Pro Commerce

Shanghai-ed

Byline: Shanghai

The biggest surprise is that you get to see my blog page and I don't. I've been censored.

This photo is of the YuYuan Gardens, a former gigantic monastery that has been turned into a vast shopping warren. It has a Starbucks and I get to sit outside next to a lake and enjoy the incredible crowd. What a wonderful place, the mood is joy and everyone can feel the sheer pleasure of commerce at its finest.

The two points I want to make concern the number of women who want to marry an American sight unseen. Just to get out of this country. It reminds me that this year Japan and South Korea inked an agreement for free travel between their countries without visas. That is a sure sign that neither Japanese nor South Koreans are trying to escape their country.

( Japan did a similar deal with Iran a few years ago and got swamped immediately with five thousand Persian males landing in Tokyo with no intention of going back to Iran. The open visa deal was promptly cancelled).

The second point is that if you have a maxed-out business bring it to China. Join the American failures that have lines here like Pizza Hut, Playboy shops, KFC, LaCoste, Amway and Buick. GM sells one third more Buicks in China than in the U.S.

More later, as long as I can upload. Pardon the mistakes.

Commerce on the short end

Byline: Beijing

Three days in Beijing. Lots of walking. The many Chinese I have met have been wonderful to me.

The long walks are past the miles of endless ancient and current government buildings. All the endless buildings are intended to be awesome. Awe is one of the sources of power, the other is the total control of life and death that has been the source of tyranny for most people in the world until commerce came along to offer the first air of freedom. For the Chinese the freedom offered by commerce is recent and only exists here in a minor way.

The breath of free air, human scale and freedom for some of the business owners, who accumulate money, is found on the large and colorful commercial streets and in some of the tiny back alleys where little dens thrive. It is fun to walk on the commercial streets where people stroll, chat, visit, shop and enjoy their lives and for the first time in history have the chance to buy personal goods.

Con-silly-ence

Byline: Tokyo

I have some friends who are biological ideologs of the E.O. Wilson variety. Richard Rorty effectively refutes this position in a recent article.

He also does a great job of defining the pragmatic worldview many of us share:

"I've never quite understood what postmodernism is, but what I think that people have in mind, at least in this context, is the philosophical view that reality doesn't have a nature and that therefore truth is not an attempt to correspond to the nature of reality. This view goes back at least to Friedrich Nietzsche and William James at the beginning of the century, so postmodernism strikes me as not the right word for it -- it's a good century old. But I think it is true. So let me for a moment enlarge on the implications of that view.

" Postmodernists don't say that truth is relative or socially constructed, or at least my kind of postmodernist doesn't, the pragmatist kind. We say truth is eternal, objective, absolute, and so on, but it is not one; it is a bad inference from the claim that reality is one to the claim that truth is one. There is not a particular way that the world is, there are many ways the world is, as many as there are useful human vocabularies used to describe the world. This view suggests that no area of culture -- not physics, not theology, not biology -- is privileged in the sense of being closer to reality than any other portion of culture. From the pragmatist point of view, culture is a tool kit, and we pick up various tools as needed for various purposes. None of the tools has epistemological or ontological privilege; none of them has priority over any of the others".

Eureka --- I found it

Byline: Tokyo

For four years many thinkers have been trying to figure out the reason for the hysterical (group-think) level of hatred of President Bush. The latest interesting one comes from Victor David Hansen, who suggests it arises because Bush is a Southerner and is openly conservative.

Eureka --- I found the correct answer to the cause of Bush hatred.

First, the definition of an empirically reliable source of causality: replication. If the same factors can be found to result in the same or similar outcomes in two or more independent environments, they can be called causal.

The Jerusalem Post this morning has an article on why the lefty Israeli media hates Benyamin Netanyahu, "Bibi." The Israeli lefty media hates Bibi with same passion that the American lefty media hates President Bush.


The Israeli Bibi hating started four years earlier than the American Bush hating and has continued, unabated, regardless of Bibi's defeat in an election or his position in government.

