong Kong, which received 100,000.
Subject to how the 4-months-long Hong Kong protest moves develop, neighboring countries need to prepare for fleeing Hong Kongers that total nearly 7.5 million.
Taiwan is understood to be accepting incoming Hong Kongers on a case-by-case basis. The fresh wave of Hong Kong emigrants to Taiwan began in the 2019 after the start of protests. If the Hong Kong conditions become even more tense, it would have little choice but to admit more Hong Kong people because human rights is at the core of Taiwan’s national policy. Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung visited Taiwan in September asking Taiwan lawmakers for support, including refugee protection, the South China Morning Post reported Sept. 5. Taiwan’s refugee bill, which is believed to be readied for parliamentary debate, would protect foreigners but not mainland Chinese or Hong Kong people.
They are treated for a separate nationality status. Hong Kong people can apply for residency in Taiwan by investing close to US$200,000 and start a business by obtaining a work visa and live in Taiwan for several years, or study at a local university and after graduation work for a salary of no less than $15,000 a month.
Japan’s immigration and refugee laws were amended in 2018 but it basically restricts accepting refugees and remains far more prohibitive than Taiwan.

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Tokyo, Oct. 7, 2019–The world is brimming with visual pictorial and video images of good, bad, great, boring, and so on. Such images have historically served as the drivers of expressing human emotions, artistic creations, and often, societal activity decision-making. Over years since the birth of the Internet and smart phones, the number of image providers, limited to a small band of professionals until then, has exploded. Those providers not only post images but they also are viewers/customers, competing hungrily for winning the ‘likes’ to their facebook sites and ‘hits’ to their websites and blogs with the eye for ad income. And come the 5G era, the visual society will be revolutionized as images can be posted and viewed genuinely real-time, making people even more image-obsessed and -hungry.
Virtual image society looks colorful and gives an impression that a future looks bright, fun, and promising with little to be worried about: Images of athletes winning Olympic gold medals, 90-year-olds scaling Mr. Everest, 10 year-olds cruising around the world nonstop and solo. They would be handsomely and immediately rewarded with real-time Internet and TV show appearances, speaking engagements, appearing in commercials (photos and videos for sure). Of course, there would be disagreeable images that contravene with colorful optimism: scenes of riots, murders, and as such, but they should be kept in the shadows of viewers’ mind.
Is there something missing in the seemingly optimistic image society trend? My take is that the move to this trend is stripping people of sufficient time to pause, think and analyze, as people would be even more overwhelmed by the bombardment of video clips and still photo and anime images. Images, particularly videos, are making people react in a knee-jerk manner. The pattern already is showing up in the financial marketplace whether investors execute orders to reflect what Trump (less so now since investors are coming to ignore what he says) and Xi say about U.S.-China trade on top of what AI tell them to do, adding to greater volatility than unseen in the past. Mass-shooters may be inspired by violent video and game clips, as they are said to be already are.
What the world is going to experience in image-prioritized society, be it in the marketplace or society, would be the degradation of a vital human activity and greater volatility.

