-Practice the English Copy-Writing Metod Every Day ①
２０１３年２月 志村英盛
関連サイト：英語脳創りで情報力・発信力を高める－毎日、量聴、量作文、量音読
１．英語脳とは独立した言語中枢
英語を自在に操ることができる人の脳は、できない人の脳とどう違うのか？
植村研一浜松医科大学名誉教授（日本医学英語教育学会名誉理事長）は、
英語を流暢に話す日本語・英語バイリンガルと、英語を話すのが苦手な
日本人大学生の脳内血流を比べる実験をした。
英語のニュースを聞かせると、どちらも、脳の一部に反応を示す血流が
見られる。バイリンガルの脳は血流が２か所に分かれる。日本人大学生の
脳の血流は1か所だけであった。
植村教授によると、血流が見られたのは、言葉を聞いて意味を認識する
ウェルニッケ言語野。日本語と英語を聞いた時、このウェルニッケ言語野で
血流が別々流れるか、同じ個所でしか流れないかが、バイリンガルと、
そうでない人との違いとのことである。
「この血流のある回路が、いわゆる言語中枢です。この言語中枢が、
日本語と英語で、それぞれ独立しているか、否かが、英語脳がつくられて
いるか、否かの違いなのです。」
脳に英語の言語中枢が独立してできると、日本語を介さずに、耳や目から
入ってきた英語を、瞬時に理解するネットワークができる。
英語教育を８年以上受けた大学生でも、ほとんどがネイティブ・スピーカーと
自由に会話することができない。そのわけは、
「英語の言語中枢が形成されていないからです。英語を話せない先生が、
脳の機能を無視して、日本語への翻訳を通して、すなわち、英文和訳、和文
英訳で英語を教えるという英語教育を行っているのが、日本人の大多数が
英語を話せない原因です」と植村教授は指摘する。
脳内部の言語中枢の機能は、脳神経外科医が、腫瘍などを取り除く際、
後遺症が残らないよう、脳内にある機能を調べた結果、分かったものだ。
言葉を聞いて意味を察するウェルニッケ言語野、言語を発するブローカ
言語野のほかに、かなを理解する、漢字を理解するなどの部分は、
それぞれ別の場所にあるが、ウェルニッケ言語野が喪失した場合のみ、
言葉そのものが消失し、言語の回復が不可能になるという。
英語の言語中枢を独立させるには、まず聴きまくることだ。
植村教授は、英語のほか、ドイツ語、フランス語、オランダ語、ロシア語、
イタリア語、ポーランド語、中国語、韓国語、スペイン語、ポルトガル語を
学び、１２か国語を自在に操る。５０歳を過ぎてから学んだポーランド語も、
学会で研究発表するほどに上達した。
秘訣は「３か月間は徹底して聴くこと」だと。
２．大脳に、新しく英語脳 ＝
英語ウエルニッケ言語野を創る
１９９９年（平成１１年）１０月１９日、ＮＨＫの『クローズアップ現代』で
『どうすれば英語が話せるか』という番組が放送された。
そのなかで植村研一浜松医科大学名誉教授は
大脳生理学の｢ウエルニッケ言語野｣ご研究の成果である
大脳のスキャン写真を基に、「英語を上手に話せる人」と
「そうでない人」との違いを説明されている。
英語を上手に話せる人は、英語を話す時は、日本語とは違う言語野で処理している。
「そうでない人」は、英語を話す時も日本語と同じ言語野で処理している。
この番組のなかで、グレゴリー・クラーク多摩大学名誉学長は、
言語野をコンピュータにたとえて、このことを、「英語を上手に話す人」は、
頭のなかに、英語の言語コンピュータと、日本語の言語コンピュータと二つ
持っている。
「そうでない人」は、大脳に、日本語の言語コンピュータ一つしか
なく、いちいち、英文和訳、和文英訳をしている。だから英語を上手に話せ
ないのであると語っている。
植村教授もクラーク学長も、「英語を上手に話す」ためには、
英語のウエルニッケ言語野（英語の言語コンピュータ）を
大脳の中に、新しく創ることが必要であると語っている。
そうして、英語のウエルニッケ言語野（英語の言語コンピュータ）を
大脳のなかに新しく創りあげるには、
毎日、英語ヒアリングを続けることだと力説されている。
筆者は、自分の体験から、毎日、英語ヒアリングに加えて、
毎日、コピー英作文と、毎日、英語音読が必要であると思う。
以下は、そのための教材である。
001
The Ford Story
from The Practice of Management Chapter10
by Peter F. Drucker
The fundamental problems of order, structure, motivation and leadership
in the business enterprise have to be solved in the managing of managers.
Managers are the basic resource of the business enterprise and its scarcest.
In a fully automatic factory there may be almost no rank-and-file employees
at all. But there will be managers - in fact, there will be many times the
number of managers there are in the factory of today.
Managers are the most expensive resource in most businesses - and
the one that depreciates the fastest and needs the most constant
replenishment. It takes years to build a management team; but it can be
destroyed in a short period of misrule.
The number of managers as well as the capital investment each manager
represents are bound to increase steadily - as they have increased in the
past half century. Parallel with this will go an increase in the demands of
the enterprise on the ability of its managers. These demands have doubled
in every generation; there is no reason to expect a slowing down of the trend
during the next decades.
How well managers are managed determines whether business goals will be
reached. It also largely determines how well the enterprise manages worker
and work. For the worker's attitude reflects, above all, the attitude of his
management. It directly mirrors management's competence and structure.
The worker's effectiveness is determined largely by the way he himself is
managed. That "personnel management" confines itself by and large today
to the rank-and-file employee and all but excludes managers from its
purview, can be explained historically.
But it is nonetheless a serious mistake. The common practice expressed
recently by a large company in setting up a Department of Human Relations.
The Department will of course confine itself to the relations between
the company and employees earning less than $5,000 a year" - almost
guarantees in advance the failure of the new department and of its efforts.
Managing managers is the central concern of every manager.
During the last ten or fifteen years American managers have subjected
themselves to a steady barrage of exhortations, speeches and programs
in which they tell each other that their job is to manage the people under
them, urge each other to give top priority to that responsibility and furnish
each other with copious advice and expensive gadgets for "downward
communications."
But I have yet to sit down with a manager, whatever his level or job,
who was not primarily concerned with his upward relations and upward
communications.
Every president I know, be the company large or small, worries more about
his relations with his Board of Directors than with his vice-presidents.
Every vice-president feels that relations with the president are the real
problem. And so on down to the first-line supervisor, the production foreman
or chief clerk, who is quite certain that he could get along with his men if only
the "boss" and the personnel department left him alone.
This is not, as personnel people seem inclined to think, a sign of the
perversity of human nature. Upward relations are properly a manager's
first concern.
To be a manager means sharing in the responsibility for the
performance of the enterprise. A man who is not expected to take
this responsibility is not a manager. And a manager who does not
take it as his first responsibility is a poor manager, if not untrue
to his duty.
These problems of upward relations that worry the manager -
the relationship to his own boss; his doubts as to what is expected
of him; his difficulty in getting his point across, his program accepted,
his activity given full weight; the relations with other departments and
with staff people, and so forth - are all problems of managing managers.
The starting point of the discussion of the human organization of the
enterprise cannot therefore be the rank-and-file employees and their
work no matter how numerous they are; it must be managing managers.
Henry Ford's Attempt To Do Without Managers
The basic challenges as well as the basic concepts in managing managers
are again best illustrated by an example. And the best example is the story
of the Ford Motor Company.'
There is no more dramatic story than that of the fall of Ford from
unparalleled success to near-collapse in fifteen short years - unless it is
the equally swift and dramatic revival of the company in the last ten years.
In the early twenties Ford's share of the automobile market had climbed to
two thirds. Fifteen years later, by the time World War II started, Ford's market
share had fallen to 20 per cent. The Ford Motor Company, being privately
owned, publishes no financial figures. But it iswidely (thoughprobably
mistakenly) believed in the automobile industry that the company did not
make a profit in any one of these fifteen years.
