As the search engine giant, Google has a dominant market presence in Internet advertising by a significant margin. But Google doesn’t have a monopoly in every market. In Asia, in particular, local competitors have a great deal of importance within their own markets: Baidu in China; Naver in South Korea; and Yahoo with a stronghold over Japan. Please take a look at the figure on the lower right, which shows the search engine usage statistics for Japan. According to the statistical survey, Yahoo Japan (in red) has opened up a slight lead over Google (in blue) in terms of market share in Japan. It is true that Yahoo played a significant role in the early days of Internet services when they were first introduced to Japan in around 2000, and the company still maintains a strong brand image among search engine users in the ... ... [Read more]

Yamamoto Kozo, a member of the House of Representatives, of the Liberal Democratic Party, has been involved with the drafting of Abenomics initiatives, advocating, if nothing else, large-scale monetary easing since before the second Abe Shinzo administration was formed. Yamamoto, who is also the chairman of the “group that makes Abenomics a success,” a Diet member caucus, was reportedly surprised and could not keep himself from displaying anger when he heard the announcement of the second stage of Abenomics on September 24. The content of the second stage caught him by surprise like a thunderbolt, as he did not recognize any term such as “financial measures” in the list of policies. The Nagatacho sources consider that a significant change has taken place in the part of the brain of the Abe administration that drives financial measures. People who had advocated reflation were excluded from ... ... [Read more]

... [Read more]

The Dichotomy of Global and Local Economies As the premise for understanding my unique prescription for what should be done to revive the regions, I would like to point out that the Japanese economy is divided into a global (G) sphere and a local (L) sphere. The players in the global economic sphere are the big corporations centered on the manufacturing industry and the IT industry. They compete with the rest of the world; to use a sporting metaphor, they compete at the Olympic level. On the other hand, the actors in the local economic sphere are community-based small and medium-sized companies in retail and wholesale, transportation, distribution, social welfare, day care, nursing and medical care. The focus is on customer-facing services, but since the locality imposes limitations on location, the sporting metaphor would be a prefectural tournament. In the global sphere, perfect competition ... ... [Read more]

Dubbed a “rock star” economist as he emerged from France, Paris School of Economics Professor Thomas Piketty has also caused a major sensation in Japan. The Japanese translation of his stand-out publication, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, sold more than 100,000 copies within the first few weeks of its release. In the publishing industry, which is suffering from a structural publishing slump, publishers of the Japanese editions of foreign books have become an object of envy. The theme of the book is inequality, and in Japan, where widening inequality has long been a source of lively debate, “inequality” has become a point of contention which has even found its way into economic policy debates in the National Diet. Capital that doesn’t earn money and the decline of entrepreneurship However, isn’t the reality in Japan something unique and quite different from Professor Piketty’s argument? If ... ... [Read more]

< Key Points > The international finance system has reached a key turning point The lack of a Board of Directors in AIIB, as well as China possibly using AIIB for political purposes, are still major concerns Given these concerns, it was the right decision for Japan not to join as a charter member in order to negotiate the MOU It was a surprise that the UK decided to join in the AIIB, followed by Germany, France and Italy Japan should maintain the option of joining the AIIB depending on the AIIB’s reform proposals At the time of the IMF and World Bank Spring meeting in Washington in April, there was much media attention over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) proposed by China. Both the IMF and the World Bank have publicly welcomed the AIIB as a sign of increase in funding for ... ... [Read more]

The journey toward realizing superconducting magnetic levitation (maglev) that achieves speeds of up to 500 kilometers an hour has come one step closer to its end, with the emergence of a train known as the linear motor car. JR Central, which is responsible for the operation of the Tokaido Shinkansen line, started work on the construction of the Chuo Shinkansen line for use by the superconducting maglev at the end of last year. The occasion was marked with a ceremony held on December 17, 2014 to pray for safe construction of the line, which will run between JR Central’s Shinagawa Station in Minato Ward, Tokyo and Nagoya Station in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture. If all goes well, service is scheduled to begin in 2027, when linear motor cars will connect the 285.6-kilometer distance between Shinagawa and Nagoya in as little as 40 minutes. “Superconducting maglev” ... ... [Read more]

The Safety of the Shinkansen October 1, 2014 marked the passage of fifty years since the opening of the Tokaido Shinkansen (bullet train line), which was Japan’s first Shinkansen, and also the world’s first high-speed railway. Japan’s Shinkansen network—which began with the 552.6 km stretch between the stations of Tokyo and Shin-Osaka—has continued to grow and expand and, including the new Hokuriku Shinkansen (between Nagano and Kanazawa) that entered service on March 14, 2015, has now reached a total length of 2,848.3 km. (See the table: Shinkansen) The Shinkansen mentioned above are the ones capable of running at speeds of over 200 km/h. Apart from these, there are also the 275.9 km of the Yamagata and Akita Shinkansen, which are both of the type that run onto conventional train lines; the Hakata-Minami Line; and the 1.8 km stretch of the Joetsu Line between Echigo-Yuzawa ... ... [Read more]

Few prime ministers who have been elected from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have won general elections two times in a row. When speaking of prime ministers who demonstrated shrewdness in elections, some people may make mention of Koizumi Junichiro. However, although Koizumi won a landslide victory in the 2005 election following a dissolution of the Diet staged under the name of postal-services reform, his re-election at the previous poll in 2003 was much less convincing for the LDP, the result not something to boast about. Likewise in 1986, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro brought victory to the LDP — winning more than 300 seats for the only time ever in the era of the multi-seat constituency electoral system. Nakasone however experienced great difficulties in the previous, 1983 election as a result of the Lockheed scandal judgment of Tanaka Kakuei, earlier the same year. Put another ... ... [Read more]

・The move to escape from the deflationary spiral also contributed to the improvement of the primary balance.
・The reduction of the deficit by half in fiscal 2015 is challenging, but the focus is on the next step.
・The rapid rise in social security expenses is more serious than the postponement of the tax hike.
With the postponement of the consumption tax hike and the dissolution of the House of Representatives, economic policy entered a new phase. Discussions have commenced on the evaluation of Abenomics in the past two years and the new outlook following the election. I wish to tidy up the points under]]> ... [Read more]