Read the article and you will see that the language, views and intensity of hatred of Bibi is identical to the hatred of President Bush.

We get the same outcome (rabid hatred of a political figure) in two different environments, Israel and America.

This brings us to the cause. The qualities that both Bibi and Bush have in common. Bibi and Bush are generally considered good looking. Both men are very comfortable with who they are, no pretense whatsoever. Most importantly, both men represent the radical new school of Pro-Commerce. Bibi and Bush want less government, more commerce and both love the driving power of commerce to create a better world.

Put that package together and you have something the neo-socialist left can hate with a passion. If both men were ugly, pretentious and conservative they wouldn't bother anyone.

Bad news. Our friends who hate Bush are going to be just like the rightwingers who hated FDR until their own death. George W. Bush could live a long time and be an important and outspoken person for many decades to come.

Lonely differences

Byline: Tokyo

The subject of suicide came up in conversation. Suicides at all ages are more common in Japan than in the United States.

The total number of suicides and homicides per capita combined is roughly the same in both countries. As John Marlin once, half jokingly, pointed out: in New York, a suicide just has to walk out on the street and insult someone in order to be listed as a homicide.

We were talking about a suicide note, left behind, that blamed loneliness. I found this an unfortunate and careless use of the term loneliness. There are a number of forms of loneliness, and in my opinion, only a few warrant association with suicide.

There is the loneliness of extraordinary intelligence or of extraordinary creativity that takes one into worlds no one else inhabits. This is a kind of loneliness that comes with the territory so to speak. Highly intelligent and highly creative people may need to explain to each other what it feels like to inhabit such a stark landscape. Maybe we need more people talking about this.

There is existential loneliness about which much has been written. We die alone, but we all do it alone; it is part of being human. There is also an existential loneliness that arises from the fact that no one can truly know another person. That is also part of being human. Most of us accept these forms of loneliness as sources of wisdom.

There is romantic loneliness, that presumes souls and matching pairs. Therapy doesn't seem able treat this, nor does sex or marriage. People with this form of loneliness are on an endless search. It is just sad. The search is also romantic.

There are two kinds of loneliness that I personally find would warrant suicide.


The first is the loneliness of being physically alone. When I'm physically alone I am usually happy ... the longer I'm alone the happier I can be. If this were not the case ... if I had no joyful inner identity, I could readily understand suicide as an option.

The second is a similar loneliness that comes from being in a world that doesn't acknowledge your existence. This can happen to celebrities, rich people and beautiful women. When all the people around you see a YOU that has no connection to your own identity, and your genuine identity begins to fade, that is horrifying.

I call it the Marilyn Monroe loneliness and I find it genuinely tragic. There are ways out of this kind of loneliness but, this is the tragedy, people rarely give up celebrity, money and beauty deliberately.

There are many kinds of loneliness. I've only mentioned a few. It strikes me that a wider discussion of the subject of loneliness would be helpful to people who say they are lonely.

Tokyo Notes

Byline: Tokyo

I'm getting ready to go on to China for two weeks. I had photos of Tokyo points of interest to post. I couldn't load them at the cyberoffice because the navigation directions were in Japanese. I offer these Google photos in lieu.

The project to make Tokyo more functional for Japan's growing senior population is fully underway. Elevators are being installed in subway and train stations at a high cost and at a high rate. It was very noticable this year.

Apparently part of the same campaign includes a new station numbering system. This is a typical subway sign on the right (not one of the new signs). The new signs have a letter and a number on them. Picture a C14 in a circle on this sign. The C is the line, Chiyoda, the station is 14 on the Chiyoda line. Tokyo subways were always the easiest in the world, with color coded trains. So it is now even easier.

There are new bicycles with the Chevy and Chevrolet logo on them. How is this possible? I joked to myself that GM is trying to market a product that is reliable.