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TOKYO, Oct. 2, 2019—In September, Japan entered an extended period of progressive tax and social welfare cost increases, especially for retirees and senior workers. A government policy commission commenced debating raising pension receiving qualification ages and encouraging old folks to work until they cannot continue to pay taxes while the government ended keeping the sales tax rate at 8% and raised it to 10%, effective Oct. 1, 2019.
But it’s questionable whether old folks would response to this policy unless sweeping changes are introduced to moderate the cost burden curb.
The commission was asked by its chair, prime minister Shinzo Abe, to comprehensively explore mapping out all conceivable demographical visions of aging Japanese society over the next millennium on the premise of the Japanese people’s longevity stretching to 100 from the current average of 83.96 (2016 data):
–How old the legal employment age (!?. Is there such an age?) for senior workers should be for them to qualify for public pensions smoothly after retirement;
–Whether senior workers, e.g., those over 60 or 65 years old, can be core contributors of taxes, healthcare, elderly nursing care, and other social costs;
–How much taxes and social costs those old folks can foot for keeping aging Japan going over the next millennium without bankrupting its finances.
The planned increases are needed because Japan’s social welfare system is structured on the basis of young working classes footing the cost for retired people, the commission said. Young people cannot shoulder mounting social welfare costs because of dwindling child birth rate, which stood at 1.44 per woman in 2016, one of the lowest in the world and compared with 1.80 in the United States. The rate has notched slightly higher but not much no matter how much the government provides child birth incentives to young couples.
As the commission began debating, the government began offering free pre-K nursing and high school tuitions starting in October. But those measures’ effects are seen as iffy. The program will be financed with tax revenues from increasing the sales tax rate to 10% from 8%, effective Oct. 1, 2019, the increase which Abe earlier said was for paying for elderly society, not child births.
Government estimates forecast that Japan’s social welfare expenditures in 2040 – the peak year of population aging — would rise to 24% of gross domestic product from 21.5 percent at 121.3 trillion yen ($1.2 (trillion) in 2018.
All those sound logical, maybe. Reality is different: If a retiree that receives a typical public pension of about 250,000 yen a month earns an additional sum from work, say, three days as a part-timer, he/she would lose access to various benefits accorded senior citizens, plus faces a steep jump of the National Health Insurance monthly premium, as well as the nursing care insurance premium. Those are on top of national and local income taxes.
The bottom-line is that he/she may earn an additional 200,000 yen a month but almost half of it will go to taxes and social welfare costs, and they also will lose various benefits that local municipalities give to people that live on pensions alone.
Further, if you as a senior citizen between 65 and 70 years old and is earning more than 460,000 yen a month in pension and salary, then your basic public pension payment is suspended.
Better think twice before working, old folks!

(More information about the government commission is available at:
https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/zensedaigata_shakaihoshou/)

TOKYO, Sept. 13, 2019—It’s Day 5 and the condition is likely to continue for as long as another week: No power, no hot tap water, no bath, no frozen food in the fridge, no smart phone charging, no television …for tens of thousands of homes in Chiba, only 30 miles from downtown Tokyo. In the modern era, power outage seriously cripples daily activities. Though the storm was one of the most powerful to hit Japan, it could have been avoided but TEPCO, the power company that caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown, became complacent and failed to take precautions.
Still-unaccounted for damages are what Typhoon Faxai, the 15th tropical storm born in the South Pacific, left after its landfall in the greater Tokyo area on Sept. 9. Deaths and injuries were few, thank you, but prolonged power outage in the last leg of summer is having unfathomable impacts on daily human activities and industry, from commuting to manufacturing.As of 11:00 p.m. JST Sept. 13, as many as 194,800 homes in Chiba, east of Tokyo, were without power, according to TEPCO’s website.
It was fortunately that the typhoon hit an area that did not have nuclear power plants, like in March 2011 when a powerful earthquake struck a wide expanse of northeastern Japan, swamping the Fukushima nuclear power reactors with tall tsunami and triggering the meltdown, which to date has not be securely dowsed.
And yet, the typhoon damages were serious enough to threaten the lives of thousands of people bed-ridden in hospitals, nursing homes and private homes in the late sweltering summer. ‘If we did not have generators and TEPCO’s power supply truck did not come, the people living in our (nursing) facility could have been in trouble,’ an employee of Nagi-no-sato elderly nursing home told me Sept. 12.
What triggered the widespread power failures, according to TEPCO and local government officials, were mostly fallen trees on to power lines. Hundreds of trees are said to have fallen on to power lines, the reason why power restoration is being delayed.
It was apparent that TEPCO had been complacent about the danger of falling trees as it was in the purported safety of the Fukushima nuclear power reactors before the meltdown. Its safety-related budgets blindly focused on nuclear power reactors, the company apparently ignored or oversighted the risk of power outage from falling trees. Otherwise, there cannot possibly be hundreds of trees fallen over power lines.
Power outage in Japan used to be rare and if it happened, it was restored in a mater of hours and rarely took days. The latest blackout could prove the longest on record for TEPCO if it continues into next week.
Though it’s a different business, before Japan Rail companies were split up and divested as private entities from the former national railway, Japan Rail (Kokutetsu), disaster precautions to prevent train stoppage were as such that even on days of heavy snowfalls and torrential rains, Japan Rail employees made sure that trains run without delay, even by seconds. I remember viewing footages of Japan Rail engineers heating the train track switches in frigid, heavy snowy nights, and clearing tree trunks and branches in summer to prevent them from falling onto the railway tracks.
We bid farewell to the era of precautions and said hello to complacency.

–Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, Sept. 12, 2019—In November 1989, T. Boone Pickens, the once-famous greenmail takeover specialist who died on Nov. 11, demanded a board seat of Koito Manufacturing Co., for holding the largest chunk of the Toyota Motor Corp. auto parts subsidiary’s shares. Pickens’ demand was rejected by Koito, not even a shred of the company’s financial information beyond what was disclosed minimally under Japanese law. Pickens reportedly invested $1 billion for a 26 percent Koito stock, more than a 19 percent share Toyota held at the time. At the end of the day, nothing happened and Pickens unloaded his entire Koito holdings, probably at a small loss, despite loud clamoring from Washington lawmakers.

Fast-forward to March 1999: Nissan Motor Co. , which was on the brink of bust, sold a controlling share to Renault, which ultimately was raised to 44.4 percent, and escaped failure. The Renault acquisition of Nissan later was expanded to involving the French automaker’s acquisition of Mitsubishi Motors Corp.’s controlling stake. Renault’s acquisitions went smooth as sailing in a quiet sea.

In both the Toyota group and Nissan group deals, the Japanese government had been in the works behind the scenes, a former government official told The Prospect Sept. 12, 2019. Koito needed to be protected from Pickens at all cost, so Toyota told Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry bureaucrats, for the country’s economic stability and employment. Exposing Koito to mergers and acquisition high seas may ripple into other Toyota group companies as Pickens probably might have envisioned and could end up threatening the Toyota keiretsu (locked corporate relationship) and in turn cause instability to Japanese society.

In a contrasting setup, Nissan, a former Fuyo zaibatsu keiretsu company, desperately needed new money but it could not find any among domestic investors, as the likes of Mitsubishi and Mitsui were competing keiretsu groupings. There was ample money in Japan but nobody was interested in an investment that could disrupt the keiretsu landscape – even though it had been becoming fuzzy back then. So Nissan’s late president Yoshikazu Hanawa considered foreign investors and responded favorably to offers from Daimler-Chrysler, which already was managing Mitsubishi Motors under its arms, while sounding out Renault. Hanawa didn’t like Daimler-Chrysler’s ‘Deutsch colonialist management’ style so he settled on Renault, which he saw as a less militaristic and domineering alliance. Government bureaucrats listened to Hanawa and endorsed the deal, but they kept concerns about ‘national security’ because Nissan was formerly a national enterprise charged to leap-frog Japan as a developed country with silk spinning and weaving machinery, automobiles, military and space technology.

The next few months are expected to critical on how Nissan without CEO after the scheduled departure of Hiroto Saikawa Sept. 16, 2019 and the Japanese government would manage the company’s relationship with Renault, which had expressed intentions for a full acquisition of Nissan. Without Renault, Nissan is set to sink into another round of money shortage trap but accepting additional Renault investment would mean that one of few remaining competitive Japanese industries and technologies could drain out of the country.

–By Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, Sept. 6, 2019–This time there won’t be any room for maneuvering for an alternative: Nissan Motor Co. has to die a sudden death or be fully acquired by French automaker Renault.

Nissan president and CEO Hiroto Saikawa admitted at a Sept. 5 news conference that he had been overpaid by tens of millions of yen in 2013 in stock options called the stock appreciation rights plan, saying the program ws different to how it should have been.’

