Junichiro Koizumi hopes to be the Next Big Thing in Japanese politics. So too hope the Japanese people, who have watched the one-time economic juggernaut atrophy away the past decade. With his wavy mop of hair and inspired ideas on economic structural reform, Koizumi is a wild and refreshing reaction to the old-line Japanese political establishment. Koizumi adds a fresh and energetic look to Japanese politics, the same kind of look and feel that NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode has injected into the mobile phone business.
Indeed, i-mode is a bright spot in Japan’s otherwise dismal economy. In Japan, i-mode has come to represent something new and good, a metaphor of today for the promise of the future. Contrast that with the mobile phone story in Europe, where the $100 billion auction of third-generation mobile phone licenses has turned into a dark omen for highly-leveraged wireless companies and Euro economies alike.
Here in the U.S., 3G spectrum is in short supply, and there is an uncivil war between the mobile phone industry and schools, churches, Internet wireless carriers, mobile satellite firms and the Defense Department. Enter the politicos. Despite government spectrum studies that should have sent 3G-aspiring mobile phone firms to the shower months ago, industry is still in the ball game. How? Lesson Nine: If you can’t win … Change the rules. Take Command! Leadership Lessons from the Civil War, by Tom Wheeler … now in paperback.
If only, for Koizumi, Japan’s national economy could imitate the success-the wondrous popularity-of i-mode. Maybe it will someday, but not anytime soon. Japan is in bad shape.
As the U.S. and the world turn their focus to China (its 1.3 billion people and experiment in free-market Communism), Japan has faded into the background. President Bush, who recently hosted Koizumi at Camp David, cannot allow Japan to remain in a perpetual recession. Nor can the U.S.’ trading partners. If Japan hits rock bottom, be prepared for the Next Big Contagion.
Clyde V. Prestowitz, U.S. trade representative in the Reagan administration, recently wrote that the U.S. would be wise to elevate economic issues to the level commanded by political-military matters in the last half century of American-Japan relations. “But an economically distressed Japan cannot be an effective ally, and it increases the risk of Asian instability. Thus it is precisely because security ties are important that the administration should make fixing the economy its top priority in Japan.”
i-mode is one such fix, a glamorous one. The rest will be drudgery for Koizumi.