The problem is that I've dealt with GM and they have no interest in a cost saving or revenue stream under $100 million. The royalties on this bike can't even be $1 million. So how did this happen? How did anyone ever get GM to sell them a logo royalty deal?

There are now a number of neighborhoods with no smoking signs on the street. Not as shocking as one would think. Until twenty years ago it was uncommon for people to smoke on the street. Prevailing Japanese social courtesy, until twenty years ago, wanted to make sure no one got their clothes burned by a careless smoker with a cigarette.

An interesting innovation (not shown here) is an add-on attachment to strollers that allows a kid to stand up on small set of wheels behind the stroller and get pushed along with the stroller and a small occupant.

Lastly, there are now delivery trucks in Tokyo with hybrid engines. Simple idea since trucks can have large battery storage areas and trucks commonly go at slow speeds with plenty of standstill engine-on recharge intervals.

Unique Japanese problem

Byline: Tokyo

There is a problem Americans don't have. Or maybe we don't have a big enough sample to recognize the problem.

The big news in Japan is that being a skinny man will increase your risk of cancer death. Being a skinny woman doesn't seem to be a problem. Models should be glad to hear that. See the article for yourself.

The main type of cancer that afflicts Japanese men is stomach cancer. What most shocks Americans and leads them to deny what they hear is another statistic that shows cigarettes don't seem to cause cancer here in Japan and second hand smoke definitely isn't harmful.

Voice from San Francisco

Byline: Tokyo

Kiyama, Yoshitaka died more than half a century ago, but he spoke to me directly with the help of Fred Schodt and Peter Goodman.

Kiyama san told me what it was like to be a young Japanese immigrant living in San Francisco from 1904 to 1924. My father and grandfather were there at the same time as Kiyama san, but they never communicated what it felt like to wander the streets of San Francisco after the earthquake of '06 while the city burned, to walk the fair grounds of the Pan Pacific Exhibition, to eat and gamble in Chinatown or to live as an earnest, hard working poor immigrant in the swamp of anti-Japanese hatred generated by San Francisco labor unions, local Progressives of his day and the yellow journalists at the major dailies.

That anti-Japanese hatred still lives, in the hearts of people who deny that they have it and have no sense of where it comes from. Japan bashing still comes from the mouths of people like Democrat former congressman Dick Gephardt. (Gephardt is still a respected spokesman in his party, as is Al Sharpton -- another notorious public bigot.)

Kiyama san, speaks in slight translation with the brilliant help of translator Fred Schodt in a book of manga: The Four Immigrants Manga, 1999, Stone Bridge Press. Kiyama san speaks candidly, with humor and without rancor. The man who brings these words and images to us is Peter Goodman, publisher of Stone Bridge Press. (Click on the images to enlarge them. Kiyama san is the short man on the left in the drawing.)

Peter Goodman teaches one simple Phillips lesson with the publication of this unknown book and with many other extraordinary books in the Stone Bridge Press back list. The lesson: a good businessman, which Peter certainly is, can make a greater contribution, running his business with genius and wisdom, than all the contributions of all the charitable foundations in the Bay Area can make in a decade.

I spent several years in the 1980s trying to create an American awareness of the roots of the Japanese internment and the enduring history of Japan bashing. I would have succeeded if I had the power, humor and vivid images that Kiyama san put in his private manuscript that he self published in obscurity.

Innocence: Japan and Israel

Byline: Tokyo

What is the connection between one of the oldest continuous societies (Japan, which was first conquered in 1946 after 2,000 years) and one of the newest, Israel?

Innocent Americans are the connection.

I have brought to Japan and entertained close to one hundred friends and acquaintances over thirty years. Many of these people loved Japan and a few didn't. Innocence is the measure of my visitors' response to Japan. The more innocent the person, the more they loved Japan.