Saikawa denied instructing the company the payment to him. ‘The procedures were handled properly and I did not know about the misconduct. He said he will repay the sum to the company and insisted that the program was created by former CEO Carlos Ghosn.

Over the past year since he took over the Nissan president and CEO position from Ghosn from being Ghosn’s top aide since 2017, Saikawa has been at the center of an array of gossips and rumors about Ghosn’s downfall and his management policy, which clearly has been the reason for Nissan’s shrinking car sales worldwide.

In July, Nissan’s worldwide sales fell 5.2 percent, and year-to-date, sales were down 11.1 percent. Other Japanese automakers reported year-on-year rises in July and to date. Nissan’s stock price has been on a steady slide and around 670 yen.

Nissan had planned a domestic 250 billion yen straight bond launch this month, the largest single domestic bond issuance by the company, but it is set to be shelved until the management structure stabilizes and sales recover. A Nissan spokesperson confirmed the shelving. The 4-tranche issue coupons were above comparable bond market average, meaning that underwriters were uncertain about the bond’s distribition at market interest rates. Nissan last sold bonds in October 2018 via Nissan Financial Service.

Inside the company, people already are looking for Saikawa’s successor in response to an uproar of criticisms of him from investors and Nissan car owners, a Nissan affiliate employee said.

–Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, Aug. 23, 2019—South Korea’s announcement Aug. 22 to abrogate a bilateral defense information sharing treaty, GSOMIA, with Japan, the decision that could encourage North Korea to test more missiles, underscores the Trump White House inability to ‘Make America Great Again’ and regain the eroding U.S. position in the world.
South Korean deputy director of the national security council, Kim You-geum, told a news conference Aug. 22, ‘…we have determined that it would not serve our national interest to maintain an agreement we signed with the aim of exchanging military information which is sensitive to security.’ He said Japan has created a ‘grave change’ in the bilateral relationship.
U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo told a separate news conference in Ottawa, Canada: ‘We are disappointed…We are urging each of the two countries to continue to engage…There is no doubt that the shared interests of Japan and South Korea are important and the are important to the United States.’ Yet, he even failed to offer mediating the two countries.
Seoul made the announcement after a trilateral foreign ministerial meeting in Beijing of Korea, Japan and China hosted by Chinese premier Li Keqiang yielded no progress in mending the fast-deteriorating Japan-Korea relationship. Earlier,
Sounding hollow, Pompeo said in Bangkok, Thailand in late July that he would encourage the two feuding countries to ‘find a path forward.’
The Trump White House’s ineptitude at placating the two countries underscores its ignorance about the highly complex international politics and diplomacy of not only East Asia but also the Middle East, the Asian sub-Continent, Middle and South America and other regions. Its inability is in sharp contrast to Barrack Obama. Effectively, Obama acknowledged that the United States was no long the global policeman and the United States needed cooperation with other countries in maintaining global peace and stability, and with it, growth.
Symbolic of his good will, Obama visited Hiroshima in August 2016 as the first U.S. president to ever do so and offer beautiful words of atonement to atomic bomb victims perished on Aug. 6, 1945 under a giant mushroom cloud detonated by the United States and preached for creating a world punctuated by humanity and empathy. (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/05/27/national/full-text-of-obamas-speech-in-hiroshima/#.XV9NPS2KUWo)

–Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, July 18, 2019—What Trump is doing to immigrants is likely to hit Japan a few decades later as foreigner populations soar while Japan’s populations decrease: Regulate foreigners coming to Japan, segregate foreigners’ children in schools, deny access to the country’s National Health Insurance and public pensions. Preempting it would be difficult and painful unless bold actions are taken now.

