Japan: easier to invest in China than invade
Friday, September 3, 2010 at 12:05AM 
The weirdest part of George Friedman's Next 100 Years was his insistence on Japan returning to militarism in order to secure resources/labor. I mean, I can't believe he's been there recently or spent any time with Japanese youth if he's still pushing that "coming war with Japan" shtick (his 1991 book--two decades wrong and counting).
And there's just no good logic for it: Japan has the bucks and the technology to take advantage of China in a wholesale fashion, including the reverse flow of Chinese tourists (who now spend as much as Americans in Japan).
Bottom line: Japan's future is China's rise--pure and simple. China is 26 times the size of Japan and it presents more than 100 million-plus cities. Then there's all the Chinese money that can be used to revitalize Japanese firms (and American ones too).
Yes, China will shoot ahead on gross output, but Japan's large lead on technology will remain and "will not close easily" because Chinese companies just don't invest in R&D anywhere close to the same degree, so a mutually beneficial relationship for a very long time.
The Asian integration process proceeds, with amazingly low danger of great-power war.
Reader Comments (1)
I just finished Friedman's 'Next 100 Years' a few weeks ago, and thought the same thing. I was left scratching my head in puzzlement. I guess his point was "if Japan fails to take advantage of China's population because China shuts them out, then Japan resorts to war", but still, even the chance of China shutting Japan out of its market in any significant way is very unlikely, in my unprofessional opinion.