There’s more to Japan’s new first couple than meet the eye. The prime minister’s wife, Miyuki Hatoyama, claims to have befriended Tom Cruise in a previous life when he was, apparently, Japanese. Meanwhile the prime minister himself has been behaving like the re-incarnation of a French intellectual.
Remember the fable of the hard-working ant and the irresponsible fun-loving grasshopper? As generations of parents tell their children, both creatures get what they deserve. The grasshopper pays a terrible price for his summer of fun, while the ant survives the winter snug and smug.
Shabu shabu is a simple but delicious Japanese dish in which transclucently thin slices of beef are dipped into a boiling broth of vegetables and tofu. A few seconds will do; just enough for the meat to turn pinky-grey.
It’s the end of a quarter of a century of Reaganomics. It’s the end of equities, of globalization, of capitalism itself. We need a new system, a new economics, a whole new set of values. The bull market in overheated rhetoric is in full swing, and as is so often the case when a bubble bursts, there is a strong reaction against the intellectual foundations of the era that spawned it, spiced with rage against the people who benefited so handsomely.
Japanese language, co-written with Bill Emmott. A look at Japan’s possible futures.
It’s déjà vu all over again. That’s what the rip-roaring bull market in Chinese stocks looks like to anyone who lived through the late 1980s Japanese bubble.
The performance of the Chinese market now comfortably exceeds that of other classic bubble markets – Japan in the late 1980s and TMT in the late 1990s. Bubble markets have much in common, including the inevitable denouement.
The Abe Administration’s key achievement was to show that Japan hasn’t changed, and neither have its problems.
Japan’s challenges in the age of unconstrained globalization.
Japanese language. Three wildly different scenarios for Japan in the year 2020 – Turning the Tables, Digital Renaissance, The Long Sayonara.