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TOKYO, Nov. 12, 2023–Baseball, football, soccer, tennis, golf.. Any sport needs regulations and penalties that are written by their sponsors. Without commonly accepted self-governing rules – in a ball game, for example, you’re struck out on the third strike ball and walked with four balls – games cannot be played equitably. Should bicycle riders be ticketed for dangerous riding manners? It’s the issue being debated by Japanese police with hardly any public input, probably making Japan the first country in the world to punish violations.

Japan amended the road traffic law on April 1, 2023 requiring that all bicycle riders wear a safety helmet; observe traffic lights; ride at slow speed on sidewalks; stop at stop signs; and other rules that are comparable to motorcycle rider regulations. The big difference between the two sets of regulations is that bicycle rules do not have penalty provisions, only the slap on the hand to bicycle riders to be careful to avoid the same violations.

Now the National Police Agency is gearing to toughen the bicycle rules by amending the law to add penalties to violations. It is asking its advisory commission to draw up law amendments to be sent to the 2024 regular Diet (parliament) session, possibly for enforcing the ticketing rule from 2025.

Bicycle riders purchase insurance against injuries to pedestrians and properties, yet the number of accidents involving peds has been increasing, to more than 2,900 in 2029 from 2,281 in 2016, according to NPA statistics. The number of ‘red tickets’ police issued for criminal indictment to bikers for reckless, drunken riding and other dangerous behaviors totaled more than 24,500, or approximately three times what it was in 2013. Barely 2 percent of those that were given the red tickets showed up in court.

What’s next after introducing the penalty provision being quietly considered by police is bicycle licensing. Already, Japan’s bike regs are the world’s most stringent, albeit without penalties, but a license to ride a bike? It’s how Japanese bureaucracy invades into what began as a free rider world.

Many Japanese sports world associations’ top officials are deeply connected with the bureaucracy, the most infamous of them is the Japan Olympic Committee. JOC moved billions of taxpayer money to questionable organizations in which ex-government officials serve in various obscure positions.

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TOKYO, Oct. 24, 2023—It started quietly to the Japanese singer-songwriter group Alice’s romantic tunes evoking snow-white rolling hills and European Alps-like ski resorts of Hokkaido. The first arrivals were New Zealand and Australian skiing zealots that fell in love with Niseko’s powder snow. Rich Chinese began following two decades later, shortly before the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic, to Asia’s most coveted snow paradise, wooed by Alice’s late Shinji Tanimura’s songs and impressed by the nature’s untainted beauty and geographical proximity to their home country, and they later spread out to Furano and other parts of the northernmost Japanese island, buying properties at prices unimaginably high for locals.

During the Japanese pandemic lockdown that lasted through the first half of 2023, the Chinese appetite for Hokkaido properties remained intact, albeit muted, as they had to close deals on-line through Japan-resident Chinese intermediaries. The three-year-respite, however, gave them time for extensive research of the Japanese real estimate market, notably that it’s an industry where hardly any legal, zoning and societal restrictions on foreigners’ acquisitions exist. So, midway through the pandemic period, their eyes lit up to purchase Kyoto properties where Japanese owners have to struggle for passing properties onto their folks as the country’s population contracts and birth rates shrinks.

In the late 2000s to early 2010, Chinese investors’s interest was areas relatively close to the airport and the Hokkaido capital of Sapporo. Nitori Co., a Japanese equivalent of now-defunct Bed Bath and Beyond, was developing a large second home village near the airport, and that drew one of the first phase of Chinese acquisition of Hokkaido properties, according to media reports.

In 2022, affluent-looking Chinese who probably made fortunes in information technology products and services landed at New Chitose Airport and other Hokkaido destinations not in large group tours as before, which were still under Covid-19 travel bans, but in small groups that were permitted by the Japanese quarantine. They spread out to many Hokkaido destinations, including Yubari City, which went bankrupt several years ago. The city office sold a property and made an open-ended free lease of a vast tract of land to Japan-resident Chinese.

The city also transferred the title of Yubari Resort Co. to another Chinese investor, according to the media reports.

Niseko, one of the first-phase Chinese investment target, and neighboring Kucchan town are becoming even hotter than before the pandemic. A total of more than 200 ball-park size equivalent land tracts there are in foreign ownership. The public value (assessed by the Japanese government) of land there soared nearly 6-fold, the rise triggered substantially by the influx of money from China via Singapore, a town official told me recently.

