 Welcome back to Think Tech, I'm Jay Fiedel here on A Given Home Monday, and we're looking to the east today with Steve Zercher at Kansai Gaidai University in Kobe, Japan. We always need to look at the east, because we here in Hawaii have a better perception of the east than other places in the world. Japan is very positive for us, but Japan is having a big problem with coronavirus these days. Can you give us a little praisey on how the chart has moved up and down and down and up lately? Yeah, so we're under a state of national emergency now in Japan, so the Prime Minister decided to announce that a week or so ago, and that gave the local governments, initially it was in seven regions, the ability to issue edicts that people do stay in place and businesses close. So basically what you and Hawaii have been going through for what it's been about a month or so now, I believe, is now in place. Initially it was just for part of the country where most of the virus infections had been growing. And then a few days ago, the Prime Minister announced it for the entire country. So the entire country now is under a stay in place recommendation, and businesses are being encouraged to shorten their hours or in some case only have food be available on a delivery basis, like again in Hawaii, that happened just as I was leaving in March in Hawaii. Unfortunately though, the infection rates are still by Japanese standard, still increasing quite significantly on the order of three to four hundred a day, sometimes as high as five or six hundred. So even though we have been under this new regimen now for a fairly decent amount of time, the flattening of the curve as we've seen in other countries is not yet occurring. So it's still unknown whether or not we'll be able as a country to flatten the curve and have the infection rates go down to a manageable number and one at which the government would feel comfortable and people would feel comfortable opening up the schools again and being opening up the businesses again and so forth. So what's the hole in the boat Steve? Something is wrong. Something is wrong. These methods should be working. You should be able to flatten the curve if you have a well organized and enforced quarantine arrangement. Something is a problem. What is it? That's a good question. The recommendations, these statements from the government are non-mandatory. So even though in general Japanese people, Japanese culture is more obedient and more likely to follow statements from the government, there are businesses and people who are still going out and about and still conducting themselves in a way that they had been doing before the national emergency had been stated. Also it's hard to tell because there may be a legacy influence. These infections may be occurring because of infections or transmission that occurred a couple of weeks ago before the national emergency had actually begun or started. So the expectation is that those numbers will begin to go down as they have in other countries. But if they don't, it will be because the adherence to these rules are still not 100%. I would say probably 70% being followed, but that last 30% is still open. Why isn't the government order, they shut down? Another good question, Jay, you're on your game today, so as usual. There's two reasons for that. One is the same thing that you experience in the United States. There's a reluctance on the part of the government to be too overly controlling on this because the influence on business would be so severe. There's always that question, if we move to a total shutdown, then the economy will get even worse than we know it is right now. And then also as a part of the nature of Japanese government, they do not actually, they claim to not have the right to order that. They can only recommend. They can only say, this is what we think you should do. And in most cases, that's sufficient. They don't have the right at a national level and also at a regional level to issue the mandate. They probably can do that if they want to, but they're saying that they cannot do that, so they're resistant or reluctant to do that. You know what tells me, I'll tell you what it tells me. Is it in the past, even within your years of teaching at Kobe? If the government said something, even asking for voluntary compliance, people were very likely to do it because that's the basic Japanese culture point. That's the way it works, you respect the people and authority. But things have changed. That's what it tells me. And that a few years later, the government makes a quote suggestion and everybody wants to follow it. They have changed. They have changed in their relation to the government. There's a sense of individualism. There's a sense of the societal fabric. That's what I get out of what you just said. That could be a part of it. There could be an evolution of the perception of the role of government and the willingness to adhere to these recommendations. Another factor too is that there's certain cultural traps that this is exposing. One of them has to do with how business is conducted in Japan. But we talked about this in previous shows that Japanese employees are measured by the amount of time they spend in the office generally. There's a strong preference for people to work in the company and telework is something that's really not utilized very much in this country. Now, since the crisis has begun, there's been a lot of encouragement on the part of government and also by companies as well, some of them, to have the employees stay at home and do their work remotely. And that's having some effect at the commuting on the trains. You can see that the number of people are down, but still the trains are crowded during the work hours. So why is that? There's still this preference that if you're not in the office, you're not doing work. It's really not possible to do work outside of the office. And one small example of this that I talked with you before we started rolling on this is the use of a chop or the, it's called a Japanese honko. So it's required for business documents to be officially approved. That it has to go through a series of stamps by various offices. And this is done by an individual who has control of his individual honko or chop and only he or she has the ability to do that. So even if the employees want to stay at home, oftentimes they have to go to work in order to carry out that particular process, which is deeply embedded in