How close the company had come to ruin was shown by the near-panic
in the automobile industry when Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's only son, suddenly
died during World War II. For almost twenty years everybody in the industry
had been saying: "The old man can't last much longer; wait till Edsel takes
over." That he died while the old man was still alive forced the industry to
face the reality of the Ford situation. And the reality was such that the
survival of the company seemed improbable - some people said impossible.
The best indication of the seriousness with which these chances of survival
were viewed was a scheme proposed in responsible circles during those days
in Detroit. The U. S. Government, it was said, should lend enough money to
Studebaker - the fourth largest automobile producer but still less than one
sixth the size of Ford - to buy out the Ford family and to take over the
company. In this way, and this way alone, Ford would have a chance to
survive. Otherwise, it was agreed, the company might well have to be
nationalized lest its collapse seriously endanger the country's economy and
its war effort.
What brought Ford to this crisis?
The story of Henry Ford's personal misrule has been told in lurid and not
too accurate detail several times. People in American management - if not
the public at large - have become familiar with his secret-police methods
and his one-man tyranny. What is not understood, however, is that these
things were not pathological aberration or senility - though both may have
played a part.
Fundamental to Henry Ford's misrule was a systematic,
deliberate and conscious attempt to run the billion-dollar business
without managers.
The secret police that spied on all Ford executives served to inform Henry
Ford of any attempt on the part of one of his executives to make a decision.
When they seemed to acquire managerial authority or responsibility of their
own, they were generally fired. And one of the chief reasons why Harry
Bennett, Ford's police chief, rose during these years to almost supreme
power in the organization was that he could never be anything but the old
man's creature, and totally lacked the experience and competence to hold
any managerial position.
This refusal to allow anyone to be a manager goes back to the early days
of the Ford Motor Company. Even then it had been the old man's practice,
for instance, to demote first-line supervisors regularly every few years or
so lest they "become uppity" and forget that they owed their job to
Mr. Ford's will. Technicians Henry Ford wanted; and he was willing to pay
them generously. But management was his personal job as owner. Just as,
early in his career, he decided not to share ownership with anybody, he
apparently decided not to share management. His executives had to be his
personal assistants, doing what he told them to do; they had at most to
execute, never to manage. From this concept followed everything else: the
secret police, Ford's fear of a conspiracy against him among his closest
associates, his basic insecurity.
The concept of the executive as an extension of the owner and as his
delegate has parallels in the development of many institutions. The army
officer started out as the personal vassal of his lord. As late as the eight-
eenth century, commissions in many European armies were still considered
the personal property of the regimental commander, to be sold by him
to the highest bidder; and, our military titles - lieutenant, especially -
recall to this day the origin of officership in personal delegation. Similarly,
the public servant was at first his sovereign's delegate if not his body-
servant. Louis XI of France, who may have conceived the modern idea
of a staff of full-time lay administrators, used the same man as his personal
barber, secret-police chief and chief minister. And the ministers of
government are "secretaries" to this day.
Henry Ford's concept was not even unique in industry. It was widely held
in the early years of the century. He shared it, for instance, with one of his
most distinguished contemporaries: Lenin. It is no accident that the early
Bolshevik leaders were such fervent admirers of Ford. "Fordism" seemed
to offer the key to rapid industrialization in a country lacking in skilled labor.
Above all, it seemed to make possible industrialization without management,
in which the "owner," represented by the political dictatorship, would control
all business decisions while business itself would employ only technicians.
That this proved an idle dream early in the first Five-Year Plan "as among
the major causes of the bloody "purge" of the mid-thirties which liquidated
practically all industrial managers. And that the successors to the "purged"
executives have in turn had to be allowed to become managers, rather than
remain mere technicians, represents a defeat of the entire theory of the
Communist Revolution. One does not need the gift of prophecy to predict
that the emergence of a managerial class insures, over the long run, the
downfall of the Communist regime in Russia.
Certainly it was the absence of a management that caused the fall of the
Ford Motor Company. Even at its lowest point - just before World War II -
it still had a strong distributive and service organization. The automobile
industry believed that Ford's financial resources after fifteen years of losses
were fully equal to those of General Motors, even though Ford sales were
hardly more than one third those of General Motors.
But Ford had few managers (except in sales). Most of the good people had
either been fired or had left; there was a mass exodus of Ford executives
as soon as World War II created job opportunities after ten years of
depression. And few of the Ford executives who stayed on were good enough
to find other jobs. When the company was revived a few years later, not many
of the old-timers were found to be competent to hold a management job
much above the lowest.
The End
関連サイト：予習挑戦型へ脱皮して潜在能力を開発する
002
Apple wins Samsung patent suit
Jury awards U.S.firm $1.05 billion
THE DAILY YOMIURI SUNDAY, AUGUST 26, 2012 Page 2
A U.S. jury concluded that Samsung Electronics Co.
stole the innovative technology used by Apple Inc.
to create its revolutionary iPhone and iPad
- a decision that comes after a year of scorched-earth
litigation.
Jurors on Friday ordered Samsung to pay Apple
$1.05 billion in the latest skirmish of a global
legal battle between the two tech giants.
An appeal is expected.
Apple filed its patent infringement lawsuit
in April 2011 and engaged legions of the country's
highest-paid patent lawyers to demand $2.5 billion
from its top smart-phone competitor. Samsung fired
back with its own lawsuit seeking $399 million.
The verdict, however, belonged exclusively to Apple,
as the jury rejected all Samsung's claims against Apple.
Jurors also decided against some of Apple's claims
involving the two dozen Samsung devices at issue,
declining to award the full $2.5 billion Apple demanded.
However, the jury found that several Samsung products
illegally used such Apple creations as the "bounce-back"
feature when a user scrolls to an end image, and
the ability to zoom text with a tap of a fmger.
Apple lawyers plan to formally demand Samsung pull
its most popular cell phones and computer tablets
from the U.S. market. They also can ask the judge
to triple the damages to $3 billion. U.S. District
Judge Lucy Koh will decide those issues along with
Samsung's demand she overturn the jury's verdict
in several weeks.
The outcome of the case is likely to have ripple effects
in the smartphone market. After seeing Samsung's legal
defeat, other device makers relying on Android may
become more reluctant to use the software and risk
getting dragged into court.
"Some of these device makers might end up saying,
'We love Android, but we really don't want to fight
with Apple anymore,"' said Christopher Marlett,
Chief Executive Officer of MDB Capital Group,
an investment bank specializing in intellectual
property.
ISI Group analysts also viewed the verdict as a blow
to Android, as much as Samsung.
During closing arguments at the trial,Apple attorney
Harold McElhinny claimed Samsung was having
a "crisis of design" after the 2007 launch of the iPhone,
and executives of the South Korean company were determined
to illegally cash in on the success of the revolutionary device.
Samsung's lawyers countered that it was legally giving
consumers what they want: smartphones with big screens.
They said Samsung did not violate any of Apple's patents
and further alleged innovations claimed by Apple were
actually created by other companies.
Samsung, headquartered in Seoul, responded to the verdict,
saying in a statement it was "unfortunate that patent law
can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly
over rectangles with rounded corners."
"Today's verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple,
but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead
to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher
prices," Samsung said.
The jurors' determination that Samsung took Apple's ideas
probably matters more to the companies than the damages figures,
Marlett said.
"I don't know if $1 billion is hugely significant to Apple
or Samsung," Marlett said. "But there is a social cost here.
As a company, you don't want to be known as someone who steals
from someone else. I am sure Samsung wants to be known as an
innovator, especially since a lot of Asian companies have
become known for copying the designs of innovators."
Samsung has emerged as one of Apple's biggest rivals and has
overtaken the firm as the leading smartphone maker.
Samsung's Galaxy line of phones run on Android,
a mobile operating system that Google Inc. has given out
for free to Samsung and other phone makers.
Google entered the smartphone market while its then-CEO
Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board, infuriating Apple
co-founder Steve Jobs, who considered Android to be
a blatant rip-off of the iPhone's innovations.
After shoving Schmidt off Apple's board, Jobs vowed
that Apple would resort to "thermonuclear war"
to destroy Android and its allies.
If Android loses any ground in the mobile computing market,
it would hurt Google, too, because Google relies on Android
to drive mobile traffic to its search engine and services
to sell more advertising.
