Ryusei no Kizuna 流星の絆 Meteor’s bond
I’m liking this short drama a lot. It’s about 60% comedy, 20% drama, 20% mystery, which makes for wonderful pacing, and doesn’t get as heavy as some j-dramas can be. It stars Ms. Death Note, Toda Erika, who is omg just so beautiful. But she’s not why I watch this, I couldn’t keep up with her previous one ‘Code Blue‘ even though it had the pocky idol Aragaki Yui in it as well. Yes, it’s that bad. Anyway. It also has *bleah* boyband star Ninomiya Kazunari, so Arashi playing the OP is par for the course as per all Johnny-associated dramas, and *double bleah* Nishikido Ryo. But they don’t matter. It’s about three siblings that team up to take revenge for their parents’ murder, while also swindling bad people. I guess you could think of it as a winning combination of Kurosagi and Nobuta wo Produce.

Maou 魔王 Devil
Despite being another ‘ikemen paradise’ type drama, I actually liked this one a lot. Stars Ikuta Toma, who performed amazingly in HachiKuro and HanaKimi, and yet another Johnny’s boybander *bleah* Ohno Satoshi. His Arashi compatriot Ninomiya Kazunari had one teeny cameo in the first episode, then disappeared. Though I must admit Arashi did a good job with the OP.

So the drama is supposedly a remake of a k-drama which I never heard of, but it was surprisingly engaging. It is basically a count of monte cristo story (my favorite novel), where the protagonist (?) exacts his revenge on everyone who wronged him in very complicated ways, which is really suspenseful to see play out. I don’t think a Johnny’s boyband kid can really be an Edmond Dantes, but he did well enough. The drama is 50% psychological thriller and 50% Shakespearean tragedy, so it isn’t the most lighthearted thing to watch – it does not have gags interspersed here and there like Kurosagi and Liar Game did, so it has more in common with Byakuyako.

Seigi no Mikata 正義の味方 Ally of Justice
I really liked this one too. It’s about a high schooler and her evil older sister, who forces her to do all kinds of odd things like spy on potential boyfriends. The plot is about how the high schooler tries to get rid of her evil older sister by marrying her off, so she has to fool her sister’s dream guy into thinking she’s wonderful. It’s 100% comedy gold.

Change
Political drama about an unlikely second-generation, popular young politician who somehow becomes prime minister and makes reforms that challenge his party bosses. Basically, its a dramatization of Koizumi’s rise to power. Taking Curtis’s Japanese Politics class this semester made me appreciate this drama a lot more than if I had seen it without learning more about the political institutions and practices it satirizes (like the LDP faction system, bubble-era corruption, hereditary politics…). 75% comedy, 25% West Wing drama, its kind of like Mr Smith Goes to Washington set in Nagatacho.

This drama was amazingly popular this summer, far more than any other drama named above, which suggests that something in it resonates with the Japanese public. I keep wanting to write about this in one of my class papers, but the opportunity just never comes up.

—

So it appears there is something of a k-drama dry spell. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen anything good since Coffee Prince, and even that got old fast. For whatever reason, Korean television dramas aren’t keeping up, which is sad since I am running out of good ones to watch. This isn’t just my opinion. Daily NK reports:

In North Korea, the fervor of the South Korean Waves is on the wane; Korean dramas, which have spearheaded the spread of South Korean culture and progress since 2000, are no longer generating huge interest among North Korean citizens. The prevailing response of the citizens has been “I have seen enough” and “I have had my fill.”

H/T Curtis from NKeconwatch.

Soft power is a strategic priority, so I hope the k-drama dry spell ends soon.

Interesting social science research question: If I am right that J-dramas are more popular, and more successful as cultural exports, Why are tv dramas from Japan better than Korea, Taiwan or Hong Kong? (Singapore isn’t even in the picture… sad) Something to do with market conditions? Structure of the industries? Creative talent? Speech regulations? Culture? I would be interested in pursuing this as a project if it wasn’t so interdisciplinary.

Zettai Kareshi (絶対彼氏) / Absolute Boyfriend
Fuji TV Spring 2008 season

I find it strange that I like Zettai Kareshi so much. Although I love the romantic comedy genre of j-dramas (as opposed to the melodramas) in general, I can’t help but be reminded of the horrible conclusion that the title is everything that I am not. I’ve only seen the first few episodes since the summer started while stuck in airports and planes without in-flight entertainment, but here are some initial thoughts on the series:

It strikes me that the premise of ZK and how the conflict develops in the plot only makes sense in the context of Japanese social expectations and norms about how a woman should properly behave. In real life, all my female friends in school would simply say itadakimasu when faced with a Mocomichi. And they do. It may not necessarily be culturally-specific – ZK is thematically very similar to an old science fantasy romance novel called the Silver Metal Lover I read back in middle school. Yup, back when I had the luxury of time to read fantasy novels, so much that I could read the shoujo genre ones as well. But Silver Metal Lover was written in 1981. It’s hard to imagine ZK’s already meager psychological realism translating well beyond its shores where those expectations don’t exist.

