(On the Kanto Plain and Around Tokyo...)Local Elements of Economy
President Mr. Obama said, "The U.S.-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world."
Chairman Mr. Ben Bernanke said, "The effect of the global financial crisis has on an individual is enormous, I understand well..."
The common key word here is "accuracy of data."
Since 2500 years ago, Chinese politicians and generals took a strategy to announce a 10 times larger or smaller number for any critical matter so as to beguile an enemy into taking a wrong strategy.
So, President Mr. Barack Obama and Secretary Mrs. Clinton should always refer to American experts in a related field when dealing with Chinese politicians and generals.
But, as for FRB, I suppose Mr. Greenspan must know better than Mr. Bernanke the limit of accuracy of data sent up to FRB. If there are tricks in those financial data, the FRB chairman cannot feel assured about his comprehension of situations, no matter how hard he might work in office late in the night.
SECTION I: One Important Secret b/w Japan, Korea, and China
There is a big gap between the Japanese written language and that of Chinese and Korean.
And, Korean and Chinese are more suitable for handling in computers, one of fundamental elements of economy today.
It is not so difficult to express and handle Chinese and Korean in the computer, since they have only one alphabet system of their own, Chinese ideograms (Knaji) and Hangul, respectively.
They are a kind of two-byte (16 bits) alphabet sets while English uses only one-byte (8 bits) alphabet set.
Yet, Chinese and Korean use only one system of their alphabet set, respectively.
But, the Japanese written language has three systems: Kanji, Hirakana, and Katakana. And they are used together, being properly mingled in one sentence with English alphabet characters if needed.
What makes Japanese more difficult to do in this context is writing computer codes for creating a program to run on a computer.
Especially, as Chinese is closer to English than Japanese or Korea is, it is not so difficult for Chinese to learn how to write computer codes using a subset of English.
Though the Korean language is rather closer to Japanese than to Chinese, they can apply their written language more easily to computer codes using a subset of English, since both Korean and English have only one system of alphabets.
So, the barrier for Japanese people is higher than others when mastering a computer-programming skill and handling Japanese writing in a computer system.
It is just like a specific condition imposed that a car in Japan must have 10 gear-shifting levels instead of four or five, which would extremely difficult to learn how to drive or manufacture those cars.
As today's economy is based on computer software, Japanese are requested to consume enormous energy to conquer this cultural barrier in the computer technology and utilize application programs effectively, though no proud Japanese engineers complain about it.
So, there is a great handicap for Japan to lead the world in economy and technology today, all simply due to uniqueness of its language.
Though no economists have ever argued this matter, the loss of efficiency of economic activities in the Japanese society is huge especially observed in its competition with Wall Street and City.
So, at least, Americans and Europeans must know that their written expressions look completely different to one another between Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese.
It is just like America, Canada, and Europe use three different alphabet systems, one for each.
And, as today's economy is based on computer software, this language difference has been grave for Japan since 1960's, though no economists have ever raised it.
SECTION II: Computer Software
I suspect that Japanese economists even today do not know that computer codes are mostly written in English or a sub-set of English even if in Japan.
I once, or decades ago, actually wrote a computer program in FORTRAN which were punched into big paper cards.
One instruction line needed one card. So, "get data from address 100 (Y = X)," "put it into the accumulator A (Y = Y + Y)," and "shift it to an upper digit once (Y = 2*Y)" needed three handful cards.
I brought hundreds of these cards to an air-conditioned machine room in a factory managed by Hitachi around Tokyo, thus waiting for hours till my turn for execution of the program came.
It was the same way as I had done a few years before in a university; and I thought this method would be normal forever, which was a wrong estimation.
Indeed a few years later, I was programming machine codes into a video console in IBM-related facilities.
It was before an age of PCs, but there are still two things in common even today:
1) Computer codes are mostly written in English or a subset of English as a programming language.
2) A CPU, a core of a computers, is driven by machine-language codes, a translated result of programming codes, so as to activate its electronic circuits inside the chip.
Nowadays, Japanese-language-based programming methods have been developed and available. But, due to globalization, if a Japanese programmer writes his source codes using Japanese programming codes, they cannot be read and understood by his partners in America, China, or India.
Nonetheless, it was a big surprise, looking back from today, that so many Japanese computer programmers who could not speak English at all (though most of them graduated from a high school or a university) were writing codes in FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, LISP, C, and other English-based computer languages, including the machine language, in Japan since 1960's .
They were a great part of the driving force of the Japanese industry before the era of PCs and the Internet.
1990's were an era of a challenge for Japanese software developers, since PCs and the Internet allowed even ordinary Americans to write computer codes at home using plain English. American amateur investors into a Wall Street company could easily make a computer program to track his funds in the market while Japanese banks needed specialists to write quasi-English computer codes. An efficiency gap became desperately widened for Japan especially in the financial sector.
This is a true fact in the modern history no economists have ever argued.
(The lesson is that development of Japanese economy is highly linked with advantages and disadvantages of the Japanese language, which however does not necessarily mean that it is better to teach Japanese children English in elementary schools or kindergartens.)
SECTION III: U.S. IT Companies Have $100 Billion in Cash
The amount of money held by Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems, Google, IBM, HP, Yahoo, and other major IT enterprises in the form of cash or its qeuivalent is said to be in total more than $100 billions.
On the other hand, the aggregate market value of Goldman Sachs, the current champion on Wall Street, is just $57 billions.
That is why economists who do not know mentality of the IT industry cannot comprehend a true underlying trend in the financial sector, not only because Wall Street depends on computer software.
What is going to dominate over Wall Street will be a mind set that has grown up in the American IT industry, leading to different behaviors of players in the market of future.
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(To be continued...)
(Oh, en fait, l'âge est passé avant même que le principal événement de l'année 2009, ma princesse!
http://www.btinternet.com/~edward.caution/littledarling.htm )
Luk 7:28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.
Luk 7:29 And all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John.