The Apple-Samsung trial came after each side filed a blizzard
of legal motions and refused advisories by the judge
to settle the dispute out of court. Deliberations by the jury
of seven men and two women began Wednesday.
The End
003
Anti-Japan stance may curb investment
in China
The Yomiuri Shimbun, Sept. 23, 2012,EDITORIALS
Anti-Japan demonstrations in cities around China
to protest the Japanese government's purchase
of the Senkaku Islands have mostly calmed down.
However, it is a problem that the Chinese government
is escalating its overbearing approach in diplomacy.
Chinese authorities banned demonstrations in Beijing
after Tuesday, which marked the 81st anniversary
of the Liutiaohu bombing incident that prefaced
the Manchurian Incident.
The authorities apparently became wary that continuing
to allow the demonstrations could threaten social stability
because some of them developed into riots.
But we are concerned that Chinese President Hu Jintao
and other national leaders have made a series of hard-line
statements against Japan. Premier Wen Jiabao said in Brussels,
where the China-European Union summit meeting was held,
that China "must take strong measures," referring to
the Japanese government's purchase of the Senkaku Islands.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who will succeed
Hu at the upcoming National Congress of the Communist Party
of China, also said some groups in Japan repeated mistakes
and "staged the farce" of purchasing the islands.
They apparently were expressing their determination
to make no concessions at all to Japan.
Doing business in China risky
However, we believe it was to the Chinese side's
disadvantage that the demonstrations have made Japanese
companies keenly realize the risks of doing business in China.
Resumption of operations is being delayed at some of
the Japanese factories in China attacked by demonstrators.
The Chinese side has not shown any willingness to pay
compensation for damage caused during the protests.
The Japanese nonlife insurance sector estimated that
insurance payouts to the damaged companies would reach
\10 billion in total. That eventually might raise insurance
fees of the companies.
It is also a matter of concern that strikes for pay raises
are occurring frequently at Japanese-affiliated plants
in Guangdong and other provinces in China.
We understand why one Japanese business leader after another
is expressing wariness about investment in China,
saying they must be cautious.
Japanese firms have placed much value on China as the factory
of the world and increased their investment in that country.
Such investment reached a total of $6.3 billion last year,
up 50 percent from the previous year.
This contrasts with U.S. investment in China, which fell
26 percent last year to a mere $3 billion.
Millions work at Japan firms
Such aggressive investment by Japanese companies is sustaining
China's employment and economy. It is estimated that several
million Chinese work at Japanese-affiliated companies in China.
The violent anti-Japan demonstrations have trampled
on cooperative relations between China and Japan
that have been nurtured over many years.
It is highly likely that Japanese companies will sharply curb
their investment in China and instead increase investment
in other Asian countries such as Vietnam and Thailand.
Because the Chinese economy is continuing to slow down due to
a decrease in exports and other factors, China's real economic
growth rate this year is expected to drop below 8 percent.
It is certain that-depending on the investment strategy of
Japanese companies-downward pressure could further increase
on the Chinese economy, negatively affecting employment there.
China should realize that continuing its hard line
against Japan could boomerang to its own disadvantage.
The End
004
Declining Population Reveals Social Dilemma
by Prof.Takenori Inoki
Prof.Inoki is director general of the International Research Center
for Japanese Studies, a post he has held since 2008.
He also is a professor emeritus of Osaka University,
where he served as the dean of the Department of Economics.
The Daily Yomouri Tuesday,February 28,2012 【insights into the woeld 】
Japan's chronically low birthrate is one of the many knotty problems
facing society that can hardly be resolved by political wisdom alone.
The seriousness and extent of such problems will eventually compel
each individual to change his or her way of thinking - otherwise,
one policy solution after another will prove to be nothing more than
a stopgap measure. In other words, our society is stuck in a classic
dilemma in which individuals have chosen to maximize their self-interest
but the nation-wide sum of those choices weighs against the public
interest and the common good of the country.
Against such a backdrop, even if the government manages to design
competent policy initiatives, no far-reaching rock-solid solution
to the daunting problems will emerge as long as people's consciousness
of their own problems remains unchanged.
To expect politics and government to resolve all such problems related
to our lives is nothing but fiction.
The country's depressed birthrate and aging society are a case in point.
The pressing social security challenge of revamping the systems for
pensions and medical services stems from the rapidly aging and shrinking
population. The aging of society inevitably entails ballooning social security
expenditures. The main factor behind the shrinking child population is the
change in public perceptions of marriage and family - many people now
tend to marry later or choose to stay unmarried, and there is also
a widespread tendency among married couples to have fewer children.
Simply modifying the existing pension and medical service regimes will not
be sufficient to resolve the underlying problems that threaten the
sustainability of both systems.
Why? Because the social security challenges are deeply intertwined
with fundamental elements of the human condition, such as longevity,
family values and existence itself.
Late last month, the National Institute of Population and Social Security
Research released the latest edition of its "Population Projection for
Japan." The report, which provides childbirth and mortality estimates
based on different assumptions, is not intended to tell us of the destiny
of our society. Yet, the estimates contained in the report do not
necessarily make us optimistic about the future of our offspring.
One demographic projection using midrange estimates of birth and death
rates envisions the Japanese population, which stood at 128.06 million
in the 2010 census, entering a long-term shrinking phase and eventually
declining to 86.74 million in 2060. The institute expects the size of the
dependent population-the combination of the elderly (65 or older) and
child (14 and younger) cohorts-to nearly equal that of the working-age
population (15-64 years old). This is exactly the scenario that television
programs and newspapers often illustrate with an image of a young person
carrying an elderly person on his or her shoulders.
Recently, we have witnessed a dramatic growth trend in the unmarried
demographic. The 2010 census found 35.6 percent of men aged 35 to 39
- excluding those whose marital status was unknown were unmarried,
compared with a mere 4.2 percent in 1965. I am really astonished that
Japanese people's attitudes toward marriage and families have changed
that drastically in recent decades.
It should be noted, of course, that we cannot always generalize about
the gravity of the economic problems a declining and aging population
causes to countries. Labor productivity and standards of living vary
from country to country, depending on the extent to which capital
accumulation has been achieved, whether capital per capita has increased
and how far technological innovation has advanced. In this connection,
however, it is hard to simply subscribe to an optimistic view that the
advance of labor-saving technologies will help resolve all the social
problems resulting from the contraction of the population.
Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the future of our society
amid the declining and aging population, it is necessary to recognize
the essence of the matter.
First, we need to look at the correlation between a country's population
and its national power. Today, gross domestic product-the total market
value of all goods and services produced within an economy in a given
period of time-is widely referred to as a yardstick to gauge national
strength, and "per capita GDP" is often used to measure the well-being
of the people in each country. Without knowing the actual state of
per capita dividend of national income, the actual level of affluence of
the people cannot be discerned.
However, "per capita GDP" is not a reliable benchmark for precise
comparisons of national power among countries.
Indeed, in his book "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith (1723-1790)
did not conceive any "per capita" viewpoint. Instead, Smith saw the
division of labor as the primary cause for increasing national wealth.
In his theory, the extent of the division of labor is limited by the extent
of the market, and the extent of the market is limited by population
growth, but population growth itself is determined - in a form of dynamic
feedback - by the extent of the division of labor and that of the market.
In retrospect, those countries that grew economically during the age
in which Smith lived mostly experienced incremental demographic growth.
History shows that an uptrend in wages stimulates an increase in the
population and makes people industrious. This epitomizes the idea of the
population as the source of national power, which can be outlined in terms
of aggregate GDP - not per capita GDP. In other words, the overall
population is the major limit on the extent of aggregate GDP.
Economics finds no solution
Contemporary economics - which handles the complicated affairs of
industrial societies for which cross-border division of labor has become
the global norm - has not yet found a definite analytical solution
vis-a-vis the correlation between demographic changes and market
and economic development. It is true that the working-age population
in emerging economies is surging, but what really matters with the labor
force - the key economic resource for development - is its "quality,"
which can be attained primarily through education and training.
In this context, it is conceivable for the diffusion of education, the
population and GDP to affect one another in complex and mutually
dependent ways.