As a corollary to the above, although it is ostensibly about the perfect boyfriend, a closer look at the series reveals an implicit definition of the ideal girl, because of the equally unrealistically chaste and virtuous protagonist, an office lady at a confectionery company who works hard and makes great cream puffs. I believe the series would be more accurately titled zettai kanojo (絶対彼女) instead, if it is reflective of prevailing social expectations of Japanese women in the labor market, and Japanese corporate culture in general. The protagonist is a diligent worker, yet she is not full-time staff but a temp contracted from an agency, and often appears serving coffee during meetings. Even when she is most productive, she is no corporate professional either – her contribution as a talented pâtissier is a domestic-oriented skill. (See my essay on the Japanese economy for more on corporate gender discrimination)

On a more positive note, ZK also presents a role model for a greater role of fathers in the domestic world. Mocomichi’s character is programmed to do household chores, cook delicious meals, and help with living expenses. Yet the appeal of ZK suggests that this masculine ideal is far from real male aspirations. As much as popular culture may reflect social realities, television serials are more often an escapist fantasy. One can only hope that the men watching ZK catch the message – Japanese women’s expectations of men are changing too.

My last observation is on the implicit debate on the definition of masculinity. On one hand we have greek-god “ore sexy?” Mocomichi flexing his muscles topless for the audience. On the other hand we have metrosexual host-club himo-type Mizushima Hiro, who was a supporting character in the blatantly-titled “hanakimi ikemen paradise“. These rival definitions of ikemen-hood (ike-manhood?) interest me in terms of which is relatively less unachievable in my own quest to become, well, the title of the drama. I know, I know. Yappari zettai muri desu ne? All I can do is try to change the things I can and accept the things I can’t.

James Zumwalt, Director of the Office of Japanese Affairs at the State Department came to Columbia to give us an update on US-Japan relations, hosted by Robert Immerman-sensei at the Weatherhead Institute. He was speaking on the record, so it wasn’t really all that exciting, but there were a few gems I took away.

Pessimism about the future of US-J relations and Zumwalt’s answers:

1) Domestic politics in what he terms the “revolving sushi government” – it is unclear that the current PM Fukuda will remain in power in the medium-term.

2) Sense that US attention in East Asia is shifting towards China relations – though Zumwalt assures us there is no ‘limited pool of attention’ (really? come on its a law of economics) Japanese are worried that Japan is not discussed at all on presidential campaign trails whereas China relations is a big issue, which is odd since it’s probably better that the candidates are not discussing them as it would probably be in a negative, nativist way.

3) US acceptance of India’s nuclear ambitions, which fuels Japanese fears that the US will accept nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula – Zumwalt seems somewhat irritated by those who made that decision, noting that both parties have a shared goal of a nuclear-free peninsula.

4) Misalignment of priorities in the six-party process – the abductee issue is not a US priority, but it is for Japanese legislators.

5) Ceasing support for Op Enduring Freedom – though Zumwalt noted that they still support Op Iraqi Freedom and there are still significant mil-mil ties.

Japan on the Security Council
Zumwalt claims that it is ‘in our interest’ for Japan to get a permanent seat, and that they are the largest donor, but whether it actually happens has more to do with Japan than anything the US can do. He seemed a little irritated about what he called the “unequal alliance” as Japan has no corresponding defence obligation toward the US, but he gave the standard answer about constitutional change on Article 9: that it’s up for Japanese people to decide if they want to have a greater role in peacekeeping operations etc.

Economic cooperation
Zumwalt was highly critical of Japanese overregulation. He had an anecdote about how disagreements over an ‘open skies’ agreement meant the airline industry is still heavily protected in Japan, as aviation is outside WTO processes. The Japanese airlines opposed the agreement as they were afraid of competition, but now that new commercial jets like the 777 have better capabilities, it doesn’t necessary make sense anymore to have US airline hubs in Tokyo when customers prefer direct flights and travel is increasingly going to China. Another anecdote was about rejecting a Fedex processing center in the 80s which would now be pretty good, but the boat has left.