I was in a hurry and many eating establishments were overfilled with lunchtime crowds, so I entered a Matsuya beef bowl stand that looking from the street had some empty stools. I ordered a small beef bowl so that I can fill up my stomach before heading to the next destination. The waiter put a glass of water in front of me, took my order without uttering a welcome or anything. He was not a Japanese and looked like a Southeast Asian. I emptied the glass and tried to pour more water myself from a jug sitting on the counter. The lid was loose and came off the jug, spilling water and ice cubes, almost but not quite to a young woman sitting immediately on my right and eating what she had to order. I cleaned the table with a towel the waiter brought and noticed the lady next to me was not a Japanese either, probably a Southeast Asian. My order served, I started eating my quick lunch, when three people came in to the place, two men and a woman, all young and caucasian. They asked for a beef bowl takeout to a lady working in the back kitchen. She also looked like a Southeast Asian. The three restaurant staffers seemed to be all non-Japanese. I looked about the whole counter and realized that more than half of the customers were non-Japanese, some looking like travelers with backpacks by their side and others probably local residents.

The realization that more foreign nationals are in Japan, and increasingly as manual workers, touched me as an undeniable new reality recently. A few days earlier, I had to go to an ophthalmologist and after dripping my consultation card at the clinic, I excused myself for a quick bite of lunch at a fast food joint, well, again. I entered the place and was welcomed with a crisp address of ‘Irasshai-mase!’ – by a caucasian woman attendant. She was working briskly next to one who looked like a young Japanese woman who didn’t seem to like her work and wore frowned eyebrows, contrast to the foreign worker who beamed a smile at me when she took my order.

Until twenty years ago, foreign populations meant second and third-generation Japanese-Brazilians sweating at auto and electronics manufacturer assembly lines, and before then, Korean Japanese who had emigrated to Japan to avoid persecutions centuries ago and those that came during the second world war, Chinese who had arrived even before the Koreans, and specks of ‘gaijin’ most of them Americans that stayed on in Japan after the war.

Now, foreigners are all over the spectrum of Japanese society and regions as office workers, executives, teachers, and more recently in workplaces requiring physical input. Plus millions of tourists.

More foreign travelers, more residents, plunging Japanese population. A combination of globally developing and fortuitous factors are drawing foreign travelers to Japan – Accommodation sharing services like airbnb, low-cost carrier air flights, popularity of Japanese food, and then the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, among many. Correspondingly, in 2018, a total of 31.1 million foreign tourists visited Japan, an 8.7 percent year-on-year increase and almost four times over 2008 when the number was 8.35 million, according to the Japanese government’s Japan National Tourist Organization data. The government wants the number to surpass 40 million in 2020 with the Tokyo Olympics as a key boon.

In the meantime, Japan’s population is shrinking at the fastest pace in the world. Cabinet Office demographics forecast in 2012 said the population, which is now at 127 million, would decrease to less than 100 million by 2048 and shrink to as few as 867 million in 2060. The deceleration velocity is picking up speed more recently with the same Cabinet Office forecast predicting the population in 2110 to be 42.86 million. And at 28 percent, the ratio of old-age people against the total population of 127 million is at a record high. The figure would climb to 37.7 percent in 2050, the Cabinet Office forecast in the 2017 white paper on aging.

In an inverted trend, the foreign ‘resident population’ is increasing solidly, mirroring the effect of Japanese government’s policy to admit more foreign labor to make up for the slack resulting from the Japanese population shrinkage and aging. The foreign resident population as of Jan.1, 2019 was 2.667 million, an all-time high and up 6.79 percent year-on-year and representing 2.09 percent of Japan’s total population of 127.443 million, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ recent data. In addition, there are about 74,000 undocumented aliens living in Japan as of Jan. 1, 2019, according to the Ministry of Justice statistics. So the aggregate ‘official’ foreign resident population on that day stood at 2.674 million.

But the realistic foreign resident population should be much larger. A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official had told me a few years ago that a few percent of foreign tourists stay on in Japan, hired by businesses managed by formally vetted foreign business owners in Japan and Japanese employers that need foreign labor, such as yakuza gangsters and construction firms. Based on a conservative estimate that the stay-on ratio is 1 percent, approximately 311,000 foreign travelers have become residents, bringing the total to about 3 million. 

