Most significant, both symbolically and substantively, was the merger of Japan’s fabled Sony with Korea’s Samsung Electronics late in 2016. This was a huge shock for the Japanese public. Sony had for years epitomized Japanese industrial and technological leadership. While many old-guard Japanese companies had grown by establishing dominant positions in the relatively protected Japanese market and then branching out overseas, Sony had been global from the beginning. Its CEO and chairman, Akio Morita, had become fluent in English and prominent as an international statesman-CEO. While he had not always been in Japan’s inner circle, he had always been in the world’s inner circle; Sony, like Apple in its heyday, became synonymous with bold innovation, style, and quality.
By 2013, however, Sony had been looking and acting a lot like previously failing American companies such as Kodak and Motorola. It sold its headquarters building and began investing in new fields such as medical technology. It lost money in its traditional digital electronics, game, video, and mobile phone businesses, while making money on financial services and music. Traditionally regarded in the same way as a company like Apple, priding itself on the regular introduction of new hit products that created whole new industries, Sony hadn’t had a hit in eighteen years, and seemed to be moving in a less global, more parochial, and less innovative direction.
A few hundred miles across the Sea of Japan in Korea, the situation was just the opposite. Whether it was smartphones, television sets, components, or flat-panel displays, Sony simply couldn’t compete with the super-aggressive Korean giants. Rather than continuing to try to fight them, Sony decided to join them. In September of 2016, the company announced it was being taken over by Samsung and would henceforth be known as Samsung-Sony, or S&S for short.
INERTIA INTO ACTION
Since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japan opened up to the West for the first time, the Japanese political system had evolved to resemble that of France. In both countries, a powerful central bureaucracy had come to monopolize taxation, spending, and regulatory powers at the expense of the regional prefectures over which it ruled. Indeed, the centralization in Tokyo was such that, in addition to central government and political parties, virtually all major business, labor, academic, and media organizations maintained their headquarters in the city.
While Japan’s economy was collapsing, its energy supply disappearing, and its security becoming increasingly uncertain, life at the local level was also ever more difficult and unbearable. Changing the location of a stop sign in Osaka, for example, could require obtaining permission from several Tokyo-based agencies. Parents spent half the day getting their young children to and from the very limited number of government-approved child-care facilities available. Older children in elementary, middle, and high schools were not being well prepared for the modern world because centrally regulated curriculums were outdated. On top of all this, the fear of nuclear accidents in vulnerable local areas sparked a grassroots political reaction that quickly evolved into a broader movement opposing the central government.
Clearly Japan needed a fundamental revitalization program. Could it develop such a program in the face of deeply rooted inertial forces? No one really knew the answer to that question, but history suggested that it was possible. Twice in the past century and a half, Japan had reinvented itself: once in the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s, when Japan had been forced to open up by Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships; and again in the wake of World War II and the US occupation of Japan.
The crises now facing Japan were every bit as existentially threatening as those of the Meiji and post–World War II periods. Thus any renaissance program would have to be as revolutionary as the two forerunners, if not more so. It had become clear that half measures and delay were only exacerbating the problems. In light of this consciousness, after the national elections of 2016, the Diet legislated the creation of a kind of new Iwakura Mission, the Meiji-era task force that traveled abroad to find ideas for reinventing Japan. To this body, called the Extraordinary National Revitalization Commission, were appointed representatives from all elements of Japanese society—political, business, academic, regional, media, social, agricultural—and even some foreigners familiar with Japan. Their task, like that of the Iwakura Mission, was to develop a program for revitalizing the country.
CHAPTER 3
Pax Pacifica
You were impressed yesterday on your arrival at Haneda and during your ride into Tokyo by the high sea walls that have been constructed around the airport and much of the rest of Tokyo Bay. Now, in 2050, there are no longer any doubts about the reality of global warming. It has been recognized as the major national security threat for many nations, including Japan. Rising sea levels have already substantially submerged the Maldives and the Seychelles, requiring mass evacuation of their populations. Along with Tokyo and Osaka, other major coastal cities such as Mumbai, Rotterdam, and New York are literally struggling to keep their heads above water.
Today, as you walk to breakfast through the lobby of the Imperial Hotel, you are asked to pause to let the Indian Minister of Defense and his entourage pass. They are on their way to join the US Secretary of Defense and the Ministers of Defense of Japan, Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the semi-annual meeting of the PacInd (Pacific and Indian Ocean) Mutual Security Alliance that has replaced the old network of unilateral American security guarantees as the main pillar of stability in the Asia-Pacific region. As you sit down at your breakfast table, you note the Chinese and Japanese flags on a table across the room reserved for the High Commissioners of the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands Joint Government Commission, the body through which the Japanese and Chinese governments jointly administer the formerly contested island group.
This is a far cry from thirty-seven years ago when there was a serious threat of war between China and the Japan-US Alliance. Then, Japan was occupying and administering the obscure islands—really just bits of rock barely rising out of the water—known as Senkaku to the Japanese and Diaoyu to the Chinese, at the far end of the Ryukyu island chain near Taiwan. An increasingly powerful China was claiming that it had rightful sovereignty over these islets and that Japan was unlawfully occupying and preparing to colonize them. Beijing had begun sending fishing boats and naval ships into what Tokyo claimed as Japan’s territorial waters, while also declaring an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that just happened to cover the islands. Japan invoked the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty saying that the island chain fell under the US security umbrella, and Washington reluctantly assented. The swords were at least halfway out of their scabbards.
Indeed, because of its immediacy and global significance, this was one of the first issues the Extraordinary National Revitalization Commission had found itself confronting. The response of the Commission set the tone for much that was to follow. Noting that the contested islands had only become part of Japan in 1895 after China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War and had been administered by the United States from 1945 until 1972, the Commission called for settlement by arbitration through the World Court and offered Chinese energy companies the same rights to explore for and produce oil and gas as any Japanese or other international corporation.
In fact, in 2050, the Senkakus remain uninhabited and undeveloped under the shared Japanese-Chinese administration. With overlapping ADIZs that are minimally enforced by both governments, there have been no incidents for years. The islets have proven not to have significant gas and oil deposits. In any case, the whole energy issue has become insignificant for Japan as the country has become energy independent based on the development of methane hydrate, shale, clean nuclear, and renewable energy sources. Beyond that, 3-D printing, widespread use of labor-saving robots, and high carbon taxes on jet and bunker fuel have virtually ended the era of global supply chains and thus also the need for trading nations to defend them.
Beyond the acceleration of global warming and inexorably rising water levels, the main global security threats today include conflict in Europe arising from massive immigration from the disease-plagued regions of West Africa as well as from the continuing Shia-Sunni civil war in the Middle