Artists and visual people all fell in love with Japan, right away. Highly educated, intellect-bound and professional people were the least likely to fall in love with Japan. Some of the unimpressed carried the seventy-five year old pre - WWII baggage -- a widespread American fear of Japan as an emerging Pacific competitor of America. Others of the unimpressed group had a latent ideological view that white Americans are at the top of the cultural ladder and Japanese are not far behind, but are still behind. These people do not really have an understanding of culture, more of an 'everybody is the same' view of societies. (The same, but on a spectrum of competence with Americans on the right end.)

I have the same experience when I talk or write about Israel. Innocents readily understand that Israel is the first truly democratic nation made up of immigrants to be successful in the world in the past 150 years. An astounding accomplishment and proof of the historic triumph of education, commerce, democracy and technology. It is also evidence of the long run viability of modernity.

There is a large group of people who read me and listen to me, but don't hear a word I say when it comes to Israel. These are the same group of people who can't see Japan. They are: "Highly educated, intellect-bound and professional people." They are always ideological. Some base their distaste for Israel on lefty support for the underdog, others on traditional peacenik views, some carry latent anti-Semitism, but most are sentimental for the old days and really oppose the triumph of modernity and commerce.

The people who don't listen when I talk about Israel these days are most offended when I report on the exuberance and joy I found in Israel now that the wall is being built and a future without Palestinians is at hand.

Dead end in Tokyo

Byline: Tokyo

I had several beers with an old friend who is the leader of the Japanese organic farm movement and active in the global organic farm organization.

I also ate at a Slow Food restaurant, A.O.C. (as in wine) a top end French bistro. Slow food (in Japan) means the chef personally knows the farms and farmers who supply all his food, most of which is organic.

This tells you about me. I have extended and ancient connections to the organic movement and the simple living movement (the predecessor to the Slow Life movement). Both of these movements have been historic dead ends. Fortunately neither of these dead end movements was harmful to life and society, as Marxism and Socialism were.

I know, some readers will claim that the organic food movement is alive and growing. Yes, sales are growing and yes, acreage is growing, but organic farmers are not the idyllic group once dreamed of -- they are ordinary farmers with bigger and bigger and bigger farms.

Worst of all, by now millions of people have been eating organic food for decades and there isn't a shred of evidence of health benefits. Big populations over long periods, even though they are self selected, must show dramatic differences if there are differences. There aren't. Organic food is a dead end movement. The same has been true for vegetarianism, really dead for several decades even though the definition of vegetarian has changed over that time.

Simple Living and Slow Living are just names given to periodic hopes. The public, since Thoreau's days 150 years ago, has been wishing for a simpler, slower life. The wish is, in 99.95% of all cases, sentimental, melancholy and romantic.

Anyone, as I can attest with my own life, can choose a simpler life and a slower life. It doesn't require a movement. Simple living requires a conscious choice and a continuous series of the same conscious choices.

There will always be a few wise members of every society that make the simple living choice and get to spend a lot of time sitting in coffee shops. The richer a society gets -- and a billion people already live in societies that are rich enough to offer this choice -- the more people who can make the choice to live simply and more slowly.

Summer Exodus

Byline: Tokyo

Slight relief in our schedule from lunch and dinner every day to just one meal a day with friends and business associates. The source of relief: O'bon. O'bon is the long summer period when Japanese officially return to their ancestral roots. Even fourth generation Tokyoites know their roots or claim to. O'bon is the occasion for giant bon fires, picnics in the local cemetery and the wildest most raucous dancing I've ever seen. (Probably derived from earlier sex orgies.*) The occasion is ostensibly to call the ancestral ghosts home for a meal of sake, fruit and incense.

The city of Tokyo is a little less busy because of O'bon. Summer is unlike New Years, when the city really does empty out and resembles an American city on Thanksgiving or Christmas morning.

*One year I pursued the theory of Japanese summer dance festivals being derived from summer orgies.

I went to the most remote Japanese islands. No names, just Island One, Island Two, etc. I was regularly told on these islands that within living memory there used to be orgies, but not anymore.

Finally I found Island Five. I was not allowed to visit Island Five because the ferry stopped for a week. Non-Japanese were not allowed on the island for the week before that special no-ferry week.

