Pro Commerce

Photos

There are four photos that you may find interesting about Tokyo and Japan. The first on the right is a favorite of mine for the past several years.

The building is a library for the blind in Takadanobaba. The exterior façade is hanging stainless steel chains. Using a building as a metaphor (removing the chains from blindness) is something I would like to see more often.

The two photos on the left are about retired people doing public service.

The man in the park is cleaning up…as a volunteer.

The retirees below are handing out fliers for a local charity at the subway stop.

The final photo on the right is some anonymous Japanese person’s idea of humor. An umbrella has been put on a bronze statue of a boy, on a rainy day.

Iron Chef

The Iron Chef TV program is based on the intense Japanese interest in creativity in cooking.

I have found an example of how far this interest extends. At the coffee shop I go to in Uehara,
Tokyo the barista has gotten to know me for my daily coffee.

The photo on the right shows her work on my cappuccino. A double floral pattern.

Bias 7

This is the last blog about my seven biases.

Many, if not most, of our domestic social problems are the result of unintended consequences of government laws or policies.

I can only support a generalization of this sort with a few examples. Showing unintended consequences of government programs is difficult and when presented with a good counter example I may not have an explanation of why a particular social ill is connected to a prior unintended consequence.

Example number one....

Bias 6

This blog is about my bias #6 of seven bias blogs.

I really think that the Left is less intelligent than the non-Left. The general population has higher levels of education than the Left and higher income. It'll be awhile before we get a good test of my lower IQ of the Left thesis.

As a joke I have selected some corporations that the Left hates but are supported widely by the non-Left as customers and as investors.

I have treated the non-Left as the people who support Citibank, Halliburton, McDonald's, Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Microsoft. For comparison purposes I have kept track of this portfolio of companies since January 1st 2004. Since that time the Dow Jones has risen 8%. The portfolio of the non-Left has risen 32%.

Turns out, if you are company in business or a shareholder, you should be happy when the Left hates you or your holdings.

Update on a hero

One of my Tokyo heroes was at our regular coffee shop this evening. Chika is a 42 year old simple living musician. I wrote two earlier blogs about Chika (one and two).

Up date on Chika: he got married on New Years day this year and is now a father of son Shomei. With a wife Chika has to spend more time in his apartment but he still has his tent in Yoyogi Park and spends time there when he can.

Chika visited Manhattan in the past year as well as Okinawa for three months. We'll keep our simple living readers posted.

Japanese trends

I meet interesting people in Tokyo. I met Sven yesterday in Shibuya at the Segefredo coffee shop where we were both enjoying the passing scene. Sven has a first rate blog that reports on Japanese trends. He's in the business of trend reporting for several large multinational clients.

Much of Sven's material sounds like mine. Not so strange considering we both have a commercial view of the world and we both have had many clients interested and involved in Japanese trends.

Bias 5

This blog is about my bias #5 of seven bias blogs.

There is a large segment of the Left that has turned their political opinions into a cohesive religion. Religion is a set of agreed upon statements about how the world works, those statements are a catechism that is taken on pure faith by the believers in the religion.

None of the following are true but every Lefty Fundamentalist believes in them:
1. Equality of income has been a human ideal. It should continue to be.
2. Global commerce is exploitive of workers and the environment.
3. People would not be poor if they were given reasonable financial assistance.
4. Large corporations are generally malevolent and should be constrained.
5. Religion is the opiate of the masses.
6. There are classes in America.
7. The top class protects its interests at others expense.

If you accept this catechism you believe in a religion I call Lefty Fundamentalism.

Bias 4

This blog is about my bias #4　of seven bias blogs.

The Catholic Church, in the beginning of the Second Millennium, was in control of most of Europe and determined to keep any change from happening. The Church saw clearly that maintaining the feudal structure of land indenture and servitude were necessary for stability. The hierarchy of the times was the church on top, the royalty next, noblemen in the military, the landed gentry below and on the bottom were serfs. Outside of society were the traders who had no land and no fief attachment.

The Church, in its longtime theological and religious hatred of the Jews, the only　coherent educated group to oppose the core religious ideas of the European Church, placed the Jews, by Canon Law, outside of society...in the outcast group of traders and forbade Jews from owning land in Europe.

