(Tokyo, One Fine Day)WEIGHTING FACTOR OF TRUTH
If you have just 10% more muscle strength effectively activated than others, you can be even a grand "sumo" wrestling champion in Japan.
However, to be a true hero on any street, you have to take at least 10% more compassion to the weak than others.
Otherwise, you are thought to be another gangster with a pride in the 10% more devil's luck of your own even in the sumo community, at a war zone in Afghanistan, or on Wall Street.
SECTION I: LOST DECADE DOUBLED THE RICH
Before the Lehman Shock of September 2008, or for 15 years till 2006, the number of Japanese citizens who earned each $200,000 or more per year doubled.
During a period from 1990 to 2006, the number of Japanese citizens whose annual income was $200,000 or more increased by 100%.
This is another facet of the truth of Japan's Lost Decade.
At the end of 2006, 1.48 million Japanese citizens possessed each $1.2 million or more net assets, up 5.1% during the year.
(http://allabout.co.jp/career/jijiabc/closeup/CU20070723A/)
Even in June 2009, it was reported that there are 1.5 million wealthy people in Japan, while 2.8 million in Asia.
(http://diamond.jp/series/yucasee_money/10015/?page=2)
This is another factor for Japan's difficult economic situations in addition to the well-known factor of cheap-labor/cheap-goods China.
In the past, all the poor Japanese and most of rich Japanese had worked hard along with a shared paradigm of material success. But, during 1990's, the rich and the poor came to have different paradigms: the rich came to have a sinful and selfish view on economy and society, while the poor still continued to trust the old paradigm of prosperity of society as a whole, since everybody belongs to the same Japanese race sharing the the same cultural traditions.
The rich Japanese quickly understood the change in global market as symbolized by China's economic growth and technological advancement as symbolized by the so-called high-tech financial infrastructure on Wall Street.
Since 1990, smart and rich Japanese left the poor Japanese, realizing the potential of China and Wall Street. Smart and rich Japanese decided to continue to be richer in a tie up with Chinese businesses and Wall Street companies, thus neglecting poor and honest Japanese.
This is another facet of the truth of Japan's Lost Decade.
However, it had also happened in America, when American rich men forsaken honest American workers in the manufacturing sector to boost the financial sector and the entertainment sector.
China is from the beginning a society with less love to neighbors.
The challenge Japan must address now is to stop this trend and save the poor Japanese citizens from the rich who are leveraging China and Wall Street while neglecting the poor Japanese.
In this context, the regime change must have happened (suppressing a too-pro American party); irresponsible politicians must have been taught a lesson (suppressing too-pro-Chinese politicians); and highly biased companies must have been corrected (suppressing Toyota?), which is actually going on around Japan today.
If this enterprise bears fruit, the world will follow suit.
No hard-working and law-abiding Asians and Americans have to worry about Japan.
SECTION II: Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865) became a hero as he won the Civil War.
Generals of the Union were incompetent at battles against Confederate troops.
So, Lincoln took up directly command authority along with newly appointed commander Ulysses S. Grant, though he had never learnt the art of war. Lincoln got detailed information at battle fields through newly invented technology telegraph. He also issued detailed orders and instructions back to generals at the front by wire.
It is just like an American President using every telecommunications technology to study situations at the front of Afghanistan in real time and issue every detailed order to troops in Afghanistan to pursue AlQaeda and Mr. Osama bin Laden and capture them all, which however did not happen in the last months of 2001.
Lincoln's experiences as a lawyer and a politician made him the most suitable commander in 1860's very luckily, though it is said that he sometimes made a very cool decision no professional generals would dare to make to certain situations.
Is it that Lincoln was not a respectable hero but a mania for war sending bloody instructions from a telegraph room he so frequently visited, or that the Civil War was so exceptionally cruel as turning a respectable man like Lincoln to a kind of a mania for war?
In summary, the combination of Lincoln and telegraph eventually decided the case in 1865.
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(Whole Lotta Love is better than a stereotype of thuggish way to behave...
http://www.just-oldies.com/1970/whole_lotta_love.htm )
Luk 2:1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
Luk 2:2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
Luk 2:3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
Luk 2:4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
Luk 2:5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.