Japanese business culture. And even though there's lots of software products that can simulate this, there's hundreds of them. Many Japanese companies have started this up. There's still this preference for this process to be done in person. That the sense is if it's not done in person, it's not official. So that's causing people to work. These are holes in the boat. And we'll talk about how they might be changing. But the changes are not sufficient to flatten the curve. And so I give you a prediction. I give you a prediction that whatever is coming down from the government is not sufficient to make people voluntarily comply. The curve will not be flattened or not sufficiently flattened. There'll be more cases, more deaths. And after a while, there'll be a blame game. And Abe won't last in office. And then somebody else will come in and say, no, you've got to stay home. You really have to. And then the curve will come down. That's tragic because it means that the cases between now and then, the deaths between now and then are not necessary. And the Japanese are learning the hard way. So are the Americans, by the way, would make a big difference there. Right, I think the approach to the crisis is similar between the two countries. That there's not been a clear strategy. And even when the stay in place announcements are made, they're not adhered to. So the government's vacillating somewhat on this. And also, it varies by region. So maybe the governor of one region will be more active and encouraging businesses in a stronger way to try and shut down. But where I live, for example, the governor is less active. So if he doesn't want to influence business negatively. So it's that, again, business versus health. Well, what do people in Japan think about? The contention that's going on now between business versus health. Between Trump's demand that everybody return to business, is inciting the right wing and Republican crowd to go protest and protest to open the economy up again. What do people in Japan think about that? They must have interesting reactions to that. That is being reported, but I think it's perceived as a fringe element. And certainly none of that is happening here. So one thing that Japan doesn't have is this kind of, they're fringe parties and especially on the far right. And every once in a while, you'll see them in the public. But in general, that type of activity doesn't occur. The role of religion, for example, in government is much less reduced. As opposed to the United States where evangelical groups have a lot of political influence, a lot of political power. So when it comes to the Trump people that kind of overlaps between politically right wing and then religious. So Japan doesn't have that. That type of reaction is not occurring here. So I think my impression would be if people here read about that type of activity, they just think that that's some kind of strange idiosyncrasy of the American political system. Well, it is. Can't imagine that. They were accurately, that's an accurate perception. Yeah, that's not happening here. I mean, people may not be happy with this and they may be breaking the rules. But they're not protesting. There's not a sense of, I think in general, people believe that the government has muddled, has not done this in a clear and comprehensive way. But they're making the best efforts and that generally they're doing the right thing to try and reduce the health impact. What about the technology? Japan's a very innovative place, a very robust kind of technology culture. You would think, and I know you have some examples of this, that there is movement. That there are things that are happening in the daily life in Japan that wouldn't have happened before. And then people are getting off old culture points and onto more innovative ones because of the virus. Can you talk about that? Yeah, yeah. So I'm within my micro environment as a dean at Kansai Gaidai University. I've been at the school for almost 10 years. I'm very familiar. I've grown accustomed to how things are run or managed. It's usually in a very slow, incremental way. Whenever I had made requests for changes in the past, usually the administration, I'm never quite sure who makes these decisions or how they're done. But the answer is generally no. But to my delight, I've discovered that in the last two months, as the department that I managed moved from in-class education to Zoom, like we're doing right now, education, that the administration recognizes that we're in kind of a special situation. And my requests for changes, like for example, processing expenses, in the past that had always been done in person, J, literally, you have to fill out a form and paper, submit it, get it approved, then you go by your file folders or whatever that may be, then you get the receipt and the file folders and you take them to the office that processes this and you show them the receipt and you show them the product that you bought. Can you believe that? This is how it works. So I sent a note a couple of days ago to the people who manage this and say, hey, look, we're being told not to come to campus. We can't show you the receipts. We can't show you the file folders or the paper. Can we do this digitally? And they said, oh, that's a very good suggestion, Steve. And we'll think about that in the back. So there are these types of accommodations that are occurring because I guess Japan recognizes, again, this is a micro level, but I think you can apply this to the country as a whole, that we need to do things differently. And sometimes it's really resulting in positive improvements, which should have been done years and years and years ago. Like the honko, the stamp that I talked about earlier, that should have been eliminated decades ago. But now it's clear that it has to go. So another example is that professors in the past have not been able to access the database resources, like JSTOR, for example, unless they were in the library. Oh, you cannot do research unless you're physically within the walls of the library. You cannot do it from home and log in. So I made that request a few days ago. Two hours, they said, OK, we can do it. Before, I was always told no. So this is one thing that's occurring underneath this crisis, which I think maybe will bode well for Japan once we get out of this six months from now, whatever it may be. Yeah, I think that's happening in the US, too, that sort of thing. I have similar examples