The main thing that has changed since the beginning of the second millennium is that the Church has lost relative power while the class of traders has moved closer to the top. The Jews got protection in Amsterdam from the Protestants who were also hated by the church and who also participated in commerce.

I argue, for all with eyes to see it, that the relationship still exists. Hatred of Jews is a metric that measures the hatred of commerce. The more one, or a group, hate Jews the more they hate commerce and vice versa. Commerce and modernity are now synonymous and the Fundamentalist Islamic world hates both commerce and modernity as well as the Jews.

It has been no surprise that recent anti-Semitism is coming from the Left in Europe. The left has been anti-commerce for a long time. Karl Marx hated commerce (he married the daughter of a Dutch banker relative of mine) and hated Jews even more.

Anti-Semitism is a metric for measuring the level of anti-commerce.

Bias 3

This blog is about my bias # 3 of seven bias blogs.

The Jews were in Diaspora for 2,000 years. Now after 50 years we know that the Diaspora has ended and the wandering Jews are home. The message has not sunk in with about a quarter of the wanderers who still call themselves Jews. The rest are now Israeli's or understand the modern role of Israel. I am a former Jew, now an Israeli-American.

The Knesset and Israel are the moral backbone of the ancient Judean traditions. Modern Israel is the current extension of the longest continuous sustained human moral enterprise.

Bias 2

This blog is about my bias # 2 of seven bias blogs.

All the evidence one needs to evaluate the global warming issue is in these two charts. First, we just finished the second twenty year warming period in the 20th Century. It ended in 1997. It could not have been caused by the changes in CO2 because CO2 was steadily rising for a century and a half.

The second chart shows global temperature cycles going back a little bit, 750,000 years. The variations in the earth's orbit around the sun is the cause of global temperature change in this period. We are now in one of the 250,000 year long cycles, otherwise we would have entered an ice age 2,000 years ago.

We are also in a period of mass hysteria about global warming. The hysterical people are expressing a modern version of religious eschatology.

Bias 1

Bias is a preset perspective on the world. I have seven biases that regularly appear on my blog. This blog covers the first of my biases and the next six blogs cover the rest.

Tenure. Tenure was an idea imported from Europe at the height of the anarcho-socialist period around 1900. The idea was to protect the few radicals who got into academia. Today, tenure is destroying every major university by giving lifetime power to self-serving professors at the cost of competent administration and effective pedagogy.

I have gotten so radicalized on this issue that I believe people who accept tenure, academic or government, should have to give up their right to vote...they are so far outside the vicissitudes of American Life that they are often dubious citizens.

Photos in Tokyo

I posted a set of photos taken in Tokyo by my partner and me. You can see them, though the story that goes with them is rather trivial and irrelevant.

I particularly like photo #15 of a cabaret in Roppongi that reminds us that Japanese are not Puritans and #17 that reminds us that even pimpin' a BMW has cultural color.

Connected

There are four economic changes at work these days in the U.S. economy. (1) There is a greater disparity between the incomes of the top 10% and the bottom 10% (see earlier blogs on the Gini index). (2) Wages for the bottom 10% have been static. (3) Job growth lagged further behind rising current GNP than in the past, (4) Productivity has been at an historic high.

Folks, these four elements are connected. The single variable that correlates to employment, productivity and income is education. I'm not saying anything about the nature of education, except that the number of years of service (or servitude) in education relates to employment and income of the people being measured. Period, end of story. Something about the current work environment in the U.S. is rewarding something about years of service in education. Simple statement, simple fact. No judgment.

It does seem that the increases in productivity are rewarding the top 1% of income earners before rewarding the rest, but this has been true for the nearly one hundred years of reliable economic data. In periods of high growth, income disparity grows. The converse is true too.

So moaners and groaners about income disparity will have to wait for a prolonged economic downturn when productivity, income, employment and education are not so connected. Then the moaners and groaners will have different reasons to complain.

Irresponsible media reporting

The news today of French Anderson’s conviction of molesting a 10 year old is handled by the media with the incompetence that supports the wildest rants of the anti-media blog world.

