Labor = Capital *

Looking at Japan's perennially and perniciously weak consumer spending, the marriage rates of those not in permanent employment versus those who are, the decades-long reign of "public servant" at the top of "What I want my child to be when he/she grows up" rankings (for example, Bandai - J or Kuraray - J) the speed at the checkout stands at Ozeki supermarkets (I was wrong, Ozeki does employ part-timers -- but only high school students it seems) I am beginning to think that the fundamental divisions of economic factors of production into Land + Labor + Capital are unhelpful and possibly harmful. Indeed, in light of the rise of the glaring social downsides of the increasing fraction of non-permanent workers in the workforce, it may not be hyperbolic to say that looking to the economists of Anglo-Saxon economies for advice on reforms of the Japanese labor market is much like asking anarchists for advice on reform of the banking system.

Yes, I will elaborate.


* Offer geographically restricted. Not available in some countries and territories.

Dumbwalking - The Meme

Dumbwalking (Link) is now an international menace and joke -- though it seems the proper American term for the activity is the neutral "distracted walking." (Link)

A propos of which, this seems to be dumbwalking in Vietnamese. (Link)

We Few, We Happy Few

Today, October 1, Abenomics really hits the road.

In a few hours' time Prime Minister Abe Shinzo will announce his decision, actually made weeks ago, to green light the raising of the consumption tax from 5% to 8% in April next year. He is also expected to announce a package of fiscal measures designed to lessen the contractionary impact of the imposition of the tax rise. The spending package is projected to be two-thirds the size of the expected extra annual revenue collected by the new tax.

Yes, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is also politics at its roughest, with the nation's legislators admitting they lack the courage to reconsider their vote on raising the tax in two big jumps.

Yuka Hayashi gets it all down here.

Abe should thank the Democratic Party of Japan today for this opportunity to (pretend to*) demonstrate the courage of his convictions.

He should but he will not.

A lot of folks still remember that it was in order to bring recalcitrant DPJ legislators on board that the Noda government agreed to include language requiring the prime minister to certify the economy is strong enough to withstand a rise in the consumption tax. The view of the then opposition Liberal Democratic Party was "raise the consumption tax rise now, raise the consumption tax forever and a collapse in consumption be damned" -- a bit of showy, pseudo-manliness that the LDP cannot recall now that it is once again the party in power.

The DPJ, as we now know, paid a huge price for following what is without a doubt the stupidest political advice ever (Link). As Hamlet would have it, the DPJ went to it over what was an LDP-drafted solution to an LDP-created debt and deficit problem.

The final hurdle for the April tax rise, according to Prime Minister Abe, would be a positive reading in the Ministry of Finances Tankan Survey. This the survey delivered, sort of, this morning, with large enterprises clocking in with a strong Tankan reading of +12, exceeding expectations. (Link)

That the scores for medium and small businesses fell below expectations (0 and -9, when the predictions were for +2 and -5, respectively) is not getting much attention. Since the decision on the tax rise was never really contingent up on the Tankan results, today's poor SME numbers will not be not entering into the government decision making progress. (Link)

Aside for the institutionalized over-reliance on the attitudes of managers of big business as guides to the economic outlook for Japan, a consistent problem made worse by the Abe administration's policies fluffing up the financial results of the country's biggest companies, the Tankan and its readings may increasingly also be fraught with the errors of group think of an ever more insular and isolated managerial class.

The Tankan is subjective. It is a measure of the feelings company executives have about the prospects for their businesses under the prevailing economic climate (the set of questions asked can be found here). Since company executives are the folks who make the big decisions regarding investment and spending, and if they are confident and happy, the more likely they are to invest and spend in a big way, making everyone else happy in a big way, it makes sense to ask them how they are feeling.

What happens, though, when no one else is happy in the way corporate executives are happy?

Come with me on a short journey down a side road.

The online commentariat went gaga a few days ago over a Nihon Keizai Shimbun report on women's attitudes toward work after marriage. The cause for the ruckus was on a giggle-and-"I told you so”" result in a government-commissioned study on the attitudes of persons under 40 years of age. Unmarried women and unmarried men in the survey sample were asked whether once they married they, if they were female, wanted to become housewives, or whether they, if they were male, wanted their future spouses to become housewives.