Cultural cooperation
Zumwalt notes that there are far more Japanese students in the US (at least at the graduate-level) than there are US students in Japan, so there’s asymmetry in understanding. JET is a key player in bringing US students over, and is the main source of direct hires for US agencies in Tokyo. Zumwalt doesn’t think too highly of state-to-state programs to improve this: His own first Japan experience was through a privately-run high school exchange, the most efficient programs are outside government and the new US-J cultural commission will probably not be the main driver of people-to-people relationships.

Domestic politics
The ‘twisted diet’ of an LDP-supermajority lower house and an opposition-held upper house means most legislation which gets passed in the lower house gets cut in the upper house and sent back to the lower house. The LDP needs to be able to compromise with the DPJ but hasn’t been as effective in doing so, especially on the central bank governorship, and the bill reconfirming host nation support for US troops. Zumwalt says that the opposition tells him these are just political footballs for electoral purposes and they will act responsibly when in power, but as it is unlikely that the LDP will recapture the upper house, the likely outcomes are 1) status quo of continued paralysis, 2) DPJ control of both houses or 3) some ‘grand realignment’ which he didn’t go into specifics about.

I attended a Weatherhead institute seminar on the ownership and board structure of Japanese family firms by Prof. Yupana Wiwattanakantang from Hitotsubashi University, hosted by b-school Center on Japanese Economy and Business director Hugh Patrick. I actually had the opportunity to visit Hitotsubashi while I was in Tokyo this winter, where I stayed with my friend and co-JFTC-winner Dyna in his Economics RA office. Prof. Yupana presented her a working paper on the performance of family firms in Japan, which I found quite fascinating.

The conventional wisdom holds that hiring professional managers based on merit is necessary when firms grow too large or complex for owners to manage themselves, but when ownership and management are separated, owners face the classic principal-agent problem in aligning the incentives of professional managers to their own interests, presumably profit maximization. Prof. Yupana suggests that over the centuries, the Japanese family firm has evolved institutions to mitigate the tradeoff between loyalty and meritocracy in ownership/management: marriage and adoption of firm successors. The family selects their ideal CEO candidate to marry a daughter and adopts him into their family, and the adopted son cuts off all ties to his birth family. It’s rather like mergers & acquisitions, except for people. This brings new blood into the family, which allows family firms to disinherit ‘idiot sons’ for top Todai grads, but still aligns them to family interests.

Yupana notes that Japanese cultural institutions were ideal for this evolution. First, historically inheritance goes completely to the eldest son, thus there is a ready supply of second and third sons available and willing to be adopted as an heir. Second, adoptees are (supposedly) fully loyal to the adopted family and not to their birth family, which Yupana suggests is not the case among Chinese and Korean adoptees, though there are other mechanisms family firms use to ‘lock in’ an adopted heir. Of the 15 Tokugawa rulers, 5 were adopted heirs. Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, also a prime minister, was an adopted son. Of the ~400 IPOs after the Tokyo Stock Exchange was reopened after the war, 25% were family firms, and of the remaining 75%, many had been family-controlled zaibatsu that had been busted by General Headquarters. Now, some 30% of listed firms are family owned or controlled: Toyota by the Toyoda family (until 1990) is the most notable example.

What gets really interesting is when she broke down the data into categories. There are family firms run by the founder, firms run by blood descendants, and firms run by adopted/married-in heirs. The stock performance of founder-run firms is abnormally high. Next, the performance of adopted heir-run firms is much higher than that of blood descendants.

I asked her about this, as she noted that the average age of adoption/marriage is 25. Adopted heirs are subsequently groomed to take over the reins, typically landing the top job around 50. I wondered why there was such a large performance premium between adopted heirs and blood descendants, given that both are groomed for leadership over a long period of time, and both are presumably aligned to family interests. She answered that blood heirs are more likely to abuse company privileges, whereas adopted heirs are rising from a lower social level and must prove themselves worthy. Patrick chimed in to note that adoptees were recruited from top merit-entrance universities, which means they are inherently smarter (I’m not entirely sure this is always the case, especially where Columbia is concerned), to which Yupana added that when they broke the data further among blood heirs, the heirs that were able to get into top universities by merit matched the adoptees in performance. It was the incompetent blood heirs who had to buy their way into elite schools with back doors, that drove returns down.

While I instinctively dislike the idea that the performance premium is some kind of innate intelligence, I am more inclined to believe that it is a product of environment. I went to schools in Singapore that have traditionally been the choice of the bourgeois elite. Many of my classmates were ‘young masters’, heirs of family firms. These kids were 3rd/4th generation heirs to firms that existed since the colonial era: trading houses, hotel chains, rubber/palm oil plantations. They always had the latest toys and swanky parties along the 6th avenue estates. Many of them chose not to take O/A-levels at all but could go to prep schools abroad. The children of the wealthier professionals (finance, law, management, top civil service) were also usually less successful academically, but the ones that did do well enough had tremendous advantages to leverage on without having to be outstanding.

