Japanese Prime Minister vs. US President - It's nice to know that there's still someone who's worse off than you are!

Oh well.... That loser Naoto Kan survived his vote of confidence the other day. I was quite unhappy about that... But I was very happy with how he did it. He lied and tricked his fellow crooked politicians. In that way, it does make me chuckle. 

THREE STOOGES MOST VIOLENT SEQUENCE EVER!

Moe says, "Power company probably got their wires 
all tangled up. Go up there and straighten out the mess!" Indeed.

 It seems he made deals with other politicians to not vote against him in the vote of no confidence motion. He promised them, that if they'd cooperate, that he'd quit soon if he survived with their help. Then, after he survived the vote, he reneged, and went around telling a different story about leaving office much later (or that he hadn't yet decided) and now other idiot politicians are angry that he lied to them? Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!

Talk about the kettle calling the pot black! What a comedy of morons.


Reuters reports:


Ruling and opposition lawmakers slammed Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Friday, as he hinted that he would remain in power until around January although he promised a day earlier to quit once the country's recovery from the March disaster takes hold. Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who supported the premier and voted against the no-confidence motion against his Cabinet on Thursday on the condition that Kan would quit soon, denounced Kan for backpedaling on his word. 


Isn't that just hilarious? One liar, in a room full of liars, lies and the rest of the liars are angry?   Don't look now, but doesn't this sound like that place in the movie, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?

Jack Nicholson stars as leader of unspecified organized political group

Sure, it's humorous. But there's a part that is not humorous about all this. Sydney Morning Herald reports in Japan Faces Downgrade as Economic Turmoil Goes On:


Japan's hopes of bouncing back from the economic turmoil caused by the earthquake and tsunami in March have been knocked by the threat of a credit rating downgrade from Moody's, and a rise in unemployment. Moody's warned that the devastation that struck Japan nearly three months ago is making it even harder for the country to recover from the financial crisis. It put Japan's Aa2 rating - the agency's third-highest grade - on review for a possible downgrade, adding there was a "low chance" of a multi-notch downgrade.


OK. This isn't funny. I suppose people who own lots of golf and silver might find this comforting or funny.... Unfortunately, I'm one of these people who don't believe it is possible to ever have too much gold or silver.


Depressing news. Depressing news, indeed... But then, my good friend Mark, from Diamonds.co.jp (highly recommended) sent me this. 


Mark sent this about Obama (click on image for full size):

Our prime minister, Naoto Kan, is an incompetent clown. But could he possibly be worse than Bush or Obama? No way. Japan is messed up, but we have the luxury of booting out our prime ministers every year. ... Hopefully every six weeks. You guys in the USA get stuck with these clowns for 4 ~ 8 years.

It's always comforting to know that there's still someone who is worse off than you are....

What a Difference a Day (25 Years) Makes

If Japan fails to end industrial policy, its postwar developmentalism may be judged a failure.
--Yasusuke Murakami, 1996

Maria Grever - Cuando Vuelva A Tu Lado

You might recognize the melody. It is "What a Difference a Day Makes." 

This song was written by a Mexican composer named Maria Grever 

and it was originally in Spanish!

"How could this have happened?" Japan, the nation that just 25 ~ 30-years ago was predicted by many to dominate the world spent most of the 1990's and the 2000's just struggling to stay afloat. In fact, the only reason why Japan did stay afloat was massive government spending on useless public works projects and the like.

Today, Japan's debt stands at 225% of GDP. The cupboards are laid bare and with the continuing troubles all around the world with rising food and oil prices, not to mention the recent disaster in Japan do not bode well. Things are headed for a clash this year, I predict.


Mike Whitney says:


....(USA) unemployment is on the rise (Initial claims rose to 424,000 on Thursday), GDP is falling (1Q GDP revised to 1.8%), durable goods are down 3.6 percent in April, the market is topping out, business investment is flat, Europe's on the ropes, Japan is in a historic slump, China is overheating, the output gap is as wide as it was 6 quarters ago, bank balance sheets are bleeding red from falling home prices and non-performing loans, and the housing market is crashing.

Most of the rest of the article that Whitney wrote is pure Keynesian nonsense but he had the above information correct. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.


I have recommended stocking up on food and water and think you should do the same.... Especially if you live in an earthquake prone country like Japan. Because if something happens, all the stores will sell out of water and most foods within a day, if that long.


The store shelves always look full because they are constantly restocked throughout the day. What's going to happen when something bad happens and the delivery trucks stop running?

Japan, in particular is in a very precarious position today. 


In 1998, Richard Katz wrote a book entitled, Japan: The System that Soured (The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle). It was one of any books at the time that speeled out what went wrong with the Japanese economic miracle. I bought the book when it first came out and still have it. I am amazed at how much this writer had predicted that has come true. 

He wrote: 

"Without sweeping structural reforms, Japan will continue to stagnate. Japan's productivity growth is so dismal these days that, even if it operated at full capacity, economists say the fastest it could grow is around 2 percent or so. That's half the 4 percent rate it averaged from 1975 to 1990. And yet; because of Japan's myriad macroeconomic problems, Japan has commonly been unable to operate at full capacity. In four out of the six years since fiscal 1992, Japan has grown less than 1 percent, and in three of those four years less than 0.5 percent. Japan grew less over the entire five-year period from mid-1992 through mid-1997 than it did in the single year of 1990. Unless there is massive budgetary stimulus, this negligible growth is expected to continue through at least 1998 and 1999 (see Figure 1.1). By the dawn of the new millennium, Japan will have spent an entire decade growing more slowly than the United States, the nation it was supposedly "on track to overtake by the year 2000."


