I LOVE JAPAN. Kazuhiro Arai

The Nature of Economics (2) When a contract is incomplete as in the real world, the agents have discretion and face interdependence or a game situation. Each can influence the welfare of the other. Pursuit of self-interest in this situation is generally inefficient. This discretion includes many commonplace behaviors such as providing wrong information, doing shoddy work, and working slowly. They will surely decrease the welfare of the partners such as employers, employees, and consumers. The game situation can be described as the prisoner's dilemma game. It shows that pursuit of self-interest under contract incompleteness with discretion leads to inefficiency. For example, telling a lie is a strictly dominating strategy* in it but both players being honest is more efficient than both telling a lie. The above story suggests that individualism or unrestrained pursuit of self-interest cannot be justified in general. It may be loosely justified only in organized markets, suc...

The Nature of Economics (1) Many people believe that economics is a science that promotes the welfare of all human beings. However it is actually used to justify strategies of particular groups as in the case of free trade. Today’s economics is an ideology. The basis of an ideology is formed first intuitively and then the whole is justified by cleverly applying logic. A widely used method of clever application of logic is to use only facts or assumptions that are convenient for justification. Neoclassical economics or mainstream economics is an ideology that justifies individual freedom or individualism to the maximum. Because of its mathematical nature, we can easily know what assumptions are used in it. We can know further that it ignores many inconvenient facts. One of the most important assumptions of neoclassical economics is contract completeness, which means that all transaction contracts are sufficiently detailed. Otherwise it cannot justify Western individualism. But...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (4)               One may think that Christianity is the best religion in the world because it has the largest number of believers. I would like to show that this understanding is wrong.               Why has Christianity spread so widely in the world? This question needs to be answered in two steps, first historically and second economically. I want to consider the second step leaving the consideration of the first to historians. That question can be answered by applying the theory of network externalities. This theory can be understood easily if an example is given. It is beneficial to have a telephone when most others are telephone users. It is not beneficial to have a telephone when only one out of ten thousand people are telephone users. People become telephone users because many others are telephone users...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (3)               Endo’s Silence stimulates me to consider what conditions a religion should satisfy to contribute to world peace and make all people happy. In this regard Christianity has obvious shortcomings because it divides people into Christians and non-Christians and allows the former to attack the latter. Christians always think whether people in question are Christians or not. It is certain that it cannot be a religion for world peace. It may be useful to know that unlike Christians Japanese people have been generous to foreign religions. But if a foreign religion does harm to them, the case will be altered. At present Christians and Muslims live together peacefully in Japan. Japanese culture is likely to be a buffer among many religions. It may have power to change them into more generous religions. In order to consider a condition for a desirable religion, imagin...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (2)               Shusaku Endo wrote Silence by assuming that all what Christians do is right and that a ban on Christianity is wrong. This is the fundamental reason why it is biased. It may be enjoyable for Christians to write and read such a novel but it is quite childish to do so. From the facts and logic discussed above, it is obvious that the author himself is wrong. Christian faith makes people blind to real facts. What is heinous regarding the work is that Endo describes the missionaries with dignity but both Japanese Christians and non-Christians with coarseness. This is more conspicuous in the movie by Martin Scorsese. Kichijiro, a very important fictitious supporting actor, plays a role of dishonoring Japanese people. But there have been very few Japanese like Kichijiro. Japanese Christians were known as honest and earnest. This was a reason exceptionally many died...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (1)               Many people may think that Shusaku Endo’s Silence is a masterpiece and especially Western Christians may enjoy reading it and watching the movie. I would like to claim however that it is a poor work with an ingrained bias of the Christian. The author has spread a barbarous image of Japanese people throughout the world. This is a completely wrong image. First I would like to provide you with information that the author lived a few hundred meters away from my present home. The first photo below shows his residential area. From this you may obtain a bit of image of where he wrote Silence . He used to walk around this neighborhood. So do I sometimes but I have never met him because he had died before I moved in. His close redactor lived nearby.               A key point for fair evaluation of Sil...

What USA did to Japan               As I wrote before, USA instigated Japan to start the Japan-US war through several economic sanctions including the oil embargoes in 1940 and 1941, which could be considered a virtual war declaration on Japan at that time. It was aware of the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand by listening in to the communications of the Japanese Navy. This was why aircraft carriers Enterprise and Lexington and newly built escort vessels were not at the harbor and only old warships were moored there. In spite of these facts, USA insisted that Japan had carried out a sneaky attack. There are many wars including the Vietnam War that were started without a declaration.               USA dropped countless incendiary bombs over Tokyo on the 10 th of March 1941 and killed more than a hundred thousand civilians. It dropped atomic bombs on Hirosh...