When we focus on our own country, we should not overlook the fact
that Japanese society has shifted to an environment in which higher
wages do not necessarily stimulate population growth anymore.
In a society where the equal opportunity rule is firmly in place, parents
tend to keenly invest in the education of their children in well-advised
preparations for them to live affluent lives in the future. Thus, it is natural
for parents in a democracy to be in a frenzy as to education. In reality,
however, the financial burdens borne by Japanese parents to ensure their
children receive a quality education is very high when compared with
other countries. Such high-level personal expenditures for education,
especially higher education, are understandably one of the reasons
dissuading married couples in Japan from having many children.
No doubt, parents who want to be rational under the existing
circumstances choose to have fewer children so as to provide them
with greater educational opportunities and equip them to achieve
a better life in the future.
But it has to be pointed out that such rational decisions among
individuals to have fewer children turn out, from a national perspective,
to be a major cause of the decline in the birthrate and the overall
population. As in this case, we occasionally encounter phenomena
in society that are fine and reasonable from the individual point of view
but are not always good for society as a whole.
With respect to the child population, it may be significant that the number
of out-of-wedlock births is remarkably low in Japan compared to the
rest of the world. We may have to wait for future studies to know if there
is any relation between this fact and the declining birthrate.
Our country lacks legislation entitling children born out of wedlock
to the same legal protection as other children, a situation that may keep
a number of people from having children at all.
Of course, circumstances vary from country to country. For instance,
a research report published by an American labor economics scholar
shows the rise in the number of births to unwed mothers in the United
States has coincided with an increase in female students dropping out
of high school after having babies.
Needless to say, the government should be prudent in dealing directly
with the population issue. In the first place, it is doubtful that
government-imposed measures would be effective in halting
the demographic slide. Even so, it is vital to create a working environment
more favorable for women's postpartum return to the workplace and
to improve child-rearing conditions for working parents.
That said, it still is up to each person to eventually decide to have
children, a decision that is closely related to individuals' consciousness
of the values they find in marriage and family. As such, it does not seem
to be easy for our country to get rid of the "dilemma between personal
desires and social priorities."
The End
005
The Practice of Management
Chapter10② Rebuilding Ford Management
by Peter F. Drucker
Whether Ford could have survived at all had there been
a postwar depression is debatable. But the company might have
collapsed even in the postwar boom had Henry Ford's idea of
managing without managers not been reversed radically by his
grandson and successor, Henry Ford II. The story of the revival
of the Ford Motor Company since 1944 is one of the epics of
American business. Many of the details are not known outside
the company; it is high time that the whole story was published.
But enough is known to make it clear that the key to Ford's
revival has been the building and organization of management -
just as the stifling and destruction of management had been
the key to the earlier decline.
Henry Ford II was in his mid-twenties when responsibility
suddenly fell on his shoulders, with his father dead and
his grandfather rapidly failing. He had no business experience
at all. And there were few executives of stature left
in the company to help or guide him. Yet he obviously understood
what the real problem was; for his first act was to establish
as basic policy that there would be a real management.
Most of the men constituting this management had to be found
on the outside. But before he could bring in anyone he had
first to clean house. And he had to establish the basic
principles on which the company would operate in the future.
All this he had to do alone - with his grandfather still alive
and his grandfather's henchmen still on the job. Only then
could he pick new people to help him manage, people who could
run their activities themselves, take full responsibility
for them and be given full authority over them. In fact,
the first appointment, that of Ernest R. Breech as executive
vice-president, announced that Breech would have full operating
authority. And this concept has been observed in setting up
all management jobs throughout the organization.
Management has become management by objectives. Where Ford
executives under the old regime were never told anything,
the new regime has been trying to supply every manager
with the information he needs to do his own job,
and with as much information about the company as is feasible.
The concept of the executive as a personal delegate of the owner
has been replaced by the concept of the manager whose authority
is grounded in the objective responsibility of the job.
Arbitrary orders have been replaced by performance standards
based on objectives and measurements.
The greatest change perhaps - certainly the most visible -
is in organization structure.
The old Ford Motor Company was rigidly centralized. Not only
was all power and decision in the hands of old Henry Ford; but
there was only one set of figures for the whole, complex operation.
The Ford Motor Company owns its own steel mill, for instance.
With a capacity of 1.5 million tons a year, it is one of the
country's largest. Yet it was an open secret in Detroit that
the cost figures of the steel mill disappeared in the over-all
cost figures for the company. The mill superintendent for instance,
did not know what price the company paid for the coal he used.
Purchase contracts under the old regime were usually "top secret."
By contrast Ford today is decentralized into fifteen autonomous
divisions, each with its own complete management fully responsible
for the performance and results of its business and with full
authority to make all decisions to attain these results.
The steel mill, incidentally, is among these divisions,
along with major automobile-producing divisions like Ford and
Mercury-Lincoln, parts and equipment divisions and one division
in charge of international and export business.
Henry Ford II did not, of course, invent his concepts of
management and organization. He took most of them - along with his
top managers - from his big competitor, General Motors. They are
the concepts on which General Motors was built, and which
underlay General Motors' rise to the position of largest manufacturing
enterprise in the country. But Henry Ford II is unique in that he
started out with a complete set of principles rather than develop
them imperceptibly as he went along. His experience is therefore
of particular significance as a test of these concepts. Here was
a company that seemed headed for almost certain decay, if not ruin,
a company without any management, demoralized and leaderless.
Ten years later, Ford's share of the market is climbing steadily.
It has joined battle with General Motors' Chevrolet car for first place
in the automobile market. From being moribund it has become
a major growth company. And the miracle - for miracle it is -
has been brought about by a complete change in the principles
of the management of managers.
What It Means to Manage Managers
The Ford story enables us to say dogmatically that the enterprise
cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management
does the owner's job by delegation. Management is needed not only
because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because
running an enterprise is something essentially different
from running one's own property.
The older Ford ran his company quite consciously as a single
proprietorship. His experience proves that, whatever the legal rules,
the modern business enterprise cannot be run this way. The resources
entrusted to it can produce wealth only if they are maintained beyond
the life-span of one man. The enterprise must therefore be capable of
perpetuating itself; and to do this it must have managers. The complexity
of the task is such, even in a small business, that it cannot be
discharged by one man working with helpers and assistants. It requires
an organized and integrated team, each member of which does his own
managerial job.
It is therefore the definition of modern business enterprise that
it requires a management - that is, an organ which rules and runs
the enterprise. The functions and duties of this organ are
determined by only one thing: the objective needs of the enterprise.
Owners may legally be the "employers" of management; they may even
be omnipotent in a given situation. But the nature, functions
and responsibilities of management are always determined by the
task rather than by delegation.
It is true that in its genetic origin management grows out of the
delegation to assistants of those tasks which the owner of a small but
growing business can no longer discharge himself. But while growth
in size, that is quantitative change, makes management necessary,
the change itself is qualitative in its effects. Once there is a business
enterprise, management's function is no longer definable in terms
of delegation by the owners. Management has a function because
of the objective requirements of the enterprise. To deny or to slight
this function is to ruin the enterprise.
Management is not an end in itself. It is an organ of the business
enterprise. And it consists of individuals. The first requirement in
managing managers is therefore that the vision of the individual
managers be directed toward the goals of the business,
and that their wills and efforts be bent toward reaching
these goals. The first requirement in managing managers is
management by objectives and self-control.
But the individual manager must also be able to make the needed
efforts and produce the required results. His job must be set up
so as to allow maximum performance. The second requirement of
managing managers is therefore the proper structure of the
manager's job.
Though managers are individuals, they have to work together in
a team, and such an organized group always has a distinct character.
Though made by individuals, their vision, their practices, their
attitudes, and behavior, this character is a common character.
It survives long after the men are gone who originally created it.
It molds the behavior and attitudes of newcomers. It decides largely
who will succeed in the organization. It determines whether the
organization will recognize and reward excellence or scuttle into
the shallow harbor of placid mediocrity. Indeed, it controls whether
men will grow or become stunted, whether they will stand straight
and erect or become crooked and misshapen. A mean spirit in the
organization will produce mean managers, a great spirit great
managers. A major requirement in managing managers
is therefore the creation of the right spirit
in the organization.