According to the Nikkei report, 34% of young unmarried women wanted to become full-time housewives after they married -- a seemingly irrationally high number creating headwinds for those arguing Japan's economic salvation lies in creating more opportunities for women to stay in the workforce. (Link)

The Nikkei's take on the survey was unfortunate.

First, because it misrepresented the actual answers to the questions, making it seem as though young women were their own worst enemies in terms of both marriage and economic advancement. It also created the impression of an unbridgeable gulf separating the expectations of young women and young men. **

Second, the Nikkei's report deflected attention away from the rest of the survey (Link - J) which turns out to be a treasure trove of attitude data, allowing one to burrow deep -- at least as deeply as an internet-based survey allows -- into the psyche of Japan's andafo ("under 40 years of age") generations.

For example,

- Personal sense of comfort:

Workers that have the highest level of overall personal satisfaction as regards their present lives? Civil servants, followed by college students, company managers and housewives. (Graph 2, page 5)

- Personal relationships:

Persons believing most strongly that deep personal relationships are burdens? The unemployed, followed by company executives.

Persons feeling that deep personal relationship are not a burden? Student and company employees.

Notwithstanding the above, the social group with the highest percentage of person with intense feelings that deep personal relations are not a burden? Company executives. (Graph vi , 2), page 41)

- Enthusiasm about work:

Age cohort and sex with the highest percentage of individuals wanting to keep on working, moving up the corporate ladder? Women in their teens.

Age cohort and sex with the highest percentage of individuals who do not want to work at all? Men in their mid- and late-twenties. (Graph xxxii, 1), page 76)


Then there is Graph 7, on page 8.

Despite high levels of personal satisfaction with their present lives, housewives are the least likely to agree with the statement "the future of Japan is bright" -- a vanishingly small 0.2% of housewives being in full agreement with that assertion.

Conversely -- and why I feel one needs to be careful on about relying on the results of the Tankan attitude survey as gauges of national economic performance -- those agreeing most enthusiastically with the statement "the future of Japan is bright" are: company executives.

I reproduce the report's graph of the results of the "the future of Japan is bright" question, in all its default Excel colors glory, below:


(Click on the graph to open up image in a larger format)

Line two in the graph has the responses of the company executives, showing both the highest levels of full agreement (15.4%) and agreeing somewhat (23.1%) with the statement, "The future of Japan is bright."

Accepting the caveats that the company executives in this survey are younger folks than the ones surveyed by the Tankan, and that as persons with their hands on the tillers of the economy company managers are more likely to be attuned to changes in economic winds, company managers seem to be real outliers when gauging public attitudes about Japan’s prospects. They are inordinately (Graph 6 on page 7 shows the average scores) confident about the future of the country, indicating that they are over-optimistic.

[By contrast, the survey finds housewives are inordinately pessimistic and afraid, making surveys of their attitudes equally fraught.]

Such optimism may of course be trans-national, with the managerial classes in each nation having similarly optimistic assessments of the national future. Wealth, security and a sense of control would tend to make a person feel more optimistic.

Nevertheless I am concerned at the seeming huge disconnect existing in between what managers sense will happen and what the average citizens sense will happen. In the online survey company managers made up a scant 0.4% of those surveyed, making their confidence truly a privilege of the very, very few.

I of course believe in leverage when it comes to business -- that the decisions of a tiny number or even one person can make a huge difference.

However, when the number of folks feeling a strong sense of hope are so tiny, the weight of general pessimism needs addressing -- and I am failing to see the ostensibly proactive and aggressive Abe II administration doing what it takes to generate a countervailing optimism in any but the most privileged in society.


-----------------------------

* I have to wonder about Mr. Abe and his convictions. They seems less convictions than persistent notions.

* The results to the question were messy, indicating a lot of internal calculation are being undertaken with understandable confusion as to what members of the opposite sex expect from a spouse:

Unmarried women - "After you get married, do you want to be a full-time housewife?"

Yes 8.2%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say yes 26.0%
I can’t say either yes or no 27.2%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say no 25.1%
No 13.4%

Unmarried men - "Would you want your wife to be a full-time housewife?"

