My comments on COVID-19, Part 1:An Opportunity to Overturn 30 Years of Defeat

■My comments on COVID-19, Part 1:An Opportunity to Overturn 30 Years of Defeat

Earth is trapped. People die, they can't have funerals, and they cry. They have no one to take their anger out on. The economy collapses. People hang on to God. They sing. COVID-19 has spread to more areas than the plague in the 14th century and cholera in the 19th century. More areas are affected by the virus than those affected by the two world wars. Since the end of World War II, there have been nuclear threats, regional conflicts, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and typhoons. After somehow coping with these crises, the human race has been faced with a plague.

How to suppress the invisible enemy? No, maybe it is not supposed to be the one we should fight against. Like a cold or the flu, it may be the one we have to come to terms with and live with. The plague epidemic killed 20% of the world's population at the time. I hope it doesn't come to that.

On the other hand, I wonder. If we assume that the coronavirus kills 20% of the economy. If we lost 20% of our current economy, would 20% of us die as well? That is definitely not going to happen. GDP is now 550 trillion yen, and 450 trillion yen, 20% less, was in 1990, during the bubble economy. At that time, we were happier than we thought we were. Weren’t we rich at that time? The bursting of the bubble didn't depress me too much. I think it would be good to prepare ourselves for such a fall.

Let's calm down for a moment.

But I never realized that the world was still so disconnected. I am not talking about a dispute where Trump used abusive languages against China and China fought back. I am talking about how each country works in their own system. China's dictatorial regime has imposed a thorough lockdown and introduced facial recognition technology to track people. France, with its presidential system, also has strict curfews. Even with the same presidential system, the United States of America has many regional differences. The United Kingdom, which has a parliamentary system of government like Japan, tried to take its own route by obtaining group immunity, but Prime Minister Johnson himself was hospitalized with the coronavirus infection. In India, police officers make people going outside do push-ups. I am not sure what is going on in Russia. 

We don’t know which mechanism works for the coronavirus. We don't know that yet. However, this is a global experiment in politics and crisis management in which many testbeds of success and failure are running simultaneously. We don't have time to wait for the results of other countries to respond. What will be the legacy of this multidimensional experiment in the coming global crisis?

For Japan, this is the first nationwide crisis since its defeat in World War II, surpassing that of 3.11 earthquake in Japan. It is still too early to evaluate, but I see that Japan is hanging in there. Whether it's the death toll, social turmoil, or economic decline, I think we can say that the situation in Japan is better than other countries. This country, which is a defeated nation and has not given much power to politics is not able to implement a lockdown fortunately or unfortunately. Convenience stores are open, and joggers are outside running.

How much we can contain the virus depends on self-restraint and surmising, meaning reading what someone is implying the effectiveness of such airy "requests" from the national and local governments depends on how much the people who accept those requests and how much they implement them and how much they discipline themselves. Self-restraint, self-restraint, self-restraint. surmising, surmising, surmising We have no choice but to rely on these two reading-the-room habits, the main culprits that have shrunk Japan in the Heisei era.

A timing of declaring a state of emergency is too late. The amount of fiscal spending in the emergency economic stimulus package which directly go to people is very small. Reduce the consumption tax to zero. Hand out face masks. Don't give out face masks, they're too expensive. The government and the Tokyo metropolitan government should have made proper arrangements in advance.

I hear the loud voices of the people. I hear it a lot. I guess everyone relies on their government. I guess everyone trusts them. I guess the government is doing a good job.

Now, the problem is digitalization.

The fact that we have managed to hold on to our system without collapsing is probably a result of our training in sharing information through SNS and the Internet. Both 9.11 attack and 3.11earhquake were local incidents. The coronavirus is the first global crisis since the spread of smartphones and social media. There are many fake news and disinformation in the information space, but I think the information space is filled with more counter-coronavirus operations than those. Digital wants to be useful for counter-coronavirus measures.

And this could be a good thing for Japan. Japan has been losing in IT field for 30 years. This may be an opportunity to overturn that. Rather than that, we have no choice but to take advantage of the coronavirus as a last chance. There are some sectors that will be directly affected, such as food service, tourism, and entertainment, and I am really concerned that industry and culture may be destroyed. On the other hand, there are industries such as e-commerce, video distribution, and online games that are booming with special demand for internet related consumption due to their stay home time. This is an opportunity to raise the B2C ratio of 6% in e-commerce to 20%, on par with China. This is also an opportunity to take a 5-billion-yen e-sports market and make it as popular as Korea's and grow it into a 70-billion-yen market.

Telework had been expected to be implemented for 30 years but had not progressed. It has finally become a reality. It will give a boost to the use of IT in industry. According to a survey by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry, three quarters of companies are unable to implement telework. It just means that those companies have done almost nothing for a quarter of a century since the spread of IT. If you try, you can do it if you don't, you will die.

And it is time for the three areas that have lagged behind, government, healthcare, and education, to leap at the digital first bandwagon.

The government finally made up its mind to accept the challenge and began to hold meetings remotely. I've seen some scenes where the bureaucrats are sloppy with their controls, but it's just a trivial thing at which we can smile. They will be used to it soon. The super-hard bedrock of medical care also moved a bit, allowing for online initial consultations.

Above all, it is education that will make a breakthrough this time. The situation will change drastically since measures such as achieving 1 PC per person and facilitating the processing of copyrights for online educational materials are included in the emergency economic stimulus package. Up until six months ago, I had been lamenting that Japan's educational informatization was the lowest in the OECD and below that of developing countries. I want to say to myself at that time “There are bad things, but good things will also happen.”

Overcoming coronavirus predicament at the same time, let's use it as leverage to achieve the digital first, which we haven't been able to do for 30 years, and make it a legacy.