A business enterprise must have a government. In fact it needs
both an organ of overall leadership and final decision, and an
organ of overall review and appraisal. It needs both a chief executive
and a board of directors.
The business enterprise must make provision for its own survival
and growth. It must make provision for tomorrow's managers.
An organized group needs a structure. Arriving at sound structural
principles of management organization is therefore the final
necessity in managing managers.
These are not things that "should" be done; they are things that
are done in every enterprise whether its managers realize it or not.
In every enterprise managers are either guided in the right direction
or are misdirected; but their vision and efforts are always focused
on something. In every business enterprise managers' jobs are set
up either properly or improperly; they cannot be left unorganized.
Every business enterprise has either an effective or an ineffective
organization structure; but it always has an organization structure.
It has either a spirit that killeth or one that giveth life. People are
always being developed. The only choice is whether they are to be
developed equal to their potential and to tomorrow's demands or
are to be misdeveloped.
Henry Ford wanted no managers. But the only result was that he
misdirected managers, set up their jobs improperly, created a spirit
of suspicion and frustration, misorganized his company and
misdeveloped management people. The only choice management has in
these six areas is therefore whether it will do the jobs right or not.
But the jobs themselves cannot be evaded. And whether they are
being done right or not will determine largely whether the
enterprise will survive and prosper or decline and ultimately fall.
The End
006
Can Eurozone Forestall a Chain Reaction
of Crises ?
by Prof. Shumpei Takemori, Keio University
The Daily Yomiuri June 4,2012
The eurozone crisis is almost over," Italian Prime Minister
Mario Monti declared during an official working visit to Tokyo
in late March.
This view turned out to be overly optimistic;
the eurozone once again plunged into financial turmoil in May.
Apart from Spain's banking crisis, a topic I will reserve
for the last part of this essay, there are two major reasons
for the sudden turn of events.
The first is the changing tide in European politics
as manifested by the victories of anti-austerity parties
in recent elections. In a general election in Greece on May 6,
the radical left-wing coalition Syrizza stormed to a second-place
finish with its strong message of pledging to renege on the
country's austerity program, a condition mandated by other
eurozone nations inreturn for their fiscal support. Greece
subsequently failed to form a new government and another
election will take place on June 17, the outcome of which
will decide whether Greece will stay in the eurozone.
The growing anti-austerity backlash also spread to France,
which in tandem with Germany had spearheaded the eurozone's
crisis management. French Socialist Party leader Francois
Hollande, who made his vocal opposition to the German-led
austerity policy the main message of his electoral platform,
won the presidential election on May 6, putting the future
of Franco-German cooperation in jeopardy.
Secondly, early this year a widespread illusion emerged that
a firewall was finally in place in the eurozone to prevent
the crisis in Greece from spreading to other debt-plagued
member states such as Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
This illusion was shattered when yields on Spanish government
bonds soared in the wake of the Greek election.
With the change in the European Union's political landscape,
the carefully crafted strategy that emerged after long
negotiations among the eurozone members to resolve the crisis
is in shreds. The relative stability seen in the zone at the
outset of the year reflected a political deal between
Germany - caretaker of the monetary bloc - and the rest of the
17-nation bloc, which I will call "the rest." This Faustian
bargain consisted of the following trade-offs:
(a) The rest would subjugate part of their national sovereignty
to Brussels by signing a fiscal compact, a new code that put
their annual budgetary planning into the straightjacket of
unforgiving Teutonic discipline;
(b) In exchange, Germany would temporarily suppress its
inflation phobia and let the ECB indulge in a spending spree
of long-term refinancing: lending freely to problem banks
in problem countries at a giveaway interest rate with dubious
collateral. The establishment of the European Financial
Stability Fund to deal with the debt crisis and other
bailout measures lack financial firepower. Yet the ECB's
"TARGET" - the Trans-European Automated Real-Time Gross
settlement Express Transfer system, a cross-border settlement
system of the eurozone - has been fully operational
as a backdoor life-support mechanism for the troubled
eurozone countries.
Countries posting trade deficits with eurozone peers cannot
afford to pay import bills with euros they have earned through
exports alone, so during the pre-crisis years, they borrowed
from the capital market to make pp for euro funding
shortfalls. After the debt crisis kicked in, the capital
market slammed its doors. What is worse is that the citizens
of these countries have been trying to park their capital
in safe havens abroad. As a result, the capital market gives
them no help easing the scarcity of euro funds. Instead,
it tends to compound the euro crunch in crisis-stricken
countries.
There is no other way to cover the euro funding shortfalls
than to run the money printing machine at full throttle.
The monetary base, namely the total amount of euro banknotes
plus the cash reserves in the vaults of the eurozone national
central banks, is determined by the Governing Council of the
ECB, but in cases of emergency the eurozone's national central
banks are allowed to print euro banknotes and/or provide
local banks with lending. When a member state creates euro
beyond the ECB-mandated ceiling, the extra euros are logged
on the TARGET settlement system as an ECB loan to the central
bank of the country in question.
As of March this year, TARGET loans to troubled sovereign
borrowers were equivalent to more than \80 trillion (Euro8 trillion).
The aforementioned spending spree by the ECB - namely the ECB's
long-term refinancing operations (or LTRO) for banks since
late last year, which have amounted to as much as \100 trillion
- is nothing but a powered-up version of the TARGET rescues.
It has mobilized a robust backdoor support mechanism for
troubled eurozone states. The ECB's generous open-ended program
provides commercial banks with three-year loans bearing
an interest rate identical to the ECB's policy rate -
0.75 percent per annum at present. Commercial banks used
some of the borrowing to refinance maturing debts and
another part to purchase new sovereign bonds issued by
debt-laden countries. Early this year, the attention of
international investors was focused on Greece's drastic
debt restructuring, which in effect forced investors
to write down 60 percent of their Greek bond holdings.
International investors realized the Greek writedowns
could trigger the spread of the contagion to Italy and
Spain but yields on Italian and Spanish sovereign bonds
showed no sign of a hike. This gave them the impression
a firewall was finally in place in the eurozone.
In retrospect, that was an illusion caused by the ECB's
long-term refinancing operations.
Who will finally assume the ECB's credit risk ?
In the event of a member state's default either on their
TARGET liabilities or their LTRO liabilities, a eurozone
agreement calls on each non-defaulting member state
to share the portion equivalent to its share of the ECB's
capital. Should all the crisis-stricken member states
default on ECB loans, Germany would be obliged to bear
more than 90 percent of the debt loss. Since the rekindling
of the eurozone crisis, there have been mounting calls
for the introduction of common euro bonds, a scheme aimed
at having member countries jointly issue bonds and lend
the proceeds to heavily indebted member states that
otherwise would have to pay higher interest rates.
But Germany's opposition has kept the bond scheme
from taking off. Political leaders in Germany lack
the spine to take bold action by ignoring their
constituencies' refusal to give fiscal assistance
to other eurozone states.
In practice, the ECB's lending measures have
the same economic effect for a troubled eurozone
state as a common euro bond scheme, namely the
burden of a default risk is shared collectively by
member states instead of being borne by a member state
in isolation. In other words, Germany has already
effectively started bailing out eurozone peers via
the backdoor using the ECB lending channels.
Backdoor bailout arrangement
The stealth agreement will inevitably come to light
once troubled member states default on loans. How will
the German people react if they are suddenly told
they must pay a bill of more than \10 trillion ?
The German government would want to avoid this nightmare
by all means possible. That was why it was in a hurry
to have other member states sign off on the fiscal
compact. The problem with this compact is its absurd
rigidity. For instance, Italy with its sovereign debts
accounting for 120 percent of its gross domestic product
would be obliged to halve this to 60 percent in 20 years.
This means Italy would have to slash the debt-to-GDP
ratio by at least three percentage points annually.
But 60 percent is not a magical number: There is
neither economic theory nor empirical evidence
supporting the idea that if this particular ratio
is below 60 percent a country can be kept from fiscal
collapse (in fact, Spain's debt-to-GDP ratio was
only 36 percent before the start of the global crisis).
