Japanization by William Pesek

Author:William Pesek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Yet the biggest risks are in the developing world. Once developing nations do go nuclear, it’s vital that marquee-caliber voices in the private sector speak out. Part of the problem in Japan is the near-absolute power enjoyed by Nippon Keidanren, a passionately pro-nuclear outfit. Anyone who crosses Japan’s main business lobby will find himself on the outside—persona non grata in a nation in which relationships and access are everything. That’s not to say a few mavericks haven’t braved outcast status.

Masayoshi Son is the 56-year-old chief executive officer of Softbank Corp. The billionaire first cracked the monopolies that dominated Japan’s telecommunications industry. Now he’s working to shake up the utilities market with plans to invest about $1 billion to build 10 solar farms. That means crossing Tepco and other nuclear power merchants by offering alternatives.

Hiroshi Mikitani, 49, the president of e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc., has been more daring. In mid-2011, he sent shockwaves through Japan Inc. when he quit Nippon Keidanren and started a rival association. In part, his fight is about making corporate Japan nimbler and more entrepreneurial by creating spaces for long-neglected small-to-midsize companies to thrive.

Mikitani is targeting the “Galapagos syndrome” that plagues too many Japanese industries whose products are highly evolved but unable to survive beyond the water’s edge. Rather than coddle such industries, the idea is to unleash the creative destruction emphasized by economist Joseph Schumpeter to encourage corporate Japan to adapt or die.

But Mikitani, whose birthday is, coincidentally, March 11, has made the most waves by taking on the Tokyo establishment’s contention that the economy will collapse if Japan gives up on nuclear power. This canard is also being refuted by perhaps the unlikeliest of public figures: Junichiro Koizumi, Abe’s political mentor. Koizumi sent shockwaves through Nagatacho with an October 2 speech to business executives in Nagoya, in which he declared his opposition to nuclear power.

“There is nothing more costly than nuclear power,” Koizumi said, marking an about-face from his early support of the industry. As prime minister from 2001 to 2006, Koizumi referred to Japan as “a nation built on nuclear power” and ended tax-funded subsidies for solar panel companies to preserve the supremacy of reactors. Abe was less than impressed, saying: “It’s irresponsible to promise at this point to scrap nuclear energy.”

Koizumi’s siding with the anti-nuclear movement is important for two reasons. First, he’s an extraordinarily perceptive politician with a unique ability to read the public zeitgeist and sell sweeping change to the masses. Second, and more important, he is calling for a kind of Manhattan Project in reverse. The reference here is to the U.S. project that produced the nuclear weapons that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. What Koizumi envisions is an ambitious plan to do the opposite and rid Japan of the reactors the public has come to fear. What’s more, Koizumi believes, Japanese are likely to rally around such a call for action.

“If the Liberal Democratic Party were to adopt a policy of no nukes, the public mood would rise in an instant,” Koizumi declared.

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