I have been in the stop-human genetic engineering movement from day one and French Anderson has been a leading spokesperson in favor of improving humans (he obviously wants adult woman to be genetically engineered to keep their ten year old bodies, and ten year old naïveté).

There are two simple points about Anderson’s conviction.　Anderson and his followers do not and never have understood the immoral nature of their engineer-humans’ position. Anderson clearly doesn’t understand basic morality.

Second, on the same day, the press reported Anderson’s conviction; President Bush vetoed a bill to give money to Anderson’s research field. Bush, from June of 2000, when he was briefed on this subject by Leon Kass, has understood the immorality of human genetic engineering. I love the guy for that alone.

To understand the issue you only need to look at what the Nazi’s were trying to do in creating a super race and what the majority of Americans would do to keep from having a gay child.

Art of Africa

One of the greatest art shows I’ve seen since the retrospective on Matisse in D.C. It is called Africa Remix, on display at the Mori Gallery in Mori’s Roppongi Hills. It is a gallery on the 52nd floor of a tower with a 360 degree vista of Tokyo (the vista is on the 51st floor).

The vista was new to me and spectacular. Worth every penny of the $15 admission to both floors. The Africa Remix show would have been worth many times that　by itself, had I known. I, of course, bought the catalogue.

This incredible collection will not be shown in the U.S. That is a tragedy on a world class scale. Come to Tokyo to see it or go to Stockholm in the winter.

First the negative....

Westbank-Gaza Arabs

The Westbank-Gaza Arabs have several generations of misery ahead of them, maybe more. There is no alternative, no reason for hope.

Humans living in societies where they are free to come and go are subject to the rules of Social Sorting. People are attracted to and join institutions that appeal to them. They stay in the institutions if it feels good to them. They leave when they are no longer comfortable with others in the institution. Consequently all institutions in a free society are made up of people who feel comfortable together. That goes for the whole society too.

Every generation of Westbank-Gaza Arabs...

Overcast and drizzling

Occasionally on this blog I suggest that the Lefty Fundamentalist worldview appeals mostly to angry people. (Lefty Fundamentalism is explicated here.)

My underlying assumption and observation is that feelings shape perceptions.

I did a classic test of this thesis when I was working in Marketing Research at the Bank of America in a building in San Francisco with almost no windows.

Over many months I interviewed employees in the building and asked them what the weather was like outside. The responses were overwhelmingly “overcast and drizzling” regardless of the real weather.

Shut in an office with no outside view they created a less desireable world outside.

Unhappy people create a political worldview of misery and disaster.

Quick note

Nothing has changed on the eastern Mediterranean in fifteen years. Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are still dedicated to destroying Israel.

What has changed is the American president and his Congress. Now when the American president has the guts to say that Israel is well within its rights to defend itself from death proclaiming terrorism, with military force, the rest of the powerful nations in the world are falling in line with Israel and the American president.

Quite a change. Did you notice?

North Korea

The gossip in the Japanese Foreign Office is that there has been a coup in North Korea.

If true, you heard it here first. If false, blame it on Valerie Plame.

Anger leaking

One of the startling things about Japanese society is the absence of visible anger. Whenever I mention it, Americans tell me that Japanese anger must be repressed and leaks out in other ways. Few of these Americans give due credit for their psychological certainty to Sigmund Freud.

In nearly thirty-five years of annual visits to Japan I have only seen one case of public anger.

If repression was the mechanism then let me pose a question.

Women in America are much more restrained in the expression of anger than men. Does that mean the women, as a group, are leaking their anger?

Is it time to reexamine the theory of repression?

Barbie rental

The Aussies call barbeques barbies.

I saw an interesting business in Tokyo that could be copied in the U.S.

Barbie rentals. The photo on the right is a Barbie picnic in a public park with the propane Barbie rented along with the tent, the cooler and all the related picnic equipment except for the food.

Go ahead and do it.

Wabi sabi origins

My good friend Leonard Koren introduced the Japanese esthetic term wabi sabi to the English cultures. Leonard made a great contribution to all our lives. Wabi sabi is the appreciation of the ordinary in our world...the unpolished, the rustic, the used but useful.

A friend, visiting us in Tokyo asked why sophisticated china is associated with China while the Japanese had no problem matching and surpassing the Chinese ceramic techniques.