It is unimaginable that for the next 20 years the
proud Italian population will make tireless and
unflinchingly annual sacrifices to attain a pointless
target. The election results in France and Greece
make the new fiscal treaty much less viable.
From the ruins of the frustrated Faustian bargain
between Germany and the rest, the eurozone
has to again start shaping up its new strategy to
tackle the debt crisis. Seeing that its efforts to
enshrine the fiscal compact as the cornerstone of
national fiscal policies are going nowhere,
Germany is more and more reluctant to allow
the ECB to embark on another spending spree.
As a consequence, the eurozone is currently quite
defenseless and vulnerable to such a dramatic event
as a Greek exit from the eurozone (called a Grexit
by the financial market). Moreover, a Grexit
would not only deal a devastating blow to Europe
but to the whole world. A Grexit would take place
in the following four steps:
(1) The radical left-wing coalition Syrizza will
become so influential in Greek politics the country
will no longer be capable of carrying out an austerity
program.
(2) The eurozone will suspend fiscal assistance
to Greece, and the Greek government will declare
a default on its sovereign debts.
(3) The ECB will stop providing loans to Greece
against collateral in Greek sovereign bonds.
(4) Euro banknotes will virtually vanish in
Greece, with the remaining euro-denominated
funds used to pay for imports of oil and other
necessities. The Greeks will be forced to use an
alternative currency for domestic transactions.
This event would be catastrophic for Greece.
Syrizza, however, says the eurozone cannot afford
to allow the country to leave, so it will keep
providing fiscal support.
The current situation in Europe is so precarious
and vulnerable that even in this outrageous
statement there seems to be some truth. The
vulnerability of the current eurozone situation stems
from the fact that the banking system in Spain is
on the verge of collapse. A major bank, Bankia,
which came into being after the merger of
regional banks saddled with nonperforming loans
due to the housing bubble, could go under at any
moment. Despite the announcement by the Spanish
government it will inject public money
amounting to \1.9 trillion, the share price of
Bankia continues to decline. The problem loans
held by Spain's banks, which stand at \18 trillion
now, are poised to snowball if the Spanish economy
deteriorates further under the burden of the
austerity budget.
And this is not all. The Spanish government is
now in the unenviable position of choosing between
saving public trust in its failing banking sector
and saving public trust in its own failing fiscal
order. In other words, it runs the risk of puncturing
its own creditworthiness by using public
money to rescue its banks. In the event of a Grexit,
investors are most likely to turn their backs on
Spain. Once Spain is engulfed in a full-scale
economic crisis, the next victim will be Italy.
Which country will fall victim to the eurozone crisis
after that?
Europe is on the razor-thin edge of success or
failure in its bid to forestall a chain reaction of
crises, a situation the eurozone might not be able
to prevent even with a firewall built on the
strength of the bloc's haves and the ECB's
financial muscle.
The End
007
Marketing Insight fom A to Z
Introduction
by Philip Kotler
Today's central problem facing business is not a shortage of
goods but a shortage of customers. Most of the world's industries
can produce far more goods than the world's consumers can buy.
Overcapacity results from individual competitors projecting
a greater market share growth than is possible. If each company
projects a 10 percent growth in its sales and the total market
is growing by only 3 percent, the result is excess capacity.
This in turn leads to hypercompetition. Competitors, desperate
to attract customers, lower their prices and add giveaways.
These strategies ultimately mean lower margins, lower profits,
some failing companies, and more mergers and acquisitions.
Marketing is the answer to how to compete on bases other
than price. Because of overcapacity, marketing has become more
important than ever. Marketing is the company's customer
manufacturing department.
But marketing is still a terribly misunderstood subject
in business circles and in the public's mind. Companies think
that marketing exists to help manufacturing get rid of the
company's products. The truth is the reverse, that manufacturing
exists to support marketing. A company can always outsource
its manufacturing. What makes a company prosper is its marketing
ideas and offerings. Manufacturing, purchasing, research and
development (R&D), finance, and other company functions exist
to support the company's work in the customer marketplace.
Marketing is too often confused with selling. Marketing and
selling are almost opposites. "Hard-sell marketing" is
a contradiction. Long ago I said: "Marketing is not the art
of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. Marketing
is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art
of helping your customers become better off. The marketer's
watchwords are quality, service, and value."
Selling starts only when you have a product. Marketing
starts before a product exists. Marketing is the homework
your company does to figure out what people need and what
your company should offer. Marketing determines how to launch,
price, distribute, and promote your product/service offerings
to the marketplace. Marketing then monitors the results and
improves the offering over time. Marketing also decides
if and when to end an offering.
All said, marketing is not a short-term selling effort
but a long-term investment effort. When marketing is done well,
it occurs before the company makes any product or enters any
market; and it continues long after the sale.
Lester Wunderman, of direct marketing fame, contrasted
selling to marketing in the following way: "The chant of
the Industrial Revolution was that of the manufacturer
who said, 'This is what I make, won't you please buy it?'
The call of the Information Age is the consumer asking,
'This is what I want, won't you please make it?' "
Marketing hopes to understand the target customer so well
that selling isn't necessary. Peter Drucker held that
"the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous."
Mark - eting is the ability to hit the mark.
Yet there are business leaders who say, "We can't waste
time on marketing. We haven't designed the product yet."
Or "We are too successful to need marketing, and if we were
unsuccessful, we couldn't afford it." I remember being phoned
by a CEO: "Come and teach us some of your marketing stuff -
my sales just dropped by 30 percent."
Here is my definition of marketing: Marketing management is
the art and science of choosing target markets and getting,
keeping, and growing customers through creating, communicating,
and delivering superior customer value.
Or if you like a more detailed definition: "Marketing is the
business function that identifies unfulfilled needs and wants,
defines and measures their magnitude and potential profitability,
determines which target markets the organization can best serve,
decides on appropriate products, services, and programs to serve
these chosen markets, and calls upon everyone in the
organization to think and serve the customer."
In short, marketing's job is to convert people's changing
needs into profitable opportunities. Marketing's aim is to create
value by offering superior solutions, saving buyer search and
transaction time and effort, and delivering to the whole society
a higher standard of living.
Marketing practice today must go beyond a fixation on
transactions that often leads to a sale today and a lost customer
tomorrow. The marketer's goal is to build a mutually profitable
long-term relationship with its customers, not just sell a product.
A business is worth no more than the lifetime value of its customers.
This calls for knowing your customers well enough to deliver
relevant and timely offers, services, and messages that meet
their individual needs.
The function of marketing is typically organized as a
department within a business. This is good and bad. It's good
because it brings together a number of skilled people with specific
abilities for understanding, serving, and satisfying customers.
It's bad because other departments believe that all marketing
is done in one department. As the late David Packard of
Hewlett-Packard observed, "Marketing is much too important
to leave to the marketing department.... In a truly great marketing
organization, you can't tell who's in the marketing department.
Everyone in the organization has to make decisions based on the
impact on the customer."
The same thought was well-stated by Professor Philippe Naert:
"You will not obtain the real marketing culture by hastily
creating a marketing department or team, even if you appoint
extremely capable people to the job. Marketing begins with top
management. If top management is not convinced of the need to
be customer minded, how can the marketing idea be accepted
and implemented by the rest of the company ? "
Marketing is not restricted to a department that creates ads,
selects media, sends out direct mail, and answers customer questions.
Marketing is a larger process of systematically figuring out what to
make, how to bring it to the customer's attention and easy access,
and how to keep the customer wanting to buy more from you.
Furthermore, marketing strategy and actions are not only played
out in customer markets. For example, your company also has to raise
money from investors. As a result you need to know how to market to
investors. You also want to attract talent to your company. So you
need to develop a value proposition that will attract the most able
people to join your company. Whether marketing to customers,
investors, or talent, you need to understand their needs and wants
and present a competitively superior value proposition to win
their favor.
Is marketing hard to learn? The good news is that marketing
takes a day to learn. The bad news is that it takes a lifetime
to master! But even the bad news can be looked at in a positive way.
I take inspiration from Warren Bennis' remark: "Nothing gives me
a greater joy than learning something new." (Mr. Bennis is
Distinguished Professor at the University of California and
prominent writer on leadership.)
