Jim Frederick is Tokyo Bureau Chief for Time Magazine

Morning Optimism

The first ever World Economic Forum on East Asia to be held in Tokyo kicked off with high optimism this morning.  The first panelists at the first plenary session, answered its title, “Can Asia’s Growth Model Sustain Itself?” with an unequivocal yes. The entire panel was extremely upbeat, there was much talk about, “The new century belongs to Asia,” and “The center of gravity of the global economy is moving East,” and “India and China are the new economic powerhouses.” While I, too, am ultimately an optimist, I fear many are still not addressing the harder questions about Asian growth. I have to admit I found these breezy assurances to be a little rosy. My impression after living in Japan over the past years is that political risks are increasing dramatically, and there are economic concerns that often go unaddressed.  How are China’s energy needs going to be met without conflict? China may be a country that graduates 10 times more college graduates than the US or 10 times more engineers, or whatever statistics are being bandied about to prove that China is the new superpower, but it is also a country that has 800 million peasants, a phenomenon completely unique in human history. What about them?

The Crucial Economic Evolution

The morning sessions have frequently returned to this issue: Asia’s next step of economic development needs to move from export economies reliant on Europe and US to ones with mature, self-sustaining consumer demand. But that is an exceedingly difficult goal. Japan, for all of its success, still struggles with the fact that it’s reliant on its export industries. How will India and China fare any better?

Neat Gadget

The Spot Me gadgets that the World Economic Forum is distributing to participants are incredibly cool. The size of a small PDA, it has the complete schedule and list of participants programmed into them, but the neatest part is its radar function which checks the surrounding area and tells you who is sitting near you. Plug in the people you want to talk to, and the thing will buzz when one of them are in your range. Send messages to them, set up appointments, awesome. I had heard about a similar function that was used unsuccessfully as a dating-match service, but gizmos like this seem infinitely more suited towards business networking.

The Buzzword of the Day

Innovation. Everybody is talking about it, using the word incessantly, saying it is the key to competitiveness. It is all the rage, the way that “Quality” was several years ago. It is now such a cliché, however, and used so unconsciously and reflexively by all businesspeople, I fear that it is losing its meaning.

Afternoon Pessimism

In one of the PM sessions, I hosted a seminar on China, Japan and Korea and why they were having so much trouble getting along. My panelists were a distinguished bunch from Japan, China, Korea and the US. Here, the atmosphere was almost as pessimistic as the morinng was optimistic. Panelists SAID they were optimists, but they also said that they didn’t forsee much chance of things improving politically, perhaps for years. To me that sounded pretty grim. Economies could roll along unhindered all the way up to the countries’ coming to armed conflict, but political disagreements — over Japan’s Prime Ministers’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine, territorial disputes, disputes over energy resources — these were likely to rumble on indefinitely because the world, as one panelist put it, suffers from a “statesman deficit.” Many pointed to the EU as model of economic and political integration and cooperation but the consensus of this panel was that that type of development is a long, long way off. Hot Economics, Cold Politics has become the default way of referring to the state of Asia these days and it looks like that condition will be around for some time to come.