The question gave me the answer to a different question: why the Japanese created wabi sabi. Historically, wabi sabi became institutionalized in the 1600’s in Kyoto tea ceremony. The goal in Tea, of that era, was to eliminate ostentation for Zen reasons. Wabi sabi had been a deeply embedded esthetic, but Tea institutionalized it.

Why did the Japanese create wabi sabi? Because the Japanese are the cleanest people on the planet (anyone who doubts it hasn’t seen much of the world). For the rest of the world, refined came to mean clean. Clean white delicate dishes, delicate clean fabrics; refined … meaning clean.

For the Japanese everything has always been clean in their homes, Temples, shrines and public places. Therefore it is uniquely the Japanese who can appreciate rustic, used, worn, and unpolished objects. They are automatically clean if they are in Japan.

Example: the most popular clothing item in Japan are worn out jeans and jeans with shredded sections. The Japanese know that the jeans on everyone wearing them are very clean….. they are just worn-out.

The punk kids in Seattle who started the shabby jeans trend and the skateboarders, wore them as evidence that the kids were defiant, disrespectful and dirty.

None of those words could describe the elegant Japanese who wear worn-out jeans.

Wabi sabi could only arise in the cleanest society.

Electric scooter

I saw the Yamaha electric scooter, the Pocke, in a store window.　It goes 20 mph and will get 40 hours on a charge. I can’t figure out where it would be used. It really doesn’t do much more than an electric bicycle.

But my imagination isn’t the issue. This electric scooter from Yamaha is part of the answer to my Japan Quest … the source of commercial creativity. This is intrapreneuring a term created by my good friend Gifford Pinchot to describe entrepreneurs inside corporations.

Yamaha, like most other big technically based Japanese corporations, brings almost any idea their engineers have to market. They let the market test new ideas. In most of the world, entrepreneurs have to raise money, build and market their own products. In Japan they just have to sell a new products manager.

Foot draggers

These photos tell a story.

I sat in a coffee shop and watched too many people drag their feet after their cycle or scooter was moving. Dragging one's feet is unnecessary and dangerous. The instant there is movement the cycle rider should lift the feet up.

Roughly one out of twenty people do it wrong in Tokyo which is similar to the number who drag their feet in San Francisco. The hazard is that a shin or calf will get pushed into some part of the cycle behind the foot.

The top two photos show a motorcycle and two scooter people making the same mistake.

The two lower photos show the consequences. On the left the ambulance is taking away a motorcycle rider after his shin was broken. The ambulance team placed the cycle rider's leg in a brace to move him.

On the right the police are filling out a report and deciding what to do with the motorcycle left behind.

Too much choice

There are numerous books, articles and PBS programs complaining about too much consumer choice. Too many variations on the same thing.

There is an inherent mean-spiritedness among these propagators of "too much choice". In the S.F.-San Jose Bay Area we now how many large and growing Asian markets. These exist for one reason: ordinary supermarkets have too limited a range of choices for the clientele that live in this area.

In Tokyo there are many stores that have a selection of items in every category of products that are three to four times as great as anything in the U.S. I personally love it. Much greater chance of finding what I’m looking for.
The wonderful new supermarkets in Israel have four to five times as many objects in every category and many times the number of categories of any American supermarket...because of the diversity of the population. Fifty different kinds of smoked fish.

Complainers about "too much choice" really don't like the diversity of America. They usually complain about too many cereals. First, the whole notion of branding makes it possible to only select the products you like. Second, there are a dozen cereals from around the world that I love and can't get in American supermarkets. Too little choice is the reality.

If these folks had any influence, Whole Foods and Trader Joes would never have gotten started.

Who are these mean-spirited complainers about too much choice? They are Puritans; religious Lefty fundamentalist descendants of the New England Puritans.

My late close friend Peter Sherrill defined Puritans as 'people who feel other people are having too much fun and should be stopped.'

One inch thick glasses

I am often uncomfortable in a good bookstore.

Good, to me, means plenty of first rate non-fiction. Plenty of non-fiction means plenty of discredited, wrong headed and Marxist based work. I mean writers like Edward Said, Jared Diamond, Paul Krugman, Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Erlich, Barbara Ehrenreich and Michael Pollan. This class of writers seems to be 90% of all the non-fiction writers.