That cleared up my suspicions about summer dance festivals being derived from sex orgies.

Ethnic voters: Jews and Blacks

Byline: Tokyo

Which group responds better to subtlety in ethnic politics: Jewish or Black voters?

There is a long history in America, of ethnic voting. Big city machines were based on ethnic voting for 100 years, particularly Irish voters. The Democratic Party has a 100 year history of appealing to and rewarding ethnic Southern anti-black voters.

This election will show how two ethnic voting groups respond to a deliberate and subtle political strategy. I say political strategy, but it may simply have been personal moral actions by President Bush.

For the Jewish voter, President Bush became the best friend the Jews have had in over 2,500 years. He banned the Palestinians from the international stage, he denied them any of their claims (right of return, land for peace, funding for development, the right to enter Israel or control of their airspace). Bush denounced blatant and growing anti-Semitism in Europe. None of Bush's actions had negative political repercussions for him among traditional anti-Semitic voters.

How will American Jewish voters respond? In 2000, 20% of Jews voted for Bush. Polls show that 40% are preparing to vote for Bush. Israelis would vote 3 to 1 for Bush.

For the Black voter, Bush has done three things. He appointed blacks to his closest and most powerful administrative positions. He supported the only issue that matters to life in the Black community -- education -- fighting the national teachers union by creating national educational testing standards. He invented and implemented the most powerful political tool ever devised for direct support of blacks, the Faith Based Initiative. President Bush did all three without antagonizing the traditional anti-Black voters. A brilliant political achievement.

Since 9/11 Rev. Louis Farrakhan has disappeared from the black scene and so has Mumia Abu Jamal. Black terrorist rhetoric is subdued for the time being. The exceptions to this change are Kwasi Mfune and Julian Bond who use the NAACP as their anti-American hate platform.

How will Black voters respond? In 2000, 10% of Blacks voted for Bush. There are no recent polls on Black votes.

Which group will respond to ethnic benefits from this president? Does either group understand rewarding their benefactors?

Pork, Politics and sport

Byline: Tokyo

Having been a visitor to Japan for over thirty years and having spent years here, a month or two at a time, it is hard to know what I see that is unusual.

Some of my observations came out at dinner last night. It was a pork cutlet dinner called Tonkatsu, my favorite, which I can rarely eat because of the delicious, but excessive pork fat. Pork fat would ordinarily be constipating so the Japanese, over centuries, have learned to serve pork with cabbage. A unique pork dinner tradition is that you can have all the cabbage salad you want. I often have two or three servings of cabbage salad.

I had great pork last night, but it didn't have a name. In the most high priced beef restaurant in Tokyo, a women announces the name of the cow being eaten that evening. One night, when a friend was there, they announced that the cow, Hariko, was a virgin.

Politics: I was here and involved in the year of the bar owners in the Diet. My friend Murayama, Katsu was a minor leader in the Socialist Party and the year was 1992. The Japanese, then as now, were struggling with the issue of an Army, in that case it was about sending a peace keeping force to Cambodia. The Japanese are fervently pacificists. An election was called for 1993 and Murayama's party knew they had a chance to do well. Murayama, with me in tow, went to every bar he knew and tried to talk the owners, usually women in their 50s, into running for the Diet (Congress) from Tokyo.

Murayama signed up five women bar owners and they won easily. The election, which broke a 38 year control of the Diet by the Liberal Democrat Party, would have easily carried the Socialists to total control if the Socialists had had more candidates on the ballots. The next year I met some of these sweet innocents in a Diet ante-room where I gave a brief talk. Lovely women (raunchy at heart) who didn't look right in their conservative suits and their little green sakura lapel buttons that designate a Diet member.

This year a different friend works for Sokogakai, a buddhist/baptist-like religion that has a political party: Komeito. Komeito is the clean party. The current issue is that most Diet members failed to pay into their pension plans (they get retirement benefits anyway). Only one Komeito member failed to contribute to his pension plan --- he had to crawl, beg forgiveness and bow, all at the same time, at his party headquarters. My friend saw the sight and loved it.

