Investor Presentaiton
debt already uses up half of the state's tax revenues (however, as a silver lining: Japan's
enormous public debt is partly balanced by the huge financial assets of Japanese companies:
corporate Japan has never been richer.)
A rapidly decreasing population and an emptying countryside are a trigger for new
business models. In 2013 the book 'Satoyama Capitalism' was published. Satoyama (1)
is based on the Japanese words for village (sato) and mountain (yama) - and point of
departure is that similar landscapes have sustained millions of people for thousands of years.
Satoyama promotes circulation of resources, money and goodwill within a community
through cashless exchanges such as self-sufficiency in water resources, food and fuel,
bartering and paying it forward. Or, according to Kosuke Motani, chief senior economist at
the Japan Research Institute, Ltd. at a recent
seminar in Tokyo: "The bottom line of satoyama
capitalism is to have sustainability through the
cycle and reproduction of nature. Rural
municipalities across Japan should capitalize on
their natural resources to pursue sustainable
lifestyles via adopting alternative ideas
complementary to conventional capitalism and
make active efforts to bring in young urbanites to rejuvenate their communities".
Satoyama which is presented as a global effort, is led by the Japanese Ministry of the
Environment and the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies and is
promoted by the Japan Times. Have a look at this presentation and video.
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It is easy to downgrade this Satoyama project as a fantasy, a new 'Garden of Eden' or
a '21st century Shangri-La', but you can also ask yourself: what can you do as a country with a
rapidly decreasing and greying population and lots of vacant areas on the one hand and
plentiful arable land and abundant nature such as woods, rivers, seas on the other hand? Yes,
immigration should offer a limited - solution. And yes: better conditions for women to raise
children should be promoted (according to the OECD, the ratio to GDP of social expenditure
for families, including early child care and education or family allowance was a mere 1.3% in
2013 in Japan, much lower than in Germany (2.2%), France (2.9%) and Sweden (3.6 %).
However, it will take literally ages to see the results of these measures. So why not simply try
to live with the reality that Japan might have 50 million inhabitants by 2110 (which is, by the
way, about the same number of Japanese as in 1910.) The key question is of course: is Japan
able to maintain its high-level and sophisticated society? The good news is that Japanese
companies are earning substantial money from their overseas subsidiaries. And yes, Japanese
companies are betting on automation and robotization to cope with a lack of people, but will
that be enough? Frankly, I have no idea.
In Shimane I meet with Akiko, a well-educated woman who gave up a good job in
Tokyo to work at a farm in Yokota, under a program sponsored by the Japanese government
to attract young people to work in farming. Akiko wants to learn about organic rice farming,
and only in Yokota did she understand that the traditional Japan is very different from what is
happening in the big urban areas. "Yes, it is sometimes disappointingly conventional here",
she says, "but I learn a lot and maybe I end up as an organic farmer in this part of Japan. Why
not?"
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