You can tell who these kids are easily: They don’t need to fight for financial aid, or worry about getting scholarship money. They usually don’t need to worry too much about SATs or landing the right first job, daddy can always pull strings to get an admit or an ‘internship’. They are not government scholarship holders but reject the heavily subsidized local universities, choosing to study abroad at colleges that are not usual on-campus recruiting sites (i.e. not worth full tuition). If they do, they typically choose to pursue ‘personally fulfilling’ humanities/fine arts disciplines rather than the hard sciences, engineering, and quantitative social sciences. They hold us ‘pre-professional’ types in disdain, and sneer at finance and consulting as ‘rat races’.

By and large it has been the children of the less-wealthy professionals (academia, middle civil service) that had the optimal balance of opportunity and incentives to succeed, because if they don’t, what little comforts they presently enjoy will disappear – they are expected to support their families, not the other way around. They are acculturated enough with middle class meritocratic values to want to excel in the system, without being able to extract rents from it. The vast majority of my peers who went to Oxbridge, Ivy schools, and NUS law/med come from this background.

Maybe I should switch my semester abroad from Beida to Todai and focus on getting married and adopted into some keiretsu princess’s family…

…we received a total of 82 submissions from 22 different countries for the competition this year.

After a strict screening of all the essays, the four submissions below have been selected as the Prize Excellence of the competition in 2007. Unfortunately, however, there was not one that the Selection Committee members should strongly back for the Grand Prize of 1 million yen.

Competitor analysis: I am the youngest of the 4 winners, though not by much. Of the other 2 non-Japanese winners i.e. the English-language entries, one is an exchange student at Nagoya who won this year’s ADB competition, and the other works for a strategy consulting firm in Beijing. I look forward to meeting them both, they have pretty interesting backgrounds.

Going forward: 82 entries is lower than previous years and I predict next year will be less competitive. Also, previous winners (at least the Japanese ones) tended to be much older. I will work harder next time around to clinch the top prize. Before this, there were very few English-language winners to refer to as a model. When I am there I will talk to the judges to assess the relative standing of our essays and thus find out which approach (academic vs mainstream, micro vs macro) is favored.

Reality check: Oh well life goes on, and I’m happy that I won a free trip to Tokyo, which is pretty awesome by itself. Also, it’s pretty cool that I managed to write a serious paper with the made-up word ‘Gundamnomics’ in the title. I really do hope to do empirical studies of the anime industry/subculture someday, and maybe some future scholar will cite my essay. Who knows, I may have coined a term that future reports about the anime industry may use. Or maybe not. It wasn’t that appropriate a metaphor: Generally Gundams don’t really ‘transform’ though some from recent versions like Gundam 00 do.

Thus unfortunately I am not a ‘millionaire’ like Geoffrey is. Even though in nominal Yen/Won-to-USD exchange rate terms my prize is larger, it isn’t when adjusted for purchasing power parity: Given how expensive Tokyo is, I’ll probably end up spending all my prize money on metro fare and instant noodles, while Geoff has a ‘chuka party’ at the Lotte Myeongdong. I wonder if they say ‘omedetou party’.

We would like to express our gratitude to you for submitting your essay to the JFTC Essay Competition 2007. After a strict screening of all the essays, we have selected your essay, “Gundamnomics: Transforming Corporate Japan for the Challenges of Global Capitalism” as a candidate for an award. The final result is scheduled to be announced on Friday, December 14, and the winners will be notified directly. The Awarding Ceremony and our New Year’s Reception will be held from 16:30 to 19:00 on January 9, 2008 at Hotel New Otani, Tokyo, Japan.

During the IHS advanced topics seminar in Washington, I skipped the open bar social, stayed up all night in my hotel room, and fell asleep during the workshops, all because I wrote this essay at the eleventh hour – even at the train station and on the ride back to New York. The only drinks I took from the open bar were cans of coke. (I should really stop this habit of procrastinating about essay deadlines) But it was all worth it if I get to go to Tokyo, which has been my dream ever since my love for Japanese culture began in high school.

The essay abstract:

It is no surprise that in August 2007, Michael Bay’s Transformers debuted in Japan with an opening weekend of ¥631.3 million, the number one at the Japanese box office. The Transformers franchise, from which Bay’s film was adapted, began with a 1980s animated television series that was not only based on designs by Japanese toy manufacturer Takara and produced by Toei Animation, but was also inspired by the classic Japanese animation genre of giant transforming robots that includes Voltron, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and Mobile Suit Gundam. If this genre was a metaphor for the successful postwar transformation of the Japanese economy into a global powerhouse, Transformers is not merely a part of Japanese cultural imagination, but may well be the history of corporate Japan – and perhaps also its future.