The fresh money is no doubt triggered by the yen’s near 50 pct drop against the U.S. dollar and other currencies as it, from overseas’ perspectives, mean a sharp discount of Japanese properties. The town official feared that more foreign money may come in, fanning inflation that’s already causing havoc to local residents.

Other cities

From the late 2000s, Chinese investors have been buying Kyoto hotels and inns. There are now real estate brokers advertising available facilities to potential investors. Now, Chinese investments are focused on ‘Machiya,’ which are townhouse-like two-story wooded houses lived for centuries by local people. Those houses are being snatched up at unusually high prices making Kyoto unaffordable place to live for ordinary people. This indicates that supply of hotels and inns for Chinese acquisitions are being dried up.

Recent Japanese government statistics underscored the impact of aggressive Chinese investment into the Japanese property market. Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Sapporo and other big cities registered sharp property price increases.

As the Kyoto property market conditions tighten among key urban areas, Chinese seem to be refocusing on Tokyo, the city of 12 million that offers much bigger availability. A media report said that at a recent property seminar arranged by a rJapanese broker, as many as 1,000 Chinese showed up, some yelling that he’ll pay whatever the price to buy a certain property. An on-line property seminar organized by a Chinese broker drew even larger crowds, probably 1,500, showing half a dozen of so properties for sale. 

What’s behind this Chinese appetite? Clearly, many Chinese are fed up with and uncertain about the Chinese economy and Xi Jinping’s regime, so they want to move to other countries, including Japan where regulations are most lax. Plus, Chinese investors want to start Air B&B-like accommodation facilities and hotels for incoming Chinese and foreign visitors. It’s the reason why many Japanese hotels and Ryokan inns are being bought by the Chinese.

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TOKYO, Oct. 21, 2023—It came out of the blue so had caught this journalist’s curiosity: The CEO of NTT, the former Japanese telecom monopoly, nervously said at an Oct. 19 news conference: ‘The NTT law’s purpose has been mostly met; It will become irrelevant’ to the US$150 billion Japanese telecom industry. It’s clearly because the law’s repeal would spark a national furor of unpredictable kinds and could help the NTT group, including its mobile carrier unit NTT DoCoMo, terrestrial carriers of NTT East and West, and the scandal-plagued NTT Data, to try to reconsolidate into a single giant telecom monopoly.

Chronologically following, CEO Akira Shimada’s suddenly-sounding comments came a few months after prime minister Fumio Kishida’s cabinet decision to double Japan’s defense spending over the next 5 years to 2 percent of GDP from about 1 pct now to 43 trillion yen ($286 billion). Raising taxes alone to finance the increase is unrealistic given the Japanese private sector’s tax payment capacity and voter resistance. So, as the Japanese government has been doing over the past decades, disposing of government holdings of former state companies can be less stress-free for Kishida’s administration. And since the government sold off another tranche of its Japan Post Co. holdings, selling all or part of its remaining 30 percent NTT stock holdings became a logical next turn.

Barely an hour before the news conference, Shimada attended an Oct. 19 meeting of the governing Liberal Democratic Party’s project team discussing what to do about the NTT law that is chaired by the LDP strong-arm lawmakers Akira Amari and Koichi Hagiuda, a key protege of the gunned-down former PM Shinzo Abe. No wonder Shimada looked nervous, presumably having been told to disclose the NTT law overhaul intention representing the government and failing to show the independence of a publicly listed business company.

The NTT law article 4 mandates that the government hold no less than 33.3 percent of NTT stock for national security reasons. The current government holding is 34 percent. NTT was founded as a business corporation in 1985 from a state telecom entity and began placing its shares on the stock market in small installments over the past years. The last public share placement was in 1999.

The law certainly puts NTT under close government rules such as controversially demanding the company to provide its R&D results to competitors – KDDI, the former state-supervised international telecom, and Softbank, among them, as well as foreign entities – at reasonable values, and banning the appointment of non-Japanese nationals to its board and auditors. Plus it is required to offer ‘universal services’ to all Japanese regions, no matter whether a customer’s location is atop a steep mountain or a remote island.

NTT DoCoMo was separated as an independent mobile telecom at its inception but in recent years, it was merged fully as NTT parent company’s full subsidiary. Something similar may happen to its group companies and businesses. NTT East and/or West selling services jointly with DoCoMo and NTT Data offering business networks-related services with the terrestrial units.

NTT Data recently caused serious days-long disruptions of Japan’s vital commercial payment and settlement electronics system, Zengin-net. Money transfers such as salary payments were hampered. NTT West suffered a customer data leakage caused by the burglary of NTT West and DoCoMo customer personal data by an employee of its subcontractors – NTT Business Solutions Corp.