to give you. But I noticed that these things we're talking about, both you and me, these things are not profound economic changes. They're not changes that deal with large concentrations of capital or sweeping differences in the way our capital structure operates. And at the end of the day, I just want to keep my eyes on this, and I'm sure you want to keep your eyes on it. We know we're going to be different. We know whether it's we're out of here in three months or six months or a year, we know it's all going to be different. Health care, for example, we know that it's sweeping. But the question is whether it'll be better or whether it will be more difficult to achieve a quality of life, whether we'll eat better, sleep better, be able to do the things we want to do, and whether our government will function better. Actually, I feel that it wouldn't be too hard for our government to function better here in these United States. That would be easy. Anything that happens would make that easy. But I think the changes could be really profound, and not just a matter of whether you need a chop, but changes that involve everything, all of our relationships with each other, with the material world, with the government, with other countries, with cultures. And that makes it through such an exciting time, although it's a little dangerous too. What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, I have that feeling as well that through a crisis, positive change can occur. Of course, nobody wants this to be happening because so many people are getting sick, and unfortunately, many people are dying. But if you step back from that and take a look at how society is being affected by this, and it is, I think the major point, Jay, is that it's putting people into a state of thinking or being open to change and to doing things in a different way. So one small example is in Japan right now, if you're in grammar school, you have no access to computers at all, which is remarkable, right? So my children who are going to Japanese schools for their grammar school days never saw a computer in school at all. And then we put them into international school into seventh grade, and it's required that they have a computer. And my boys are just shocked about that, right? So Japan had been planning for many, many years to introduce technology into the grammar school level, to have every child in school in Japan have a computer, which is a good thing, right? I mean, because that's the world that they'll be living in for the rest of their lives. It's always talked about and pushed into the future. But because of this crisis, it's going to happen now. Japan recognizes through this crisis that they're behind when it comes to introducing technology and having Japanese children grow up with it. So it's something that they feel comfortable using and will then therefore accommodate change on a faster basis using technology. So that set of macro level, we're talking big investment there and a huge impact on how Japanese education is carried out because of the crisis that the window for that, which is always like two or three years from now, every year, it was two or three years from now as we go forward, is happening now. The government is going to pass regulations and allow this to occur through this crisis. So that's a macro example of a fundamental change that will occur to society and have tremendous impact on business, whoever provides the computers, if it's Apple or somebody else, it's gonna be huge. Yeah, well, crises tend to reveal the inside of things. And you remind me of the mass arrests in Hong Kong these days over the weekend where the PRC arrested the Democrat, the democracy leaders, including what's his name, Martin Lee over there, which is really an astounding thing to do in the middle of a crisis. And the Chinese government has really not been up to a high moral plane on dealing with the crisis. They've made it hard for people unnecessarily so. And now, diverting everything to a really negative move in Hong Kong, why? It's hard to believe that they're doing this, but I can't imagine why. And I only mention this to say that there will be people who take advantage of the crisis. There will be opportunists, including political leaders who will use it for their own advantage. Some say that Trump is doing exactly that. So at the end of the day, it's hard to say who prevails, the good guys or the ones who the opportunists. Yeah, I think that this crisis in Japan is also exposing some of the weaknesses in the leadership. We've had the same prime minister now for many, many years, prime minister Abe. And through, I would say primarily manipulation of the media and the use of political propaganda, not really based on results, but more on perception of results, he's been able to maintain popularity and control. But through the crisis, there's a big growing frustration with his lack of leadership. And sometimes he acts totally independent of others, makes decisions just on his own. And it's beginning to frustrate his coalition partners and also his popularity is beginning to go down. So at a macro level, what you're talking about, I mean, not the surveillance of people, what you're talking about in Hong Kong, but at a macro level, there may be a significant change in the Japanese government as a result of this crisis. And again, to get to your question, who will take his place? Will it be someone who can lead Japan forward? You know, Abe is more of a reactionary type of leader. He's thinking about more about the glories of Japan in the past. This is my perception, but Japan needs a progressive open-minded, courageous leader to move it to the next level. Otherwise, Japan as a country will sink from number three in the world to number four, five, six, seven, you know, it will drop down on the top 10 list of major economies. You can see that happening unless there's greater strength of leadership. So the crisis is creating the opportunity for maybe someone to come in who's like that, but I can tell you that probably we won't get someone like that. We'll get someone who's more or less similar to what we have right now. I'm sorry to hear that. What about the young people? I hate to be cynical about it. What about the young people that you run into in Kansai Gaidai University? The Japanese now, I'm not talking about the international crowd. Right. The Japanese, what are they like? They're sensitive to these issues. Are they aware of