Home—Blog—Japan's not the country you think it is
Sep 14, 2010, 03:34
Posted byMerryn Somerset Webb
Comments (11)
Is Japan what you think it is? Not if recent events in Tokyo's Aichi ward are anything to go by. Here we are in the West, thinking of Japan as a place where the old are endlessly revered, where families live in intergenerational harmony and where an astonishingly healthy lifestyle has created a generation of people living almost biblical lifespans.
Turns out none of this is quite true. When officials popped into see Sogen Kato, a man they thought was Tokyo's oldest resident, with a view to congratulating him on his longevity, they found, after what Leo Lewis in The Times calls "a bit of doorstep argy-bargy", that he had been dead for 30 years.
"Soon a ghastly truth dawned." Not only had Kato's family pocketed an estimated £70,000 of pension benefits by keeping him mummified in an upstairs room, but they weren't the only ones. Japan has – or had – 41,000 centenarians. But a quick check by officials found that in Osaka alone more than 5,100 of them are 'missing' (read long dead) while the man thought to be the oldest man on the planet in fact died back in the 1960s.
You might think that all this is, while nasty, not that big a deal. After all, while keeping your old dad's bones knocking about upstairs for 30 years in order to pick up his allowances is a little odder than doing as the British do and hanging on to their grannies' disabled parking permits for as long as they can get away with it post funeral, the sentiment is the same. And, a bit of free riding aside, the damage is not that great (assuming all the dead died of natural causes of course).
But in some ways it is a big deal. Why? Because it reminds us just how hard up many Japanese families still are after 20 years of low growth (it can't be easy to keep skeletons at home decade after decade). And because it throws doubt on the trustworthiness of Japan's official records.
If we don't know how many 100 year-olds there are, do we have any idea how many 70-90 year olds there are? Or for that matter what Japan's total OAP population is, given that - according to the BBC - over 200,000 old people are 'missing?' If we take off all the 'probably dead' people, is one in five Japanese people really over 65? And if we don't know that, then how accurate are our ideas of Japan's GDP per head, or the real burden on the public finances represented by the country's apparently aging population?
And if the Japanese can't keep track of a few thousand more or less immobile centarians, then how can we know that any of the other numbers they produce are any good either?
The Japanese like to think of themselves as being uniquely surrounded by "precision honesty and orderliness" says Lewis. But the truth – as demonstrated by the missing old people saga – is that when it comes to bureaucracy they live in a tangle of make do-ery, cover up and semi fraud. Just like the rest of us.
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(14 September 2010, 03:56PM) Complain about this comment
As William Blake said of public records, the last thing to expect is for them to be true.
(14 September 2010, 05:10PM) Complain about this comment
You only have to type 'Japanese Television' into Youtube to see what a bizarre place Japan is.I am not sure whether the two TV shows where men dress up as, I have to say, convincing women and then go on dates with well-known Japanese male pop stars are the most bizarre... or the show where young women pretend to be pussycats and have to lick frozen lollipops from a cat 'tree'.Something changed int Japan post-1945.
(14 September 2010, 08:46PM) Complain about this comment
nuclear fallout.
(14 September 2010, 11:15PM) Complain about this comment
Yes and poor old Merryn has pumped in so much money into Japan over the years, she can't afford to lose her job given all the money she thrown down the drain.
(15 September 2010, 06:02AM) Complain about this comment
TomJefs, I'm afraid the Japanese market hasn't quite worked out as I hoped. On the plus side had you invested there over the time period we have been suggesting you should, the strong yen should have made your overall performance not much worse than anyone else's. Small comfort I know and we do still have hopes that the JApanese market will one day be less of a value trap for us.
(15 September 2010, 03:29PM) Complain about this comment
"and we do still have hopes that the Japanese market will one day be less of a value trap for us. "The thing I don't understand is this - people say Japanese market is cheap (I suppose it depends on how you look at it), but nobody has ever explained why they think it will actually change, what will cause Japanese equities to rise? I've never read anything other than 'they are cheap'.
(15 September 2010, 10:43PM) Complain about this comment
The "Japanese equities are cheap" line usually comes out every time investment houses have Japan funds to flog at ISA time. Here's the problem: Japanese companies have been sitting on cash for years instead of progressively raising dividends. There's no incentive as deflation increases the real buying power of even low pay outs, but it means Japanese households (and foreign investors) never feel richer when the ex-div date comes round. Essentially, Japan needs the kind of structural reform that the government has systemically put off for th last 20 years. Sound familiar?
(17 September 2010, 09:02AM) Complain about this comment
Merryn, thanks for having the grace to respond. Wanting to believe something is true does make it true. Just look at Blair with WMD. I remember your article about when you approached by a man at a party and you advised him to invest even more in Japan, after he had already lost a lot of money. I feel sorry for him.I assume you read Buttonwood, a cautious bear, in The Economist, and for months he and his colleagues have been warning about Japan's fragile political economy. You choose to ignore that or hope it wasn't a sound and fair judgment.I advise being less strident and dogmatic - move on from Japan. You are a disservice to your readers.
(18 September 2010, 12:43PM) Complain about this comment
With regard TomJef's comment. I think that Moneyweek probably have everything right but the timing and your certainty may yet come back to bite you. I for one am glad that Moneyweek don't base their opinions on other journalists' views or simply report on trends that are already well under way. I also appreciate their attempts to point out the contrarian viewpoints early. Inevitably sometimes they'll get it wrong. TomJefs is like someone looking out the window and criticising yesterday's weather forecasters for not getting their forecast right. Easy and lazy...requires no skill or judgement. In any case if anyone is daft enough to think that following simply Moneyweek's advice guarantees them success then they should probably not be making their own investing decisions.
(18 September 2010, 01:29PM) Complain about this comment
Money weeks articles are always interesting , If you" buy " the points they raise then well and good .You can make a case for any investment and those things that seem ludicrous and unheard of are probably "true " contrarian . As for me I have made far more money out hauling things out of skips , Than I have ever made out of Investing .
(18 September 2010, 09:51PM) Complain about this comment
@RajahSo you think MW have everything right? Now that is both blind faith. They have been wrong on Japan for YEARS and helped some of their readers crystallise their losses after the financial crises - missing the bull return completely. As for judgment I stayed fully invested in the market and am up 50%. Here's another piece of judgment: the world will not end but the gold run will. Sensationalist headlines and an inflexible outlook is reckless to me, but you're so naive to see it. Be honest with yourself and a healthy scepticism would enlighten you.
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