The good news is that marketing will be around forever. The bad
news: It won't be the way you learned it. In the coming decade,
marketing will be reengineered from A to Z. I have chosen
to highlight 80 of the most critical concepts and ideas that
businesspeople need in waging their battles in this hypercompetitive
and rapidly changing marketplace.
The End
008
Mr Bo Xilai to lose Congress seat
as China prepares charges
BBC News, 29 September 2012
Top politician Bo Xilai is to be stripped of his seat
in China's national legislature, state media say,
paving the way for criminal charges. National legislators
are generally immune from prosecution,but Mr Bo's Chongqing
municipality has asked for his removal from the Congress.
Mr Bo was expelled from the Communist Party on Friday,
accused of abuse of power and corruption.His wife was given
a suspended death sentence for murdering a UK national.
In August, Gu Kailai was found guilty of murdering British
businessman Neil Heywood in November 2011.
The scandal has overshadowed the party congress that will
oversee China's change of leadership, which is expected
to see Xi Jinping replace Hu Jintao as president. It will
begin on 8 November.
Before the scandal broke, 63-year-old Mr Bo had been a prime
candidate for a top post.China's state media earlier warned
that no-one, no matter what rank, would be immune from
Communist Party discipline.
On Saturday, the official Xinhua news agency said
the Standing Committee of the Chongqing Municipal People's
Congress had decided to remove Mr Bo from his official post
as deputy to the national legislature - the 11th National
People's Congress.
The National Congress is expected to confirm the decision,
clearing the way for criminal charges, as national legislators
have immunity from prosecution or arrest unless special
approval is given.
Mr Bo is then expected to face charges of corruption,
abuse of power, bribe-taking and improper relations with women.
The BBC's Martin Patience, in Beijing, says Mr Bo's career
is over and he will almost certainly spend time in jail.
Xinhua earlier said that the Communist Party must recognise
the "perennial, complex and arduous nature of the
anti-corruption fight".The battle against corruption should
be given a more prominent place on its agenda, Xinhua reported,
"leaving no room for corrupt figures to hide within the party".
'Huge bribes'
Mr Bo has not been seen in public since mid-March, shortly
after the scandal erupted and it was announced he was under
investigation. He was suspended from his party posts in April.
Xinhua said Mr Bo "took advantage of his office to seek profits
for others and received huge bribes personally and through
his family".
Chinese social media reaction
It added: "Bo's behaviour brought serious consequences,
badly undermined the reputation of the party and the country,
created very negative impact at home and abroad and significantly
damaged the cause of the party and people."
Xinhua said the violations included Mr Bo's time as an official
in Dalian and Liaoning provinces, and as minister of commerce.
"Bo had affairs and maintained improper sexual relationships
with a number of women," the statement added.
Xinhua said Mr Bo had been expelled from the party and the
elite decision-making Politburo and Central Committee as he had
"abused his power, made severe mistakes and bore major
responsibility in the Wang Lijun incident and the intentional
homicide case of [Gu Kailai]".
Wang Lijun was Chongqing's former police chief who was
sentenced to 15 years in jail for ''bending the law, defection,
abuse of power and bribetaking" in the Neil Heywood case.
The End
009
Other firms must learn
from Sharp's setback
The Yomiuri Shimbun, Sept. 30, 2012,EDITORIALS
Even a company with cutting-edge technology and
a strong brand will founder if it makes a mistake
in the selection and concentration of its business.
The setback of Sharp Corp., dubbed a giant of liquid
crystal display panels, is a warning for the Japanese
manufacturing industry.
Amid a financial crisis, Sharp has compiled
a rehabilitation plan centering on cutting more than
10,000 jobs and selling its television factories abroad.
Highly evaluating the plan, Sharp's main financing banks
have decided to extend a total of \360 billion in loans
to the electrical appliance company.
This has temporarily settled Sharp's cash-flow
concerns and helped it move a step closer to overcoming
its management crisis.
Until several years ago, Sharp enjoyed outstanding
business results because of the popularity of its LCD
television sets manufactured at its Kameyama plant
in Mie Prefecture, known as Kameyama models.
However, amid the yen's soaring appreciation and
the weak won, South Korean companies have become more
competitive and captured the global market of LCD panels
and TV sets, displacing Sharp as the world's leading
manufacturer of those products. The marked decline
in prices of LCD panels and other products also
hurt Sharp.
Overconfidence causes mistake
Sharp spent a huge amount of money three years ago
on construction of a state-of-the-art factory in Sakai,
Osaka Prefecture, to manufacture large LCD panels.
But sales did not grow as much as expected, and
the factory only worsened earnings results.
The firm declared record losses in its consolidated
financial settlement for the business year ending
in March, and huge losses are expected in the current term, too.
Success of the Kameyama plant apparently led
to overconfidence, causing Sharp to go astray in
planning its business strategy.
This shows the grim reality that even a prestigious
company with a history of 100 years can be forced
to drastically restructure its business.
First, Sharp must quickly enhance areas of its
speciality including small and midsize LCD panels
for smartphones, the market of which is expected to grow,
and home electric appliances and copying machines.
Another key factor in profitability is whether
the firm can capture markets in emerging economies.
Optimism is out of the question for Sharp, and
speed will be a decisive factor in overhauling the company.
Attention will now turn to partnership negotiations
between Sharp and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.,
a major contracted manufacturer in Taiwan.
In March, Hon Hai agreed to maintain a ratio of
investment in Sharp of 9.9 percent. After the price of
Sharp's stock plunged, the companies began renegotiating
the partnership, but the talks have made little headway.
Competition in global market
Sharp desperately needs measures to further enhance
its financial foundation through a partnership with Hon Hai
and boost global sales of small and midsize LCD panels
and other products. We hope Sharp will sign an agreement with
Hon Hai as soon as possible. However, Sharp
must be very wary of the outflow of its most advanced
technology.
Japan's manufacturing industry, including
electrical appliance manufacturers, are facing the
yen's soaring appreciation and intensified global
competition. Japanese firms must learn a lesson
from Sharp's case and strengthen their competitiveness
by developing strategic products that anticipate
changing market demand and exploiting growing markets.
The government also has an important role to
play in supporting the nation's industry. The government
must curb the yen's appreciation and
try to secure a stable supply of electricity by reactivating
nuclear power reactors around the
country. It also must initiate active trade policies
such as Japan's early participation in negotiations
over the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact.
The End
010
Spotlighting violence and vandalism
Japanese politicians, diplomats and businesspeople
should prepare for friction and.confrontation
with China over a prolonged period
By Masayuki Yamauchi
Yamauchi is a professor at Meiji University and
a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo,
specializing in modern Islamic and Middle Eastern
history and international relations.
The waves of violent disturbances in the Muslim
world and China have shown us how disproportionate
the exercise of the right to freedom of expression
can be.
A U.S.-made film that depicts Islam's Prophet
Mohammed as an immoral person has infuriated
the Muslim world. In Libya, where Arab Spring
uprisings earlier terminated Moammar Gaddafi's
four-decade dictatorial rule, the U.S. ambassador
and other officials were killed during furious
protests over the film.
Closer to home, China's anger over Japan's
nationalization of the Senkaku Islands in Okinawa
Prefecture resulted in anti-Japan violence.
Although no Japanese were killed, Chinese protesters
damaged Japan-China joint ventures and Japanese
subsidiaries, both of which have contributed to
the development of the Chinese economy. The violence
in the Muslim world and China has something in common.
First, the prevalence of social media such as
the Internet has enabled violence and hatred to
instantly spread across the relevant communities.
Secondly, we have witnessed the existence of
"enclosed freedom," by which I mean situations
where acts of violence and vandalism are tolerated
by authorities as long as popular anger is directed
only at the values and policies of foreign countries.
In the case of China, "enclosed freedom" means
the Chinese are free to take to the streets to
protest against Japan, but their freedom of expression
will be quickly suppressed if the demonstrations
threaten to develop into criticism of the Chinese Communist
Party leadership's wealth and privileges, or overt complaints
about the income gap between rich and poor and high
unemployment.
A similar situation exists in the Middle East,
where people are allowed to exercise the right to
freedom of expression and behave without restriction
as long as their protests are aimed at Israel.
