This article is from WeChat official account:Yuanchuan Research Institute (ID: caijingyanjiu), author: Yu Peiying, Zhouzhe Hao, Li Jianhua, editor: Chen Chang, Li Mo days, Publisher: Pan far Sichuan Institute of Finance and Economics group, head Figure from: vision China
The American scholar Ezra Vogel became famous in China, mostly because of “Deng Xiaoping Times.” However, he first gained fame in the circle because of his research on Japan.
In 1979, Fu Gaoyi compiled his thoughts on Japan’s post-war economic prosperity into the book “Japan No. 1”, which not only sparked large-scale discussions in Japan, It has greatly impacted the confidence of Americans. The US NBC TV station specially engaged in a 76-minute special program with a sour title: If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? (If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?)
The Japanese economy has experienced rapid development since the Korean War. On the one hand, Japanese home appliances and automobiles are exported to Europe and the United States. The average salary of ordinary people has increased by 10%~15% every year. On the other side, the income gap between Japanese senior managers and new employees is not large, which can be described as genuine “common prosperity”. At that time, more than 90% of the Japanese considered themselves middle-class, and the saying “100 million mid-rate” came into being.
But history tells us that foreigners’ praise and praise are not acceptable, especially for East Asian countries.
After the publication of Fu Gaoyi’s book, Japan went further and further along the road to the bubble. In December 1989, the Nikkei index hit a record high and then turned around. Then the bubble collapsed, housing prices were cut in half, and the economy entered a loss of 20 years. Teacher FuI was prepared for a long time and published the book “Is Japan Still Number One” in 2000, which specifically demonstrated that my judgment back then was no problem, and the royalties were made soft.
“Japan’s Number One” and “Is Japan Number One”, Ezra Vogel
The Japanese people’s once arrogant spirit has also been exhausted in the long economic winter. After 2000, documentaries such as “Poor Busy Family” and “Old Bankruptcy” and best-selling books such as “Lower Society” became popular in Japan, all with one word: mourning. In the film “Poor Busy Family”, there is a heart-wrenching soul torment: Why am I working so hard, or so poor?
Japan’s problems are not limited to Japan. Relying on export-oriented trade to drive economic prosperity, and achieving overtaking at corners through government-led industrial upgrading are the same codes for the rise of East Asian countries and regions after the war. But with the “East Asian model” comes asset bubbles, declining birthrates and aging, debt crises, and widespread social anxiety, which seems to be an inevitable curse.
In the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Korean people suffered heavy losses under the tide of unemployment, but the chaebol continued to solidify the social class. A “Parasite” talked about the sadness of the bottom people. In 1998, a Taiwanese engineering doctor wrote the novel “First Intimate Contact” under the pen name of “Riffel Tsai”, which exploded in the mainland and also announced the birth of the “boring generation” in Taiwan.
Three years later, the WTO accession negotiations fell in Beijing, and the courier brothers, assembly line workers, and the programmers who died became the background of the “Chinese miracle.” However, after several rounds of class-solidification discussions represented by “unfavorable sons”, “consumption downgrade”, and “it is impossible to work in this life”, Chinese netizens have used Chinese characters extensively and profoundly, which perfectly interprets the unwillingness and loss of the younger generation— -Hit workers.
From the joking of “Heisei abandoned houses” to the self-deprecating of “beating up workers”, is it an inconspicuous footnote under the torrent of the times, or a destiny of the late-comer economy in the historical process?
Japanese mirror: a generation of loss of material desire
1In the summer of 964, the Japanese women’s volleyball team defeated the Soviet Union to win the gold medal in the Olympic Games held in China, breaking the pattern of European and American countries’ dominance of the world volleyball. The audience rating of the game was as high as 80%. Twenty years later, the Chinese women’s volleyball team led by Lang Ping won the Los Angeles Olympics. Japanese filmmaker Knack also specially produced the cartoon “The Witch of the East”, looking back at the highlights of the Japanese women’s volleyball team 20 years ago.
At that time, Japan gradually emerged from the postwar haze. Driven by the automobile and home appliance industries, the industrial sector began to absorb a large number of laborers. In 1960, the Japanese government put forward the “income doubling plan”, trying to double the national income within ten years, and complete the target ahead of schedule seven years later. Throughout the 1960s, the living standards of Japanese families rapidly moved closer to those of Europe and America, and the economy was booming.