I think that a liberal education means, and has meant for half a century, putting on one-inch thick glasses so the student can read a set of books that are only accessible with the 1" glasses. Nearly all the books that require 1" glasses have been discredited or are based on Marxist class warfare which was nonsense to begin with.

Will people who have ordinary vision, have their eyes open to the empirical world, are optimistic, love people, understand human diversity, appreciate merit and accept the modern world... ever going to write a large selection of books?

Obviously not..... by definition.

Lohas?

Lohas is an English word. Do you know what it means?

More than one-third of Japanese under 35 consider Lohas an American word and a popular American lifestyle. There are magazines, products and ads with Lohas all over them everywhere in Tokyo.

You don't know what Lohas is? Two marketing research guys in Colorado came up with a market segment they call Lohas and they have put out some papers and a quarterly on the subject. The Lohas market segment eats organic, recycles and claims to be environmentally and health conscious.

Big deal. Ten years ago the same market research generated the magazine Real Simple. Ten years before that the same market research generated "voluntary simplicity."

The market research that led to Real Simple led a friend of mine to propose a calendar of simple living. You can find the twelve items I wrote at the time. We were completely off base, relative to the market, which was people working hard and feeling too busy.

Simple living has a few tens of thousands of participants and probably hasn't changed in the last few hundred years.

The Lohas people are just what they are: a consumer market segment much like the people who drive Saab's wear Prada and pay $35 for a bottle of wine. The Lohas people want hybrids, wear Patagonia and prefer free range chickens.

Whole Earth

I read a 1986 compilation of ten years from the CoEvolution Quarterly. We called it CQ. It was started and run for most of the first ten years by Stewart Brand. The owner of CQ was the Point foundation. Point was started with the $1.5 million in proceeds from the Last Whole Earth Catalog (which wasn't the Last). I was president of Point Foundation for 2 of the first 4 years and CQ published many articles by me.

Reading a summary of the only hippie...

Tokyo mood

I felt a dramatic mood change in Tokyo on Friday the 7th. From a mood of general confidence and upbeat about economic prospects to dour and grim. I felt it in every part of the city, on subways and in department stores. (I had mentioned the happy mood in a blog written in June and posted last week.)

I don’t claim to know the reason for the change in mood.

I could guess that having a neighboring country with a tyrannical government, insane behavior, nuclear weapons, blatant threats and unbridled determination to ignore all international pressure… launching missiles wouldn’t make anyone happy. Add to this, the neighbor is the puppet of a large and powerful nuclear belligerent state (China) and the country vowing to protect Japan, the U.S., is filled with outspoken media cowards and anti-war partisans.

Tokyo au currant

Tokyo is booming as has been the case for the past ten years, Tokyo is pulling the rest of the country along with it. New buildings are going up everywhere, there are waiting lines at restaurants and advertising slots on trains and subways are nearly all full.

Tokyo from a satellite is a fairly flat plain, the size of Switzerland. While the Swiss number 7.3 million, the same space on the Kanto Plain is filled with 48 million people. If Tokyo alone were a nation it would be the second richest and the 23rd largest. More people than Spain, Argentina, Australia, Poland or Scandinavia. It would be larger in population than 165 members of the U.N. and the WTO and still have only one vote in each body.

The biggest changes in the past year have all been in the same direction. Nearly all colored hair has disappeared, it is now only black. The music in cafes, on the street and in department stores is upbeat. The startling/imaginative dress of the young teenagers has nearly vanished.

In one year Tokyoites have become conservative, more prosperous and happier; the young rebel girls are missing.

Japan will soon have nuclear weapons, a weapon defense system and be on their own in the global political scene. Is that the reason for the drastic change?

Politics

It is fascinating to read the comments from the readers of the Jerusalem Post to the news that, finally after 70 years, the International Red Cross will create a symbol that can be used in Israel, China and India that is not a Christian or Muslim symbol (the new one is a red diamond).

Nearly all the letters to the JPost are concerned with moral issues relating to the global Red Cross' decision.

But my reaction was to think about ....