Olympics: the Japanese seem to love the Olympics. It is carried on three TV channels here, all the time. The TV covers different events on different channels and seems very fair about covering the winners. A week ago the Japanese defeated the Chinese in soccer in China and the Chinese booed during the entire game. The Japanese I talked to took this as a sign of Chinese media-generated nationalism --- part of commercial competition.

Give me your symptoms

Byline: Tokyo

Coincidence or meaningful sub-radar issue? I had a three day flu last week. When I talked by phone to a close friend in San Francisco, I learned that my friend had the same symptoms on the same days. We hadn't seen each other in more than a month.

So what? Maybe nothing, but there is a simple way to find out. Any large health organization could set up a website to investigate these non-reportable sub-radar symptoms. On one website, in four or five languages, it would be feasible to have a sample of tens of thousands of people, worldwide, record online, their otherwise insignificant symptoms.

After a period, as short as a year, we would have powerful data to examine sub-radar health data that has never been available. Maybe there are slow moving contagious conditions. Maybe there are distinct geographic patterns that are not visible.

O.K.,somebody, set up the minor symptoms website.

From my days creating online currency, Cashets, I have a database program that could handle the health website easily.

Terror understanding

Byline: Tokyo

There are two excellent articles on terrorism. One is by Walter Laqueur that is comprehensive and describes more of the problems that we have to live with than policy options. The other considers a classic writer on the subject, whom I knew in San Francisco, Eric Hoffer. The subject is covered on the blog of my friend Michael Turner, whom I visit for coffee regularly, here in Tokyo.

Tenure adieu

Byline：Tokyo

Mainstream churches lost the central role they held in American life in the early 1960s to be replaced by Fundamentalists and Evangelicals by the early 1970s. The reason was that mainstream churches used their moral authority to argue against the U.S. foreign policy in Viet Nam. The moral authority of the mainstream churches was thrown away. American churchgoers did not accept the authority of churches in setting foreign policy. The mainstream churches (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Episcopal) have never recovered.

I see the same phenomenon happening today: today the loss of moral authority is in academia. Academia is overwhelmingly opposed to American foreign policyin the Middle East. While Americans have no choice about using colleges and universities, they can act against the academics and I believe they will.

I expect Americans to remove tenure from American professors at nearly all public universities within the next five years. Private universities will follow suit.

Tenure for American professors was introduced between 1915 and 1925 under pressure from the newly formed AAUP (professors union) on the basis that the profession of professor was to serve the public, not the University trustees, with honesty and integrity.

That commitment to the public has been broken and the professorial authority diminished by the current ideological extremism found extensively in academia.

Goodbye tenure.

Cyberoffice

Byline: Tokyo

My first blog from a cyberoffice. Pretty incredible place in the Shibuya district.

The computer at the house I regularly stay in, here in Tokyo, died a hard drive death. So a friend sent me to this cyberoffice on the 6th floor of a Pachinko Parlor.

There are 111 cubicles. Most cubicles are four feet by five feet. About 25 cubicles are four feet by six feet; they are for couples. “What?” you may ask.

The couples booths have a small leather bench with one computer and one video screen. Possibly they are for game playing and possibly watching DVDs in private. This cyberoffice is open 24 hours a day and has special low midnight to 6am rates. There may be other uses --- I can only speculate.

For no reason I can comprehend, there is an area with eight women only cubicles.

The floor has thousands of CDs and great headsets in every cubicle. There are many thousands of DVDs on shelves on the walls, like a library. All computer screens are large.

The price is about $3.75 for the first hour and $3.00 thereafter. That includes free soft drinks of every imaginable sort, including espresso. There is cubicle food service with reasonable prices and a wide range of delectables.

Right now the floor is more than half full at 7pm. It is totally quiet, totally quiet.

Ironic: As a writer I usually get paid. Right now I’m paying to write.