However, poor young people in some countries
in the region became fed up with "enclosed
freedom" and eventually embarked on uprisings
to oust dictators.
On the other hand, it is impossible to accept
taking advantage of freedom of expression to ridicule
Muslims for their reverence of the Prophet Mohammed.
Freedom of expression or speech should not fan
hatred, racism and contempt. An Egyptian Coptic
Christian living in the United States is alleged to
have promoted the anti-Islam film. Like the Danish
illustrators of cartoons that offended Muslims
in the 2000s, the producer of the film lacks prudence.
While he pretended to praise the considerable
tolerance for criticism of the host society,
which ensures his safety, he treated with disdain
the piety of the poor and underprivileged.
However, some extremists in the Muslim world
should be condemned for instigating violence.
It is repulsive that U.S. diplomats -who had nothing
to do with the production of the anti-Islam film -
were indiscriminately murdered merely because
they were Americans. What happened in Benghazi
is a transgression against Islam's beliefs.
Compared with the Muslim world's violence
against United States and Europe, the recent
vandalism at Japanese diplomatic missions and
businesses in China is more serious in at least
one way, as it was carried out under the apparent
guidance of the Chinese government. In the 1990s,
then Chinese President Jiang Zemin introduced
a new guideline on "patriotic education" -
namely the intensification of anti-Japan lessons
for primary, middle and high school students
across the country. As a result, a psychological
structure is in place in China with its "enclosed
freedom" permitting violence and vandalism against
Japanese symbols.
The Chinese leadership also seems to be deliberately
diverting its people's attention away from political
reform and toward anti-Japan campaigns. This is to prevent
the Chinese people's dissatisfaction with and grudges
against the leadership and other matters from giving
rise to an "Arab Spring" movement in China.
Difference between regions
In the Muslim world, no matter how furious
Islamists are with the United States and Europe,
it is rare for foreign diplomatic missions, companies
and factories to be damaged by rioters,
as in the case of China. The difference reflects
the extent to which authorities are involved
in mobilizing masses in campaigns against
foreign countries.
The recent series of popular protests in China
has proved that violence and vandalism could be
endless if the authorities did not control its
"enclosed freedom." In that regard, the recent
anti-Japan campaigns can be said to be closer
to a "rebellion" - the term the Chinese authorities
used to describe the Tiananmen Square Incident
of 1989 -than to demonstrations.
The protests against Japan might have developed
into a "rebellion" against the Chinese Communist
Party were it not for the party congress and
leadership change scheduled for this autumn and
Beijing's order to halt anti-Japan protests.
If China's current leadership, which has failed to
protect its neighbor's people and property on its soil,
tries to organize mass mobilizations against
opponents in a power struggle within the party or
against Japan, it will lose respect as the world's
second largest economy in terms of gross domestic
product. This kind of approach brings to mind
the actions of Mao Zedong and other first-generation
Chinese revolutionaries.
Undaunted by the possibility of being labeled
"rebels," anti-Japan protesters asserted themselves
because of a theory peculiar to China・
"Whatever you do out of patriotism, you will be
pardoned." Under the Chinese education system
and imbued with its ideology, protesters not only
behaved arrogantly but expressed repugnance
against the Japanese.
China's particular theory of pardoning people
for patriotic excesses openly supports a historical
perception that justifies the Chinese people's hatred
of the Japanese. Chinese people's actions done in the
name of such a theory appear to be akin to what are
recognized as hate crimes in the United States, which
result in contempt for or attacks on specific races,
ethnic groups or religions. Therefore, it is appalling
that the Chinese authorities ignore violence and vandalism
against Japan and often take advantage of popular anger
for internal political purposes.
Of course, other countries ignore violence or
vandalism when specific foreign countries are targeted.
For instance, protests against the United States and
Europe often have turned violent not only in Libya but
also in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In contrast, the situation in Turkey, a Muslim country,
is different. The Turks also are devout Muslims and quite
sensitive to matters concerning the prophet and Islam.
However, there have been no major acts of violence in
Turkey in protest over the controversial film. If hate
crimes against Muslims occur, such hideous acts should
be denounced in speeches and nonviolent actions.
The national trait of Turkey - the acceptance of different
and plural opinions - is based on a set of factors such as
secularism (separation of religion and the state), multiparty
democracy guaranteeing regime change and the supremacy of
the government and parliament over the military.
A Turkish-style political environment permitting different
opinions and pluralism is hardly conceivable in China
under the dictatorial rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China
in 1949, violence and vandalism has cost the country
a tremendous number of lives, through such events as
the Great Leap Forward (an economic modernization campaign
that ended in famine), the Cultural Revolution,
the Tiananmen Square Incident and issues concerning
the Tibetans and other ethnic minorities. Against the
background of such major events, acts of violence and
vandalism in the anti-Japan demonstrations, backed by
the patriot-centric theory, may not seem extraordinary
from the Chinese standpoint.
In "Moralia," the ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch
wrote that if a person has the intention to express
loathing toward someone else, that person will feel slandered.
In other words, according to the sage, hatred is a reflection
of the intent - or the state of the mind - of a person to wait
for the right opportunity to blacken an opponent's name.
The idea that "hatred" is the intent to divert the people's
anger toward a particular opponent by blackening him or her
is precisely what China's "patriotic education" aimed
for. China has made sure its population always harbors ill
feelings toward Japan by spreading historically groundless
statistics and photographs, among other actions.
The Chinese people's hatred will almost certainly diminish
once China's social inequalities and income gap have been
rectified to the extent that they find peace of mind, joy in
life and become more composed. However, it will take some time
for such a favorable change to take place. Until then, China
will direct its people's anger toward Japan whenever it wants
to channel their discontent away from internal considerations.
Therefore, Japanese politicians, diplomats and businesspeople
should prepare for friction and.confrontation with China
over the long haul.
The End
英語と日本語とは音の性質が違う
－英語の音の違いを体得する
英語のパスバンド（主として使われる周波数）と日本語のパスバンドは
異なる。英語は２,０００ヘルツ以上の周波数が主として使われる。
日本語は１,５００ヘルツ以下の周波数が主である。
だから、日本人には英語の音が聞き取りにくいのである。
従って、英語コミュニケーション能力を体得するためには、まず、
主に２,０００ヘルツ以上で話される「英語を聞き取れる耳」を持つことが
必要になるのである。
大脳のなかに英語のウェルニッケ言語野を新しく作ることは、英語の
聞き取りや、英語の正しい発音のためにも必要である。
一般的に、英語のウェルニッケ言語野が大脳のなかになく、日本語の
ウェルニッケ言語野で、英文和訳・和文英訳をして英語を使っている場合、
Ｌ と Ｒ を、それぞれ明確に把握できない。従って正しく発音できないことが多い。
World や Girl や Cat や Dog の母音のように、日本語にない母音を
明確に区別して聞き取れない。従って、正しく発音できない。
the や or や and もキャッチできない。従って、正しく発音できない。
マレーネ・ディートリッヒのリリー・マルレーンの英語歌詞の中に
「When we are marching in the mud and cold」という一節がある。
この中の「mud and cold」を、筆者は永年、「マレンコウ」としか聞き取れなかった。
mudは日本語のマッドとは全然違う。 andは日本語のアンドとは全然違う。
coldは日本語のコールドとは全然違う。日本語脳では「mud and cold」を
まったく聞き取れないのは当然である。
さらに、英語では単語と連音節は違う。連音節を一つの単語として把握しなければ
聞き取れない。
You Tube:Lili Marlene Marlene Dietrich (English Version) At the Cafe De Paris 1954
従って、自分の話す英語が米国人に理解されないという英語教員がかなり存在する。
自分では正しい英語の発音と思っている発音が、英語でも日本語でもない
というわけである。
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Materials to Create an English Brain by the Copy-Writing Method
２．毎日コピー英作文法実践で英語脳を創る②
３．毎日コピー英作文法実践で英語脳を創る③
４．毎日コピー英作文法実践で英語脳を創る④
５．毎日コピー英作文法実践で英語脳を創る⑤
６．毎日コピー英作文法実践で英語脳を創る⑥