Abe’s pro-foreign labor policy. This spring, prime minister Abe launched a pro-foreign labor policy to enable restaurants and other businesses needing manual labor to hire foreign workers. During the first few years starting 2019, the number to be admitted is 45,000 a year, and it would be increased progressively later. Ultimately, the policy would admit foreign nationals to work and live in Japan exactly like Japanese to be naturalized. 

It sounds like a beautiful idea but the reality is different. Cities like the ancient capital of Kyoto and Ota, Gunma, where automaker Subaru Corp. is headquartered, are lukewarm to accepting more foreign tourists and residents. Kyoto Shimbun newspaper frequently reports about foreign tourists’ bad manners and inconveniences caused by them such as touching kimono of Maiko, graffiti, high costs of language education for foreigners’ children. 

The story doesn’t end there, however. Hospitals and clinics have been reported to have missed receiving payments from foreign tourists after treatment. A March 2019 Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare survey showed that 18.9 percent of hospitals that took part in the survey replied that foreign visitors failed to pay medical bills that averaged $4,100. The survey was taken in October 2018 alone. Because of language barriers, many hospitals hire interpreters at their own cost but do not charge the fees, according to a ministry official July 18. Though the foreigners’ no-pay to date has been a minor incident as a whole for Japan’s health insurance system, it would mean a cost burden if the trend continues, particularly toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, he said. Whether it is still being practiced is not clear but a few years ago when Japan was generous enough to have non-residents register for the National Health Insurance program, foreign travelers would exploit the opportunity and abuse the insurance, which pays 2/3^rdof the medical cost from the policy.

Something similar could happen to the national pension program. The Abe government revised the policy to pay public pensions to people who did not pay premiums for 25 years. The new rule qualifies people to receive payments if they paid premiums for a minimum of 10 years. Long-term foreign residents have begun applying for receiving pensions, and that is putting extra burdens on the policy that’s already operating on thin ice resulting from population aging.

Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, July 4, 2019—At about $30 trillion, the New York Stock Exchange stands out as the world’s largest securities exchange now. Add Nadaq’s $16 trillion, the United States far outdistances all other major exchanges combined including Shanghai ($5.9 trillion), Hong Kong ($5.7 trillion), Tokyo ($5.2 trillion), and Dax ($3.3 trillion).

Tokyo, which had been ranking third after New York and Shanghai the past decade, slipped to fourth after Hong Kong in the 2019 spring and now is even with the former British colony. Whether Tokyo can recapture the third place may be conditioned to where global trade will develop against the backdrop of U.S.-China trade tensions.

Retracing history to the 1980s: The United States was of course at the very top place, but Japan surged to a close second in the late 1980s, and though it was a blip in the chart, Japan outranked the United States and became the global top, only to surrender that ranking in a matter of months later – in February of 1991 when the Japanese bubble burst with the Nikkei stock average going into a near free fall. When Tokyo dethroned Wall Street in market cap with an all-time high Nikkei average of 38,957 on Dec. 29, 1989, Japan growled itself as a country of indomitable samurai gobbling up prime American and foreign properties and that the world had entered an era of ‘pax-japonica.”

Japan’s nominal GDP in 1990 was 457 trillion yen (approximately $4.3 trillion at current exchange rate), while the U.S. GDP the same year was $5.9 trillion – so Japan was not all that far behind when factors such as population, manufacturing capacity and others are considered. In 2018, Japan’s GDP was $4.9 trillion, virtually stalling throughout those years, while the U.S. GDP ramped up to a whopping $20.5 trillion. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. per capita GDP, at $62,641 in 2018, far out-distanced Japan, which was a mere $39,200 the same year.

While not directly related to economic performance data, the U.S. population, at 327 million, has been growing steadily, up 0.6 percent in 2018. Japan’s population turned to negative growth in the early 2010, and is projected to contract to less than 100 million by 2050 from 127 million in 2018.

Hard data speaks truth and foretells while lawmaker and bureaucrat comments sound hollow.

Toshio Aritake