"Nor is this a temporary slump. According to official forecasts, without reforms, even at full capacity, the fastest growth Japan could sustain between now and 2010 is only 1.8 percent a year. After 2010, says the normally optimistic MITI, the combination of poor productivity and a declining labor force means it will get worse. Japan's growth potential will plunge to only 0.8 percent a year."

It astounds me that this writer was so aptly able to predict the future growth rate of Japan.

I remember when I first read this, I thought, "Japan will recover!" Now, I am not so sure.

As the quote at the top of this post suggests, if Japan cannot reform its postwar industrial policy, it will be deemed a failure. The only way that is ever going to happen is that the political system that strangles Japan must collapse. The Good Old Boys and vested interests must go.

The only way that the people are going to rise up and demand that is the bottom is going to have to fall out. Just as a drug addict or alcoholic must hit rock bottom before he will admit his problems and seek help, this country will have to collapse under the strain of a massive debt to GDP ratio.

Japan is headed for some very tough times and some very difficult decisions... It's rainy season now in Japan and the weather is cool.... But in about six weeks, it's going to start getting very hot. And I don't think that is just the temperature of the summer days... I think things are all falling into place for some very difficult times for everyone. Not just Japan.

Why Write a Blog?

I think I should entitle this blog, "Japanese Smokin' Babe's Big Boob's Versus the Political and Economic Environment in Japan."

Gee, I'll give you one guess which title will get this blog thousands of hits... And which blog will garner this blog only a few hundred hits for the day...

Duh!

Why write a blog? It's a good question. Writing a blog can be a thankless job. But, then again, you wouldn't write a blog if you wanted thanks because you'll get little, if any... (But thank you so much for the few people who have said, "Thanks!" You are super!)

No, you write a blog because you feel that you have a purpose or a mission. If you didn't feel that way, you'd quit after 3 months.

Why would you quit after 3 months? Because it would get very depressing very quickly when you realize that, after spending 3 or 4 hours a day agonizing over what you write - if you have the willpower to force yourself to write at all - that only 20 or 30 people bother to read what you wrote.

It's even worse if you open yourself up for criticism by having a "comments" section whereby illiterates can insult you and tell you to "f*ck off!" And, even at that, you only get one or two comments per day...

Oh, what we "writers" do for "art." (I can hear you snort, "Guffaw" right now!)

I've been writing this blog for 7 months now. It is a science and economic experiment. I am integrating Twitter and Facebook (as well as other Social Media) in promoting what I write on this blog. I have been trying different things to see what garners many hits (readers) and what goes "viral."

I also write this because I have been advising some companies on how to better market using the Internet, so, I guess if I am going to talk the talk, I'd better walk the walk.

You'd be amazed at how many people I meet who claim to be "experts" on Social Marketing, but they do not blog, they do not Facebook, nor do they use Mixi... How can they claim to be experts if they don't do this for themselves?

Social Media and Social Media Marketing are such new subjects that it's not like you can just go buy a book (there aren't that many good ones) and become an expert just by reading... Tell me, could you become an expert baseball player from reading books?

But I digress.... Back to what kind of content gets many readers? Of course, content is important, but I have also found that titles really do matter.

I've been experimenting with different blog titles; different Twitter teaser titles; different ways to entice people to come read the scribbles that I have written.

Unfortunately, it occurs to me that, if I write what I think are  thought provoking articles about our world as it relates to Japan, my readership drops at a surprising rate.

But, if I write about something that doesn't affect any one's life at all, like how a Japanese woman with big boobs makes $3 million dollars a year doing porn, or a blog about how Japanese girl's are mountain climbing in miniskirts, I will receive a massive hit count that day the article is uploaded.

Of course, said article will require at least one cheesecake photo.

Gratuitous photo... Nothing to see here... Move along...

The one thing that really bothers me the most is how easy it is to sensationalize titles of blogs and promote them on Twitter. But, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I have worked in the mass media for decades and am never surprised by how easily people's minds are influenced by the media...

If the blog is about, say, how Japan's political environment is making a mess of the world's #3 economy... Then I will get a few hundred readers for that.... But, like I said, if I write, about porn, boobs, or sex, that blog will get thousands of hits....

Just something to consider about the Internet that I have discovered.

By the way, of course, I will insert words such as, "economy," "politics," "economics" and "boobs" in the keywords for search engines.... Give you one guess which word will be searched the most on the Internet....

But, then again, putting photos up of girls is a lot easier than writing a long dissertation.

Yen to hit ¥78 to the US Dollar!? Thank you Japanese politicians

By Mike in Tokyo Rogers

AS I wrote last night, I am shocked that Naoto Kan was reelected as President of the DPJ and, hence, remains as Prime Minister of Japan. Most everyone else I know is also stunned at this news.

How could that have happened?

How could the DPJ members have voted to keep a guy that got them so badly beaten in the last general election? How could they have reasserted their backing to a guy that sits back and does nothing while the Japanese yen continues to rise and damage japan's export economy?

There are now reports that predict a yen rise to as high as ¥78 to the US dollar. As Bloomberg reports:

The yen is poised to rise as high as 78 per dollar as the victory of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a ruling party election damps the likelihood of intervention, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said.

I used to think that Japanese politics were much better than American politics as, in America, when we have an election for president, we get stuck with some fool who raises our taxes and starts wars and gets us farther into debt and we can't get rid of that guy for at least 4 years. In Japan, the merry-go-round that is Japanese politics has our prime minister changing every few months.

This is much better as, since the Japanese Prime Minister always changes, they haven't the time or chance to raise taxes and enact too many new laws.

This allows Japanese politics much more inertia. This is much better.

If we cannot abolish government, then the next best thing is government in deadlock or government that doesn't survive for long enough to pass any new laws or taxes.

It's too bad that, perhaps finally, Japanese politics are becoming more and more like America's.

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Keywords: Politics, Naoto Kan, Prime Minister, president