Yes 3.9%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say yes 15.4%
I can’t say either yes or no 50.5%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say no 20.2%
No 10.0%

The 34% of young women who responded either strongly or weakly in favor of becoming housewives were asked the reasons of their choice. Contrary to popular prejudice, laziness or fear of social pressures were relatively unimportant reasons driving a decision to become a housewife:

Because I think we can get by on just my spouse's salary 12.1%
Because women should just quit work after marriage 6.3%
Because either my parents, my in-laws or my employers would expect it 0.9%
Because for women, taking care of the house and the children are more important than work 41.5%
Because I hate work 14.0%
A wife's role is to support her husband's being a good worker 19.8%
Other 5.4%

[N.B. - Respondents in this group were asked to give two reasons for their earlier positive response. The above percentages are thus composed of a mix of #1 and #2 favorite explanations.]

Hikikomori Update - Some Light Upon the Subject

In an attempt to attach some numbers to the nebulous concept of hikikomori, the unknown numbers of persons in between the ages of 14 and 40 that consider themselves cut off from the rest of the world, incapable of leaving their rooms or their homes and in contact with only with members of their immediate family, the Cabinet Office tried conducting person-to-person interviews with 5000 citizens 15-to-39 years of age to ask them about their life habits. The interviewers were able to conduct full interviews with 3287 respondents, a 65.7% response rate.

Of the respondents, 1.79% classified themselves to be full-blown hikikomori, a percentage if compare the national population of the age cohorts in question would indicated a national population of 696,000 hikikomori. In addition to those who categorized themselves as hikikomori, some 3.99% of respondents, agreed with expressions such as "There are times I too want to lock myself away" -- making them seeming candidates for a transition to hikikomori status.

However, when one drills down into the numbers, the actual population of the classic hikikomori, of persons locked inside their rooms, being brought meals and leaving only to visit the bathroom, seems insignificantly small.

Total respondents agreeing with the following:

"I hardly ever leave my room" 0.12%
"I do not leave the house" 0.09"
"I will make occasional trips as far as local convenience store" 0.4%

Adding all these up to a more more narrow definition in line with the popular image of the hikikomori, the government finds a less staggering 236,000 hikikomori, only a tiny fraction of whom are living truly hermetic lives. It is only by adding the above to the 1.19% of the respondents who say, "I go out whenever I need something that helps me pursue my hobbies" that one reaches the 1.79% fraction.

As to why the 1.79% respondents fell into their hermetic lifestyles, 23.7% said, "I got sick" or "I just couldn't fit in at work;" 20.3% said, "My work search did not go well;" 11.9% said, "I stopped attending (elementary, junior high, high) school;" and 6.8% said, "I did not fit in at college."

In the breakdown in the sexes of those classifying themselves as hikikomori, men outnumbered women 2-to-1 (66.1% to 33.9%). As to the age cohorts, 33.9% of the self-identified hikikomori were in their teens, 38.9% in their twenties and 23.7% in their thirties.

Interestingly for those who would seek to reduce the number of hikikomori were the percentages of persons who seemed trapped by embarrassment more than anything else, in need of perhaps nothing more that a little push to get themselves going again. Over 7 out of 10 hikikomori (71.2%) felt sorry for about what they were doing to their families. 50.8 % felt afraid of what others might think of them.

I may be overly optimistic, but it sound like that with a little counseling, perhaps some medication over the short term and a supportive local environment -- together with a temporary expansion of a worker training and job search programs -- the hikikomori social phenomenon can be reduced to a tiny number of truly mentally ill individuals.

Then again, believers in the hikikomori crisis would argue for a vast undercount, saying, "Why would on Earth would hikikomori answer the questions of government survey takers?"

_________________________

Sources: Jiji Press and Kyodo reports of the findings. Actual Cabinet Office report is not yet available online.

The Japanese Tea Parties

Not another political party!

Well, not exactly a party. Unlike the old boys club"Sunrise Party" (that's the new English name of Tachiagare Nippon! - why is it that this new translation set visions of the last scenes of Paul Schrader's Mishima dancing in my head? ) the Nippon Soshinto (the "Japan Regeneration Party"?) lacks the requisite five sitting members of the Diet to win official approval as a political party. Until such time as it does (it is not likely to) it will carry out its activities as a political organization (seiji dantai), meaning it will be campaigning without public funding.

