Japanese Government Ordering Employees To Not Use Elevators

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Japan is the second largest economy in the world. And they are desperately trying to squeeze out very last yen from their energy systems because they are facing very serious financial problems due to the high cost of energy. The balancing act between Japan and the USA client state is becoming a serious problem for the Japanese.

AP:

Staff at Japan's Health Ministry are being asked to ditch the elevator and take the stairs as the ministry strives to conserve energy and reduce the risk of obesity and health-related problems among its employees, a newspaper reported Sunday.

From Monday, staff and visitors to the 26-story building in downtown Tokyo will be greeted with a sign in the elevator lobby saying "Please use the stairs," the Asahi newspaper reported.

The idea was proposed by a senior ministry official who overheard employees grumbling about the long wait for elevators since the ministry suspended the daytime use of six of its 18 elevators to curb global warming, the Asahi said.

I read all sorts of stories about how Japan is trying to wring out the costs of higher energy by simply eliminating all sorts of support systems. Not heating buildings in the northern half of Japan during the winter, cutting air conditioning in Tokyo's hot, humid summer is yet another. The Japanese have to keep their balance of trade firmly in the surplus column. Why does the world's number 2 economy always run a huge surplus? While the world's supposedly number one runs an ever widening deficit?

Since Reagan took over DC, America has had a trade deficit with Japan that only gets worse and worse. The Chinese, when they sent people around the world to study economic systems, examined the Japanese/American dysfunctional trade model and decided to imitate the Japanese not the Americans. This was a gigantic success. The Japanese, like the Americans, have to prevent inflation or their dysfunctional relationship with their main "trading" partner will collapse. To do this, they had to set up factories in cheap labor countries like China which has in turn, caused Japan to run a tighter trade relationship with China which used to be in Japan's favor but no longer is, thus all the sabre rattling by the Japanese.

If energy didn't rise in price, the Japanese could easily evade opening their markets to the Chinese but now, thanks to energy costs, inflation has begun to creep into deliberately deflated Japan. Yes, the yen is kept on a very short leash and is allowed to mostly only drop against the dollar! This is vital for the US importers who must keep inflation off the books. If the Japanese admit to inflation, this means no more cheap IOUs they can hand out like candy. This means setting realistic interest rates. And worker unrest.

The working class has been hammered brutally in Japan. So have the outer villages and towns that reaped the benefits of the USA/Japanese unbalanced trade as the government plowed trillions of yen into various construction and government projects. Now that is being ruthlessly cut back because of this hidden inflation. So instead of inflating money, the Japanese are restricting it by cutting and cutting. This deflationary process ends up killing the communities it hits.

NYT:

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: April 30, 2006
OGAMA, Japan — This mountain village near the Sea of Japan, withered to eight aging residents, concluded recently that it could no longer go on.

In Ogama, many houses and fields have been abandoned as residents left to find work in cities, a trend that threatens Japan's rural villages.
So, after months of anguish, the villagers settled on a drastic solution: selling all of Ogama to an industrial waste company from Tokyo, which will turn it into a landfill.

With the proceeds, the villagers, mainly in their 70's, plan to pack up everything, including their family graves, and move in the next few years to yet uncertain destinations, likely becoming the first community in Japan to voluntarily cease to exist.

The unbalanced system created by the present form of international trade means countries pegging themselves into only exporting end up esvicerating themselves. Namely, internal trade matters! Peasants across the planet are beginning to understand this. The rush to create things to be traded far away must not interfer with primary, internal trade! Protecting one's own internal trade while shipping out things that others need but can't get any other place is what trade is all about. When Europeans wanted indigo dyes, for example, they needed to trade something for the indigo (this was fixed two ways: capturing islands in the New World, removing by force, slaves from Africa and then using both to grow their own indigo rather than trading with the Far East!). Rubber came from the Amazon and wheat from the great plains of Russia and the USA. Every country that started a manufacturing base used it first to make things for itself.

Britain was the first to need to sell their manufactured goods outside of their homebase. They did this by forcing unfair trade with their colonies. This kept the colonies in debt to the home base in London and England then became a banking center since they held all the IOUs from the colonies.

Japan thought it had solved the riddle of trade vs internal use. They simply made their people live debased lives rather than raise their standard of living, deliberately keeping their own people's standards below the top 20 industrialized nations. Indeed, as America runs on only red ink, our standard of living has shot up thanks to the Japanese (and the Chinese imitation of the Japanese model). We live in bigger houses, dress better (though tastelessly), eat like fiends, drive much bigger and fancier cars than even 15 years ago, we are literally high off the hog here. The Japanese cornocupia of plenty has poured into our laps even as the Japanese are now forced to struggle along with increasing privations.

WP:

By IRWAN FIRDAUS
The Associated Press
Monday, May 1, 2006; 5:38 AM

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Workers across Asia rallied Monday to press for better factory conditions and higher wages, often encountering a heavy police presence and, in some places, outright resistance.

Demonstrations were planned in major cities across Indonesia, with up to 50,000 people expected in the capital alone to protest government plans to revise a labor law. The new law would cut severance packages and introduce more flexible contracts that would chip away at worker security.

Indonesian workers march toward the parliament building during a rally in Jakarta, Indonesia, Monday, May 1, 2006. Tens of thousands of workers marked May Day by taking to the streets of Jakarta and other major cities to demand better employee benefits and urge the government not to change labor laws.
"Don't change the law," thousands of laborers chanted at Jakarta's main downtown roundabout, as others arrived in buses and trucks, waving green, yellow and red flags and banners expressing their demands.

Fearing violence, about 13,000 police were deployed on the streets, some carrying riot shields and manning water cannons, said police chief Maj. Gen. Firman Ganisaid.

Thanks to the baby derth and no foreign labor allowed, there is no labor unrest in Japan. Instead, the status quo is silently accepted and more opt for suicide or removal from participation in the system than taking advantage of today, May Day, to demonstrate for change. The average Japanese worker lives only a precious few degrees better than the average Chinese worker. The wealth generated by the unequal trade with America barely trickles down past the top three levels of society. The Chinese leadership is very aware of this problem and are studying it, seeing if there is some way out of the trap that is now destroying Japan internally.

We, on the other hand, are out on a limb. Our standard of living is stupendous, the best in the whole world but it rests entirely on Asian loans, Asian labor, Asian desire to control our internal markets. And this whole thing is doomed to collapse because it is now so out of whack, it is out of control. We can't run up infinite debts, Asia can't run up infinite trade deficits, this is overdue for a loud crash.

If anyone should be climbing stairs, using no airconditioning or heat and all the other deprivations, it is the USA, not Japan. The fact that this is backwards is not a sign of American strength but of fatally unbalanced international trade dynamics. Only America can break this system down and change it and we refuse to do this because we like consuming without paying.

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Comments

[panasianbiz]

This is a great comparison of the way America is dealing with the energy crisis versus how the Japanese are doing so. Clearly, the kinds of sacrifices the Japanese are being asked to make would cause huge employee unrest or rebellion if instituted in the U.S. where we've grown too accustomed to our luxury and oil dependence to give it up willingly!