Public Bums

Byline: Tokyo

There is an interesting and possibly important element at Sacred Place 2. (See the blog below this.) This a photo of a public bum, sunning himself in the corner of Studio Alta Plaza and being ignored by everyone, including the police at the police station ten meters away. (The Japanese let public bums live in tents in parks.)

What is a public bum and is that the right word to use? A public bum is a person who has consciously opted out of the commercial system. Public bums are visible and live on the surplus of the commercial society. Obviously some people do this privately too.

A bum is one of the people who are not part of the billion other people who get up daily to work; that definition is found in several dictionaries. The dictionary meaning idle is most accurately applied to public bums, the people who publicly opt out of commerce.

We Americans, in 1982, started referring to street people as "homeless," largely borrowing the term from New York activist organizers with an agenda. Homeless is a term of condescension. It is wrong in the first place, since many public bums have homes. Most importantly the term homeless suggests that having a home is the socially correct behavior ... Puritanical non-sense.

I think it is appropriate that a public bum is sunning himself, undisturbed, in a Sacred Place of commerce. He is the living proof that commerce is awesome. A million people pass through Shinjuku to work, additional millions shop, and a tiny few don’t. That adds to the awe.

Sacred Place 2

Byline: Tokyo

The photo on the right is a square in Shinjuku called Studio Alta after the name of the building displaying the large TV screen.

What makes this Sacred Place 2?

Studio Alta Square is roughly in the center of a complex hub of trains and subways that enter and exit Shinjuku. The Square is on top of a station and a series of underground escalators, stairways and tunnels that goes down at least five stories carrying pedestrians, trains and subways. The area is too extensive to reasonably photograph and certainly too complex for the human mind to comprehend. The Square is metonomy for the entire complex.

What makes the Shinjuku transportation nexus a sacred place is that more people pass through it to travel to work and home every day -- over one million -- than any other transportation hub on the planet. Tokyo has many transportation hubs that bring 14 million people into the city daily for work, but Shinjuku is the largest.

And what is sacred about a transportation hub? This site is a reminder that commerce is the most successful motivator of human beings in the history of human beings. Commerce generates the message that gets nearly a billion people out of bed five days a week willing to work. We work year-in-year-out in the realm of commerce, for most of our lives and we do it voluntarily.

The system of commerce that generates this human output is beyond human comprehension and warrants sacred appreciation.

The photo above left is young women worshipping at the Studio Alta sacred site. They happen to be worshipping a rock band that is about to play. Most of the young women have been waiting for eight hours on a hot day.

Why people vote

Byline: Tokyo

I think there is something stirring these days among the non-voters. I have put off doing a research project on non-voters for decades because I didn’t have a staff to work with. Maybe one of my blog readers can do the work. I’ll put up the $3,000 in out-of-pocket costs.

Measuring something people don’t do (like not vote) is a non-sequitor. Hence the research design I am suggesting.

I suggest three samples of 500 randomly chosen names from three lists. Five hundred people who voted in the last election, 500 who were registered but didn’t vote in the last election and 500 who have driver’s licenses but aren’t registered. All these lists are available in California.

To each group I will send identical letters with a $1 bill enclosed and a postcard with a return postage stamp. In each of the three groups there will be five different postcards (100 people each) with only one question. The five postcard questions will be simple, such as: “The American political system is so corrupt that voting doesn’t matter” Agree, disagree. “The way the political world operates doesn’t matter much to me, things are working well enough.” Agree, disagree.

The object is not to tally the responses to the five different postcards in the three groups (voters, registered but didn’t vote and non-voters), the object is to count the number of postcards that are returned and the type of postcards returned in each group (15 tallies).

The resulting response rates would be a statistically reliable measure of feeling about the different questions on the postcards.

I hope someone will do this study. Especially so it can be repeated over time.

Ethnic Index Funds

Byline: Tokyo

In an earlier blog I proposed index funds made up specifically for ethnic groups: Overseas Chinese, Israeli’s and Indians for example.

