Instant noodles

Instant noodles are also sold at overseas supermarkets, but they were born in Japan.

“Chicken Ramen” developed by Momofuku Ando in 1958, which became a hot topic in the morning drama, is the first instant ramen released in the world.

27-year-old who continues to care for her mother What I noticed from the words “Thank you”

I have lived to hide my mother’s illness. I have no memories of going out happily with her family. Ever since she was in elementary school, she repeatedly clashed with her mother, thinking that “our house is unusual.” There were days when many words that hurt each other flew around. Mai (a pseudonym, 27 years old), who continues to care for her mother, has recently begun to reveal her anxieties and worries to anyone other than her family. I feel the change in her closed mind.

Since Mai was a child, her mother had been fighting illness. Her mother suffers from an intractable disease called spinocerebellar degeneration. She is progressive and has symptoms such as wobbling her legs and slurred speech. Her grandmother, who lives with her, came to her elementary school entrance ceremonies, athletic meet, and disaster drills. She said, “She thought she wasn’t a normal home when her mom didn’t come to school.”

My grandmother was mainly responsible for all the housework. Her grandmother also took care of her staggering support for her mother and attending the hospital. Mai has been absent from school and attended hospital visits, but care was less frequent.

Japan becoming a zombie “Now is the time for creative destruction” Kazuhiko Toyama

This is the final episode of this column, which has continued for more than 10 years since the era of “economic observation” on the Mainichi Shimbun economic side. So, when I looked back on the past and wondered what was the underlying theme of what I had written here, the word I came up with was “creative destruction.”

This word was spoken by Schumpeter in the context of growth theory that the true source of economic growth is the creation of new added value and the improvement of productivity through creative destruction driven by innovation. is. It’s a concept nearly 100 years ago, but now we are entering an era where the source of growth potential is innovation driven by the digital revolution, and this concept does not lose its freshness.

However, in the 1980s, Japan’s economy, industry, and companies, which were praised as Japan as number one in the late Showa era and jumped to the top of the world, could not escape from their success model, and the global progressed around this time. You will be left behind by the huge wave of change in digitalization and digitization. That is, it lost its creative destructive power.

A successful model of “Nippon Co., Ltd.”, which has formed a scram with a major manufacturing industry, a major trading company that supports it in terms of trade and finance, a major bank, and a bureaucracy that backs it up. In terms of management, a mass production / mass sales type equipment-intensive industrial model, collective improvement and improvement power management by a homogeneous organization consisting of new graduate recruitment and lifetime employment / seniority-based employees.

This Japanese-style business model destroyed the traditional US industry centered on the manufacturing industry, but instead, it was represented by GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) by creative destruction. Digital industry will rise.

Then, a big metabolism occurred at the industrial level, and the economic power of the United States and Japan, which was 3 to 2 in the gross domestic product (GDP) scale at the time of 1990 and was at the same level in GDP per capita, is now 3 to 1 in GDP. The GDP per capita was a big difference between $ 70,000 and $ 40,000.

Of course, the digital industry is causing new problems such as concentration of wealth and widening disparities, but Japan’s remarkable low growth is a serious financial problem in the government and relative in society in the trend of declining birthrate and aging population. It raises the issue of widening poverty, which casts a big shadow on the sustainability of the country.