With the passing of the ‘lost decade’, it is time for corporate Japan to undertake a new strategic transformation to meet the dynamic challenges of global capitalism. In this essay, I argue that the collapse of the asset-price bubble and subsequent banking crisis created fundamental systemic changes to Japan’s political economy and institutions, and heightened its sensitivity to international capital markets and global economic forces. These challenges will require Japanese companies to achieve an efficient allocation of physical, financial, and human capital by adjusting their human resource management policies to leverage on foreign and female talent, adopting a more meritocratic and flexible corporate culture, and changing their approach to corporate governance.

If I visit Tokyo, I want to pay homage to the mecca of all anime fans Akihabara, crash a Todai/Waseda class, eat street stand ramen, walk Shibuya crossing and pet Hachiko the dog, climb Tokyo tower… reading about SY-sempai’s adventures, it just blows my mind how many things I want to do there. I also want to visit old friends and classmates, meet local contacts in the libertarian network, and talk to alumni there about investment banking in Japan. Of course, it would mean I have to crash course myself in nihongo, which means postponing my crash course in hangukmal. I really hope I get to go, because there is no way I could justify the expense without airfare and accommodation covered.

Iwai-sensei’s talk was on ‘What will become of the Japanese Corporation’, and he made the usual distinction between the conventional shareholder-oriented model and the Japanese stakeholder-oriented model. He started from legal scholarship distinctions between corporate nominalism and realism to Coasian economic distinctions between contractual and evolutionary theories of the firm to illustrate the theoretical division, then pointed to empirical survey data on real distinctions. He posits that the existence of these seemingly contradictory models within capitalist systems that are essentially the same is due to the dual legal nature of incorporation that allows for both: as the corporation is a legal person, it may own corporate assets and contract with its employees, suppliers, clients, creditors etc, but the corporation is also a asset which is owned by its shareholders. This two tiers of ownership make both corporate models possible. The conventional model emphasizes the upper tier of shareholder ownership, while the Japanese model emphasizes the lower tier of corporate ownership of its assets.

From this perspective, the Japanese keiretsu system of mutual cross-shareholdings is an attempt to make the corporation purely ‘lower-tier’, as it then ‘owns itself as an asset’ or owns a corporation that owns it. It does so effectively by circumventing legal restrictions on mutual shareholding amounts and share repurchases with its complex web of keiretsu member-subsidiary relations.

More interestingly, Iwai-sensei argues that even with the passing of the ‘lost decade’ and the restructuring of the keiretsu to more conventional forms of corporate governance, this trend may be reversed, and corporations will become less shareholder-oriented in the future. He bases this argument on the shift away from returns from physical capital to returns from human capital in a knowledge economy, particularly human capital that is not readily transferable or copied but organization-specific human capital. Iwai-sensei distinguishes two main sources of transaction costs in corporations: moral hazard (i.e. monitoring costs) and the ‘hold-up’ problem (never heard this one before) where employees have no incentive to invest in organization-specific human capital if they have no job security. In any case, he suggests that conventional shareholder-oriented corporations are good at addressing moral hazards whereas stakeholder-oriented corporations are better at addressing the hold-up problem. So in order to invest in org-specific human capital, firms will shift to a more stakeholder approach i.e. Vindicating The Japanese Model of Corporate Governance in the future and making the lost decade a forgotten past.

I’m not so sure that all the connections in his argument make much sense. Firstly, I’m not sure that the only human capital that creates value is organization-specific (i.e. requires lots of job security), when there are plenty of skill sets that might be industry-specific or vocation-specific that would still be applicable to any job in that industry or vocation. If it was the case, then investment bankers would all stay in the same firm they joined and not jump ship all the time to other banks or go to the buy-side, or management consultants wouldn’t jump to industry etc etc. Researchers wouldn’t move from academia to private sector to public sector. I’m so hard pressed to think of major innovations that require someone to stay at one firm forever. Therefore, I’m not sure that the ‘hold-up’ problem is such a big deal in creating value. Maybe it’s a big deal if you value ‘corporate culture’ and ’solidarity’, but that’s not the same as profits and growth. Maybe I’m not understanding Iwai-sensei correctly – should read his papers to figure it out – but his conclusion doesn’t seem quite right even if his explanation about the legal duality of incorporation makes sense.