Surprisingly, Daniel Yergin in his Commanding Heights estimates the size of the GNP of the Overseas Chinese. He estimates it at more than half the size of China’s GNP for only the 25 million Chinese who live outside of China (excluding Singapore and Taiwan). That is surely enough people to warrant an Overseas Chinese index fund. They could invest a large amount of money.

Using Yergin’s approach I would estimate that Overseas Israeli’s, less than 2 million people, generate a GNP equal to Israel’s GNP. About 20% of the Overseas Chinese. The Overseas Indians generate a GNP about half the size of India’s; similar to the Overseas Chinese.

Where are these ethnic index funds?

There are also entrepreneurial Philippino’s, Mexicans, Iranians and Turks who have overseas populations.

Japan August 2004

Byline: Tokyo

I talked with two brilliant Japanese friends for several hours each. One is an influential and eminent politician/statesman, the other a business consultant to major Japanese corporations. Which one had the clearest, most comprehensive view of Japan today?

The answer is found in my masthead.

Tokyo is growing in population. Forty three million people live here, up a few million from a few years ago. No city in the world comes even close in size or economic output.

Young people and young families are moving here from all over Japan. It’s driving up residential real estate prices especially, as they prefer the inner city, Shibuya-ku and Minato-ku. Schools are facing shortages of classrooms. Interestingly, these new Tokyoites spend more time in Tokyo and less outside the city for trips and sports.

The movement to Tokyo is part of the four step national plan to deal with a shrinking/aging population which I related a few years ago. The most visible other sign of this national program is the dramatic increase in the number of elevators in subway and train stations. See photo on right.

The new young people in Tokyo have taken a startling turn in taste. Their favorite movie stars, the top movies and the top songs are Korean. Korea decided to expand its film industry five years ago and this is the result.

Korea plays an interesting role in Japanese thinking. North Korea terrifies the Japanese. It further encourages Japanese support for a militant, strong and bold America. The Japanese self-defense forces in Iraq don’t have a single soldier who has ever killed anyone. The self defense personnel consider themselves peacekeepers and emergency aid workers. Their domestic popularity is increasing as a result. They count on American protection in Iraq.

Japan has a fairly long history of relations with China and the Korean peninsula; over two thousand years of known and written history. The Japanese, I’m serious, have never forgotten that Genghis Khan conquered the Korean Peninsula and used it as a jumping off point to attack Japan. An English word memorializes that thwarted attack: kamikaze. The kami kaze was the heaven-sent storm that kept Genghis from succeeding in his attack. (Two other words in English came from Japan with their meaning fully intact: hobo and bon fire.)

As a consequence, today the Japanese see the Chinese playing a central role in subduing North Korea. They worry that China, over the next few decades, may expand its influence over the whole Korean Peninsula.

Two corporate notes. Mitsubishi Trust is wasting too much of the national resources propping up the disastrous Mitsubishi Motors. There is a national consensus that the big trusts are not good for the society and need to be broken up.

The opposite is also a problem. Honda, the new postwar innovator, is on the verge of becoming the biggest U.S. car seller as GM sinks into the mud. Honda doesn’t want to be the number one car seller. All Japanese remember Japan bashing from America when Japan did too well. Honda stopped Formula One racing when they won five years in a row. They are looking for a way out of the top U.S. auto position.

Commanding Heights

Byline: Tokyo

On my vacation I get to read some of the long serious books that I have put off reading. I finished the second long book, this one more impressive and more important that the last one I recommended. Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw is the history of the fall and rise of market driven commerce in the 20th Century.

If you consider yourself a lefty, an American style liberal, one of the reasons is that you may have missed key turning points of the historical era that we all lived through. It would be hard for me to hold on to the tenents of leftyism after reading this book. I just couldn't. It helps me, a demonstrator for Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas, to see that I was holding on to sentimental values that have long been buried by history.

My more extensive review and critique is in my blog on this book under the section for my book Commerce.