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(回答先: Re: 無敵の日本は様変わり 大統領訪日でＮＹ紙報道〔朝日新聞〕 投稿者 招き猫 日時 2002 年 2 月 17 日 21:22:44)
ＮＹ紙の滋味深い記事です。
February 17, 2002
Bush to Encounter a Much Less Formidable Japan
By JAMES BROOKE
OKYO, Feb. 16 — Mitsuo Nozawa's skill at selling elevators has not changed. But his salary has.
Mr. Nozawa, a gregarious salesman fired last month by a multinational elevator manufacturer, has bounced back, using his contacts to line up a job for next month. The work will be the same, but his annual pay will be $45,000, only two-thirds of what he has earned annually in the last decade.
"That's the reality now — it is impossible to earn more salary than at your former job," said Mr. Nozawa, 55, tapping for emphasis on a recent copy of a 500-page weekly magazine that lists job openings. Recalling Japan's boom years, he added: "During the bubble years, the market was controlled by the workers. Now the market is controlled by the employers."
More than an anecdote, Mr. Nozawa's story indicates a trend. In a recent survey, 70 percent of Japanese executives polled by the Kyodo News agency said they planned to cut salaries this year. On the labor side, Rengo, the Japanese trade union federation, has said that for the first time since World War II, it will accept wage cuts in exchange for job security in spring wage negotiations.
The Japan of recession and retrenchment that President Bush will visit on Sunday is vastly different from the Japan of self-confidence and invincibility that his father visited as president in January 1992.
A decade ago, American businessmen were poring over Japanese management manuals, American factory workers were bristling at condescending remarks by Japanese leaders, and Japanese finance officials were lecturing President George Bush about his economic recession and daunting budget deficit.
This time the lectures will be from the Americans. From the supermen of a decade ago, Japanese officials are now seen as the world's slow- learning schoolboys, greeted by lectures at every turn, most recently at the World Economic Forum in New York and a meeting in Ottawa of finance ministers.
Japan's public debt is rising like a hot-air balloon, passing the level of 130 percent of gross domestic product — the highest level of any major industrialized country — and heading into unpayable territory. Japan's banks, once the financial Godzillas of the world, have been floundering in dangerously high levels of unpayable debts for years. The major banks' real assets are not worth much more than the $56 billion in public money that was plowed into them three years ago in a "one time" bailout.
As Japan struggles with its fourth recession in a decade, even the government does not forecast that growth will return before 2004. Dropping prices come partly from improved efficiencies, but also from dropping demand, as millions of Japanese learn to live with less.
In a country that loves benchmarks, a psychological coda to Japan's astounding postwar economic rise came on Feb. 1 when the Nikkei index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange closed at 9791.43, dipping below the Dow Jones industrial average for the first time in almost 45 years. The Dow had not been above Tokyo's since August 1957, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and George W. Bush an elementary school pupil.
One year ago, Americans were fearful that Japan, the world's second-largest economy, would be a global anchor, dragging the United States into a deep and lasting recession. With some economic indicators pointing to an American upturn later this year, those fears are easing.
"In the last five years, Japan's best contribution has been to not have collapsed," said Yoshihiko Miyauchi, chairman of a government deregulation panel.
Next month may bring either bank failures or bank bailouts. Bad bank debts are estimated to be double to quadruple the level of bad debts that set off the savings and loan crisis in the United States in the 1980's.
Unlike Argentina, which depended on foreign capital to balance its books, Japan is expected to work out stopgap solutions within the family. It has the world's largest reserves of foreign exchange, $401 billion. Japan's public debt is the largest in the industrial world, but 95 percent of government bonds are held by Japanese. A loss of confidence by the outside world would have limited effect here.
"It seems that the world has managed to get along without Japan quite nicely," said Marshall Gittler, the Japan currency strategist for Bank of America. "As long as there is not a financial crisis here, Japan will be just less and less important on the world stage."
"The only thing President Bush can say is to appeal to their pride," Mr. Gittler continued. "You can say, if your economy is in serious trouble and if you don't get it under control, gradually you're going to lose relevance in international politics."
Pride is something in short supply in the newly humble Tokyo. In the last week, Tokyo newspapers carried these headlines to describe news in two countries the Japanese long regarded as economically backward: "Chinese Leader Presses Japan To Speed Reforms: `Catch Up With Global Trend,' " and "Lessons From Seoul," an editorial praising the restructuring of banks in South Korea.
In contrast, headlines about Japan's economy benchmarks of recession. Last year, the trade surplus suffered the biggest drop, 38 percent, since 1970, pushing it to the lowest level in almost 20 years.
Last year's drop in industrial production, 7.9 percent, was the biggest drop since 1975, pushing unemployment in December to 5.6 percent, a postwar high. With unemployment running at five times the level of 30 years ago, Japan, which long prided itself on full employment, now shares the same level of unemployment as the United States.
"I was watching a television program where these guys from prestigious universities were saying they can't get jobs — and I thought `That's me!' " said Ayako Inaba, 23, who graduates from college here next month, with no job in sight.
Mr. Nozawa, the elevator salesman, said of his son's college friends: "Before, those students had top-level companies in mind. Now they say if you get a job you are lucky — no bonuses, no raises."
Oddly, Japan's unemployment is rising at a time when the labor force is starting to shrink. Japan faces an aging population with a dwindling number of workers. Some economists argue that, without big jumps in productivity, a country with a shrinking work force will never see a return to economic growth.
In what passes for optimism here, Mr. Myauchi, who is also the chairman of Orix Corporation, a major leasing company, predicted recently, "Many years from now, we will look back and see 2002 as the bottom."
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。