Pro Commerce

Japan in Spring of 2018

I have been visiting Japan every year since 1971. For many decades I wrote a report to friends but have been negligent for the past few years. Most recently, I stayed in Tokyo with little travel outside.

Each year I visit with about 20 friends over a meal.  The friends are not a cross section of Tokyo. They include several corporate consultants, a number of people in the Japanese State Department including a former ambassador, political operatives, art and international relations professors, a museum director and a leader of the international organic farming movement. A member of the royal family contingent and a formerly homeless garbage truck driver.

Tokyo is booming.  There are now as many ads on the subways as there were in the boom year of 1990.  The streets and stores are full. Even in late March tourists are abundant. I hear and see Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians and Europeans. There are traffic jams where traffic used to move smoothly.  There are plenty of cranes for tall buildings but fewer than ten years ago. The current boom area is Shibuya. New buildings every block.

While prices seem stable, the data indicate a slight rise. No longer falling. Tokyo is growing as rural dwellers move into town with government encouragement.  As the national population shrinks, workers are scarce. Finding employees is almost impossible.

What is not visible is that Japan has been declining economically relative to the United States.  Japanese can no longer buy a home or a condo in the U.S. I think the relative decline has to do with energy.  The U.S. has gone from high priced imported oil to low cost domestic oil and gas.

Japan in the meantime has shut down 50 fully operating nuclear plants; reopening only 10.  It is substituting oil. The country has passed the limit on solar, wind and hydro. Production costs have hurt Japan's productivity. Nuclear was 30% of Japanese energy before 2011.  That went to zero and is rising very slowly.

The best evidence of this is that American hotel prices listed in Yen online in Japan are half the $ prices you find in the U.S.

The Abe government has tried to make Japan an important player on the world stage and has failed.  The press has come after Abe with corruption charges that sound trivial to an American's ear. In the U.S. a Sec'ty of State sells ownership of a uranium company to Russia in return for hundreds of millions in gifts. No criminal charges. In Japan the wife of the prime minister is a future honorary president of a middle school that got land at a discount. (In Israel the prime minister got a gift of a model submarine).

My friends assure me that Abe is weak and may not remain prime minister for long.  Several women seem ready to take the job.

Japan continues to build its navy and air force.  Relations with the rest of Asia have never improved and remain poor to weak.  

Japanese TV uses two interesting tools.  One is for phone-in numbers to buy a product.  These numbers are always pairs: 90-440-2266. Another is the use of really beautiful Western models on the level of Marilyn Monroe.  American TV never uses really stunning blonde women in ads, just good looking.

I've never found a satisfactory way to measure people's happiness.  The best are my own feelings that the Japanese are very content with their country and their daily lives.

Strange view of American foreign policy I found among the foreign service elites.  Obama never did anything but talk for eight years. Trump has changed the entire dynamic in Asia in one year.  North Korea is willing to negotiate nuclear weapons and rockets. China is willing to negotiate exports, imports, copyrights and everyone wants to make changes in trade and monetary policy.

On the American civil war.  The issues are now raised around the world. 

• Most women of the world want a promotion, higher pay and to rise in the hierarchy.  American women don't want men to try and pick-them-up. Sounds ridiculous.
• In most countries minorities are minorities and are looked down on.  And they stay that way. In America blacks, only one of many minorities, complain and attack all the time calling whites and police "racist".
• In most countries religion is a settled matter.  In the U.S. it is a perpetual source of anti-religious antagonism.
• In most of the world being a male gay is either unnoticed, criminal or ordinary.  Married gay men is an issue in a few places and married men adopting children is almost unheard of in the world.
• Transgenders are non-existent or in a few cases, like the Philippines, worshiped.
• Global warming Apocalypse is generally irrelevant in most of the world, or a way for governmental elites to ask for more development money.

Japan is one of the few innovating countries on the planet.  The U.S. and Israel are the other two. Japan invented the Walkman, the hybrid car and cell phone texting.  Innovation in Japan these days is coming from a rare combination of large corporate support and small company innovators being put together. Deliberately.

Latest civil war

I'm in Tokyo where my opinion is greatly respected because I predicted Trump's victory two years ago with certainty.

Now I have to explain the current American cultural civil war.  I realize that we had a similar earlier cultural civil war (not the slavery-states-rights one) that began in the late 1800's.  This last civil war is now referred to as 'Prohibition'. It was a cultural war that extended far beyond the alcohol issue. It included the Grange, the Wobblies, the Progressives, the People's Party and the women's vote.

Since I ran into people in the 1950's who were still voting 'wet' or 'dry' I noticed how long the earlier cultural civil war lasted.  You may also have noted that many states still have state run liquor stores and sales of liquor is banned on Sunday's.  Even California still has strict laws separating beer and wine from other alcoholic drinks. One hundred and forty years after this cultural civil war got underway there are hundreds of dry counties in America and thousands that ban liquor sales on Sunday. Still today.

The whole point of this reminder of the last alcohol cultural civil war is that America is prone to this type of division and the division can last over a century.  Even the end of the 1860's Civil War has not had a celebration to commemorate the 100th or 150th anniversary of the ending. It is not really over when the Confederate flag and a statue of Robert E. Lee in Virginia are still national issues. I know, I tried to organize these commemorative celebrations for the end of the Civil War.  That shooting war is still a very sore point.

What is the current cultural civil war about?  The big divisive issues are:

* environmental Armaggeddon

* late term abortion

* the Southern border and Mexicans

* gun control

* police relations with the black community

*newspapers and TV news vs. radio and Internet.  