the possibilities? Are they thinking about becoming more influential in the society there? Where are the leaders coming from? Yeah, I don't have a sense of what they're thinking now because I'm not seeing them face to face anymore. We stopped that in the beginning of March. So it's been six, seven weeks now. I'm interacting with them, but it's through digital means. So I don't have a sense of that. Before that though, my sense was that the Japanese, and this is not, unfortunately, this is not a positive thing to say. They're apolitical, generally. And when they do express their preference on politics, it tends to be quite conservative, which is kind of counter to how youth is generally perceived. Younger people are tended, like in America, they're Bernie supporters and so forth, predominantly. My nephew in Hawaii was so disappointed when Bernie pulled out. I mean, he was apolitical up until Bernie appeared, and all of a sudden he became, hey, I really like this guy. This guy's good and he was depressed. I don't see that type of level of political engagement, generally, in the student state. When I asked him about what's going on, this is a pre-crisis. Have you read about this? And generally the answer is no. Well, it's a lot of people, not people in the U.S., a lot of kids like that here in Hawaii. And it's regrettable because now is the time we need them. And not to be ideologues about it, but just to be informed. But you raised one other question I'd like to ask you, we only have a minute left here. That is, so you have been engaged, and many faculty around the world have been engaged with your students online, on Zoom. And that's a different paradigm, it's a different way of teaching, different way of getting response. But it strikes me that inherent in what you're saying is that, although Zoom has Zoom-type programs, have a really powerful technological leverage in teaching students and in doing the classroom, so to speak. There are things that you miss, also. Maybe you can't provoke, engage, get their reactions, teach them, open their minds possibly in the same way as if you were flesh and blood. What do you think? Yeah, that is the observation of the professor so far. So we're kind of a small case study because we were teaching in class, we started classes in late January, so we went late January through February in person. And then like that, Abe made an announcement that all classroom engagement had stopped. So we switched over. And I met with the faculty just last weekend and we kind of discussed this. And I think that is the sense that the engagement with the students is much reduced. We have a problem of missing students. So our students are primarily international students and we encourage them once this crisis really began to grow in Japan to go back home. So about 60% of our students have returned home. So now our students are spread out all over the world. You can imagine, so you may be teaching Zoom and your students are everywhere. So we have a certain percentage, maybe like 5% or as high as 10% of some cases of students that have just disappeared. And we can't contact them that are not responding. So that's an issue that we're facing. And for the professors who truly like the engagement and discussion, teach them that way, for them it's been a very, very hard transition. Now Jay also just briefly, this semester, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. And I was interested in online education, which in Japan because of this digital gap that exists, online education in Japan basically doesn't exist. So I started an online course with the University of Hawaii, West O'ahu. And we've mixed local students, West O'ahu students with Japanese and also international students. So we've been running that through the semester starting in late January. And that of course has continued uninterrupted because we weren't in class to begin with. And that's actually turning out quite well. It's not the same as teaching in class, but that class we're using synchronous once a week and then asynchronous for the rest. And my sense is that my observation, I'll have to ask the students once the semester's over what they think, but that seems to be going okay. And there is a genuine learning process that's going on and there's team engagement and the Zoom sessions, just like we're doing right now, are effective. You can put them into groups, for example, and they do discussions. And the students just pick it up right away and enter into discussions. It's actually pretty smooth. Well, maybe the technology is ahead of us. So Zoom is creating all these different changes and methodologies to teach people. So maybe it's a matter of taking advantage of those new innovations and also learning more about how to teach. And at the end of the day, it'll be pretty good experience. One other wrinkle, Jay, to this, is that Zoom, of course, was developed and utilized up until when the crisis started as a business meeting forum. It was always set up in a business context because people are in stay-in-place and part of Japanese business culture is to gather together after work and go drinking. And now that cannot happen, right? So you cannot do that any longer. People are using Zoom. So they're in our compai parties or drinking parties that are carried out after work hours. People have a wine or a beer in their hand. They connect with their colleagues, 10 or 20 of them. And it somehow works. So my wife went on this. She works for a major American company. And she wasn't really all that positive about it, but she ended up talking with these people for like two or three hours and drinking quite a bit of wine in the process. So now I've actually set this up for my professors at the end of the semester to celebrate what we've gone through. I'm going to be buying beer for them, craft beer and send them all craft beer. And we're going to use Zoom as a semester party. So this is another kind of wrinkle that's appearing Zoom is becoming a social tool in addition to it being a business tool. So Jay, we've talked about sharing martinis. We can't do that right now, but maybe over Zoom, we can have a martini party. I'm on, you're on. Thank you, Steve. I learned so much from you about so many things. Talk to you in a couple of weeks. Be well, stay safe. Yeah, see you in a couple of weeks. Hopefully in summer, I'll see you in person if it all works out. I'm looking forward. You take care. Thank you so much. Watch your hands.