For Japan, the 1964 Olympic Games is undoubtedly an excellent opportunity to take off the hat of a defeated country and reshape the image of the country. In order to welcome the Olympics, the Japanese government has proposed six rules of etiquette, even if you enter the airport, you must wear formal clothes[4]. The large-scale infrastructure construction and consumption boom spawned by the Olympics also created the “Olympic boom” (Olympic Jing気) for the Japanese economy in the 1960s.
After the 1970s, Japan’s economy was soaring. Automobiles were exported to Europe and the United States. DRAM brought Intel to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1979, when Teacher Fu Gaoyi published “Japan No. 1”, Toyota sold 2 million cars in the United States, while only 15,000 American cars were sold in Japan during the same period.
The economic prosperity is also reflected in the high spirits of the Japanese at that time. The Japanese scholar Yukio Noguchi once described in “Post-War Japanese Economic History”: “When I learned that the term’Golden Age’ meant in Europe When looking at the glory of the past, one cannot help but feel a strange feeling, because for the Japanese in the 1960s, everyone took it for granted that the golden age refers to the future era[2]”.
In the 1980s, Japan’s prosperity reached its peak. People are waving banknotes and taking taxis on the street while investing money in stocks and real estate. Assets continue to appreciate and become an important factor in determining the way of life and consumption. In order to resist the Japanese sweeping army, the Paris department store had to impose purchase restrictions on tourists holding Japanese passports. This is where the cartoonist Katsuhiko Horita’s “Auntie Mission” came out.
In January 1989, Emperor Hirohito passed away, and Japan entered the “Heisei” era. I thought that the reign title taken from the “Historical Records” “Internal Peace and External Success” was the beginning of the country’s prosperity and stability, but unexpectedly it became a watershed and witnessed Japan’s intense labor pains.
On December 29 of that year, the Nikkei index hit a record high of 38,957 points. Five days later, the “Nihon Keizai Shimbun” combined the opinions of 20 entrepreneurs and predicted that the Nikkei index would rise to 44,000 points in 1990. Results The next day, the Tokyo Stock ExchangeThe stock price went down across the board, kicking off the bubble collapse [2].
In the following two years, the Japanese stock market and land prices plummeted, most Japanese households fell into a huge negative equity crisis, and a large number of banks went bankrupt. After this battle, the loss of Japanese national wealth was as high as 1,500 trillion yen, equivalent to the total GDP of Japan in three years. The Japanese economy has entered a period of “lost twenty years” recession.
Gu Chaoming summarized this crisis as a “balance sheet recession” in the “Great Recession”: After the signing of the “Plaza Agreement”, in order to deal with the impact of the appreciation of the yen on exports, the Japanese government adopted the famous The “Maechuan Plan” used an expansionary monetary policy to shift the economic structure from export-oriented to an “internal loop”, but the central bank’s four interest rate cuts actually pushed up the stock market and housing prices.
To curb the asset bubble, the central bank raised interest rates four times in turn, and the stock and property markets collapsed. In the end, high debt causes residents and companies to save money in order to repay debts, rather than consumption or investment, which in turn triggers an economic recession.
The recession has long changed the mentality of the younger generation in Japan. In 2004, the employment rate of Japanese college students was only 56%. In the BBC documentary “Sexless in Japan”, the virgin rate among young men aged 18 to 34 in Japan was as high as 43%. , Another 64% of people are single dogs. The author of “Low Desire Society” Ohmaeken has consistently defined the young people of the Heisei era as:
“The generation of loss of material desire and desire for prosperity”.
Although there is no such genius as “beating workers”, the Japanese people have created a more mind-blowing vocabulary-“Karoshi”, which corresponds to “Karōjisatsu” etc. Soul vocabulary. From 1990 to 2007, the Japanese private organization “Karoshi Hotline Network” received more than 400 calls for help each year.
The choice for more people is to lie down completely. The 2016 Japanese drama “Escape from Shameful but Useful” became popular at the same time in China, Japan and South Korea, which perfectly explained “Struggle is not necessarily Success is a philosophy of life without struggling.
The miracle of the Han River: the president of flowing water, the chaebol of iron and iron
Compared with the fact that the Japanese are actually lying flat, the Korean people have always been known as the No.1 hell model of East Asia. In Korea, there is also a special term “Gwarosa” (과로사) to describe the internal scrolls of the country