Trying to campaign without a dollop of money from the public coffers fits in rather well with the basic ideological stance of this new autonomous conservative political organization. Founded by Suginami Ward mayor Yamada Hiroshi, former Yokohama mayor Nakada Hiroshi and Yamagata Governor Saito Hiroshi (in the abscence of an official name, Ethan Chua referred to the incipient party as "the Hiroshis") the Nippon Soshinto is dedicated to fighting the Democratic Party of Japan, which, in emulation of its predecessor the Liberal Democratic Party, is blowing out Japan's national budget though baramaki ("rose strewing") public works projects and indiscriminate social welfare spending. From the past utterances of its founders, the party will have a strong nationalist aroma (check out the photo of the press conference) -- Suginami Ward, for example, is one of the very few municipalities whose public schools make use of the controversial Fusosha New History textbooks.

In its combination of attacks on fiscal stimulus spending and a strong conservative nationalist cant, the Nippon Soshinto shares elements of the Tea Party movement in the United States. Both are growing out of a climate of fear, responding to the uncertainty after the election of a more liberal party to power, a shift in government spending priorities as a result of that election and an increase in fiscal deficits as governments try to counteract the depressive effects of the Great Crash of 2008.

However, the voters being targeted by the Nippon Soshinto are not the defiantly ignorant rural astroturf rubes of the U.S. Tea Party movement. Indeed, the projected Nippon Soshinto voter is very nearly the social opposite of the Tea Partier: he/she is an urban or near-urban, upper middle class, highly educated individual. Indeed its policy mix seems directed at managerial, Nihon Keizai Shinbun reading commuter with few emotional ties to the countryside. Its macroeconomic stance is typically corporate - what can save Japan is unemotional, strictly-by-the-numbers government belt-tightening - or more colloquially, the "I got mine Jack, you have to fend for yourself" view.

Rolling into the House of Councillors election this summer, the voters now have the opportunity to choose from amongst three different flavors of non-LDP micro-party conservatism. The DPJ-led ruling coalition member People's New Party will appeal to social conservatives in the rural areas, the party offering wistful, even maudlin, depictions of a traditional Japan of several decades ago combined with trans-Keynesian levels of public borrowing and fiscal profligacy. The Sunrise Party will appeal to the somewhat paranoid nationalist voter, with party ideologues Hiranuma Takeo and Ishihara Shintaro banging on about how the DPJ is handing control of Japan to the South Koreans and the Chinese. In terms of economic policy, Yosano Kaoru will continue his Ahab-like pursuit of a solution to the burgeoning of the national debt, meaning the Sunrise Party will be running on the electorally poisonous promises of cuts in government spending and higher taxes.

[This, by the way, explains the reason why the mild and reasonable Yosano has joined forces with Hiranuma: it is not Hiranuma trying appear more reasonable by hanging out with Yosano, it is Yosano searching for voters whose fanaticism is intense enough to makes them willing to swallow the harsh medicine of higher taxes.]

Finally there is the Nippon Soshinto offering a "liquidate the farmers, liquidate labor, love the nation" plan for the nation's reconstruction in the hopes of captureing the attention of the members of middle-aged urban/suburban managerial class and their spouses (cue the devilishly handsome new party secretary-general Nakada Hiroshi).

In short, in the House of Councillors election, conservative voters have a choice between Shabby Socialist (PNP), Bad Tasting (Sunrise) and Organization Man (Nippon Soshinto) flavors of ex-LDP Japanese conservatism.

All I Ever Wanted To Do Was Wear A Gray Suit

The video of "After Dark," a song by Asian Kung-fu Generation (whose song "Blackout" was featured here in November) has been awarded the Space Shower Award for Best Rock Video.

The video explores, humorously, the struggle against and final acceptance of personal difference. It seems to find the rejection of fear of difference liberating and of tremendous social value.

Perhaps the video should be required viewing for anyone asserting the existence of a happy (or exhausted) national to conformism.

Maybe.

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Hat tip to Sparkplugged.