Doug, I've had a decent amount of dealing with Japanese financial institutions, but by no means am I suggesting great wisdom here. Just bopped down the Ginza a few times.
What I took away from the experience is that the famous Japanese demand/need/philosophical/cultural requirement for concensus before proceeding (which drives Americans and Chinese, to cite two) absolutely nuts, is why that country has, from our perspective, procrastinated in dealing with their economic problems. They haven't gotten a national concensus together and therefore nothing (paralysis in your very accurate IMO term) is the result. This concensus thing is a two edged sword. In the '80's, when the Japanese economy was arguably the strongest in the world, concensus meant that their government and corporations and employees were all on the same page and hitting on every cylinder and they just blew everybody away. Now however, up jumps the devil, i.e., a goof somewhere. The Americans are more "tolerant" of goofs--so when the real estate industry decided to implode (true confessions: surfer mike toils in the bricks and mortar field)and melted down a couple of hundred billion in other peoples money, we did the normal thing and sued the crap out of each other and screwed around with spin control and sent a few guys to jail but we also spent zero time admitting that there was a BIG FRIGGING PROBLEM. No different than alcoholism: step one is to fess up that there is a problem. That fess up part is where the Japanese have a real problem IMO. (Please do not flame me--I happen to greatly admire many, many elements of Japanese culture, literature, art, not to mention technological manufacturing superiority and I could go on) It's just that like we can't seem to figure out that having everyone run around with hand guns leads to many deaths by hand guns (what is hard about causality?) and the Japanese say: handguns? are you kidding? ain't no way. Our Japanese friends get analagously deranged on the goof thing: see, if we took all that time to make the decision, and got everybody to sign on, then it goes in the crapper, now we got to get everybody to sign off. This process,I will guarantee you, takes an enormous amount of time, sake', meetings, etc. Problem however IS time. Financial crisis gets worse if not dealt with RFN. And that is what our friends are not, notwithstanding incredible other talents, particularly adept at. They are in fact particularly weak here, IMO. Koreans are of course a totally different people, totally different culture, history, etc. My problem is that I cannot comment on the Koreans due to ignorance therefore cannot make sense of major portion of debate on what the hell game those guys are playing with IMF. I would like to believe that the Japanese have had seven or eight years to stew on their own issues and that even for them that's long enough and that they will now be prepared to come forward and execute on something real. When they do get their act together, they are formidable indeed. And Asia needs a "strong man" now more than at any time in recent memory, so I think that Tuesday will be very significant in the developing story. Apologies for long post, Mike Doyle |