Map showing   dry (red),   wet (blue), and   mixed (yellow) counties in the United States as of March 2012

The lesser issues are:

* recognition of transgenders and multiple sexual categories

* gay marriage and gay child rearing

* male aggressiveness

* whether Islam is a threat

* religious roles in public life

* the importance of racial identity

* anti-zionism

The environmental Armaggeddon issue is a proxy for anti-commerce. It is especially opposition to large traditional businesses.  Most environmental restrictions restrain commercial growth and innovation.

The current cultural civil war is about a variety of seemingly unrelated issues.  In some way the issues appear to have been clustered together out of convenience. This is largely true.

However the issues are coherent in terms of male vs. female, traditional vs. social change support and religious vs. secular.

How long will the current cultural civil war go on?  It could be centuries. It is also worth noting that other countries are seeing similar cultural divisions largely because of the global Internet.

A large scale military issue, like China, could suppress the current civil war.  The 'prohibition' civil war was suppressed because of WWII and the Cold War. The U.S. needed unity and couldn't afford to alienate the large German-American beer drinking population.

Fix the NRA

The National Rifle Association used to send me a dozen pieces of mail a month, including a magazine, for my trivial $35 annual membership.  I told them to stop wasting money, and they did.

Never-the-less, I  think the NRA has been a failure recently.  

Mike Bloom, George Soros and the Obama Team successfully orchestrated a march and full on campaign against guns within days of a school shooting in Parkland, Florida.  

When a comparable shooting occurred in Great Mills, Maryland, weeks later, with a pro-gun message there was no national or significant response.

That should change immediately.  The NRA needs to prepare a quick action response to any situation that will be used by the anti-gun constituency to publicize their platform.

My suggestion is that

• a dozen cartoon images be prepared for quick graphic adaptation and put these images on the NRA website, with no copyright restrictions, and send them to every medium.
• have ten respected TV voices already recorded to offer to the media for instant response and put all ten on Internet locations where they can be copied with 30 second, one minute and longer selections.
• fund pro-gun motorcycle clubs in major cities with uniforms and flags to ride publicly when pro-gun issues arise. Do the same thing with hunting vehicles, jeeps and pick-up trucks.

I know this last suggestion sounds threatening.  But that is not a bad image when the argument being made is that guns are for personal protection.

• develop a wide range of instant response PR items, including posters to be put on telephone poles, on a moments notice.

Based on the image on this page, the NRA should create a free public access website with clips and photos of all the prominent anti-gun Hollywood types using heavy duty weapons.

This a civil war over our culture and we must do battle.  We must battle quickly and appropriately.

I'm old

Old age (I'm about to turn 80) gives a few people a chance for historical insight.  I don't claim to have any accurate vision of the future because of my age. I can merely see where we are with a unique perspective.

During the Cold War, the United States with a small amount of support from a few other nations battled the military expansion of traditional autocratic societies in several nations ( Russia in East Europe, Korea and Vietnam) and watched the revolutionary reversion to autocracy in several others (China, Cuba and Venezuela).

In my life I lived through the 45 years of the Cold War. I have lived an additional decade as the Democrat Party in the U.S. tried to destroy the vitality of American commerce (with environmental Armageddon, unions, nationalized medicine and octopus like expansion of government bureaucracy.

At the same time I was fortunate to live in the center of the hippy American world, San Francisco.  With the hippies, who aggressively started new businesses, I formed the first network of hundreds of mutual helping businesses. That gave me a unique perspective on the nature of modern commerce.

Modern commercial innovation only thrives today in the United  States and Israel. It thrives because of meritocracy, a diverse population and a large population that is comfortable with open markets and loves technology.

These vital components of modern commercial innovation are thwarted around the world by traditional social structures: tribes, caste, class and hereditary elites.

In retrospect I can see that modern commerce evolved largely by accident  because of the European empires, particularly the Dutch and English, which for a few short centuries allowed the second sons of the elites to escape and thrive meritocratically in business.  The escapees built businesses and some moved to a place like America where immigration was open (as is true for Israel). As these were populations that could read and write they could also support technology and individual initiative and did.

The American West became a new opening for the meritocratic escapees from hereditary elites on the East Coast, in a nation where the English elites had been overthrown and many driven to Canada and back home to England.

I have no idea how solid or fragile this tiny world of thriving modern commerce is.

What I wonder about is whether some core nature of human beings will wipe this experiment from the face of the earth.  

I'm not being melodramatic, the great technological achievements of Greece (the Antikythera computer-like mechanism) and the Chinese age of technology Song and Yuan (1300's) were assimilated and forgotten in Greece and China.  

Today, less than a billion people live outside of tribal, class and caste societies.  Of this billion, at most a few hundred million live outside of an hereditary elite society.

Now I look at that ratio, 7 billion in the world to 0.2 billion active participants in modern commercial innovation. That is less than 5% of the people alive.   Only 5% of the people alive live in an area or nation conducive to generating modern commerce.

Why is that?  

Is it because humans are best described by E.O. Wilson as hive animals, or by the perverse observation of M.L.King Jr. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” ( A shortening  of a sermon by Theodore Parker.)  Where 'justice', as the Left understands it, is not modern commerce, it is the traditional form of human association of tribe, caste, class and hereditary elite.

While M.L.King Jr. may have personally envisioned the American idea of free and autonomous commercial individuals, the black population he championed were the offspring of African tribal people who rarely, to this date, after two centuries, have assimilated to the American norm of entrepreneurs and a commercially thriving people.

Is the "moral arc of history" going to assimilate and subdue modern commerce, returning it to the world of tribes, castes, classes, queen bee hives and alpha dog leaders?

In my old age, that is a dark worry in the back of my mind.