It’s doubtful whether the NTT group companies will/can be fully consolidated into the pre-privatization form. Likely to unfold are: Accommodating the government’s probe of telecom traffic of individuals, social and financial transactions, transmissions of political and business misinformation; deterioration of telecom technology R&D resulting from the reduction of competition among group companies and complacency and arrogance as being an unrivaled national telecom; deterioration of services and pricing owing to its dominance. Recently, NTT East sent a letter to landline users telling that it will reduce certain services and jack up prices sharply.

One more toxic effect would be that NTT workers from its CEO to lay employees probably act more like lowly bureaucrats, brushing off customer complaints and working only designated hours, such as 9-5 before 1985 when they told a customer: ‘Oh, it’s the business closing time. Please call us tomorrow!’

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TOKYO, Oct. 7, 2023—Sociologist Ezra Vogel in his 1979 book ‘Japan As No. 1’ glorified the country for leaping out of the World War II rubbles to the global forefront in government, education, and more visibly, science and technology that had helped create the Sony Walkman and Honda’s Asimo robot. 

On March 31, 2022, Honda Motor Co. held Asimo’s retirement ceremony at its Tokyo head office, ending its humanoid robot R&D that it began in 1986 for good. Toyota Motor Corp. had scrapped its toy-size pet robot project earlier. Sony unveiled its first-generation AIBO pet robot for sale in 1999 and ended in 2006, but it introduced a different version in 2017.

Those Japanese robots were touted as the world’s first commercial robots but basically for the companies’ media blitz. They were displayed at motor shows and other events but visitors were discouraged from directly engaging with them, such as touching them.

Immediately after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear power station meltdown, disaster experts recommended using Asimo for proving into nuclear power plants. Honda remained mum and the idea never flew. Tokyo Electric Power Co. eventually used French and U.S.-made robots for the job.

Sony’s Walkman cassette player, first released in 1979, was a range of the 1980s to early 1990s. It has become ‘one of’ many music players that uses flash memories and other devices, so the market was leveled for all manufacturers.

In a nutshell, U.S. and other foreign companies caught up and outdistanced what Japan boasted as the world’s first technologies in a few decades as they actively exploited computer and information technology, the area Japan lags behind.

Robots are not the only tech that Japan has relinquished its Japan As No. 1 slot:

–It was on narrow Tokyo streets where tne of the world’s first public road driving EVs were the Tama, manufactured by engineers of the now-defunct Tachikawa Aircraft Co., and in the 1970s, golf cart-size tricycle EVs for delivering bottled milk every morning. In 2001, A team of Keio University scholars manufactured the ‘Kaz’ EV that raced to the top speed of 300 km/h but the project was killed soon after. Now, Tesla, BYD and other foreign makers are stealing the EV show, while Japanese automakers struggle to catch up;

–Japan’s Supercomputer Fugaku, developed by Fujitsu and the government research lab Riken, was ranked in 2023 the fastest multiple major high-performance computer in certain segments, though it placed second and third in other categories, Fujitsu’s announcement said. According to the New York Times July 20, 2023 article, Silicon Valey startup Cerebras’s AI supercomputers seem to outrun Fugaku in AI related processing jobs;

–Until several years ago, Japan ranked net-to-neck in space development with other G7 countries, trying to catch up with the United States. Until the 2010s, Japanese government officials once told me that japan and the United States shared a common view that Japan would ‘cooperate but not compete’ with the United States in space technology. With that tacit understanding, Japan developed its H2 rocket and earlier this year experimented H3, which, to the Japanese horror, exploded soon after the liftoff, scrapping Japan’s space program back for years and forcing it to use H2 to launch a moon probe this summer – while India and China successfully sent their advanced space probes in orbit.

Japan’s post-war booming society cratered in the 1990s after the bursting of its bubble economy in 1991. It was the period when then-developing economies, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China got the first taste of industrialization by hosting Japanese transplants of electrical products, toys, textiles and later auto assembly. Even after the Tokyo stock market crash, most Japanese thought they had caught up with U.S. technology and societal models and interacted with the developing world with degrees of arrogance and complacence, typically happily transferring Japanese business models to them. The developing world caught up Japan in less than two decades.

Are there other sectors of Japanese society that have surrendered their top spots or plainly died? There probably are many. What’s left for Japan at the end of the day? 

MU.

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