Wednesday February 15, 2012

timtak's past comments

  • 2

    timtak

    How many employees, shareholders and Japan Today readers think that Woodford was responsible for Olympus loosing 80% of its value, for creating the wreck that is now Olympus?

    He could have threatened, he could have used his power when he still had it, but once he left, why did he need to tell the media ? Does he believe he acted in Olympus' best interests after his dismissal?

    Posted in: Olympus urged to rehire ousted British CEO

  • 2

    timtak

    It was the vocalist of X-Japan, Hide, who kicked the bucket. But the drummer Yoshiki was the founder, song writer and driving force. His thighs are not quite as thin as his waz model but nearly. I never had thighs that thin, since I was 8 years old anyway. It seems to me that Yoshiki is heterosexual but is very in touch with this girls side.

    Posted in: YOSHIKI figure joins other celebs in Madame Tussauds Tokyo

  • -1

    timtak

    I still can't see good reasons for using losses on investments to cover losses on investments, unless the covered losses were worse (in some legal sense) than the coverying losses.

    Posted in: Olympus admits hiding losses dating back to 1990s

  • -1

    timtak

    Who covers up loss making investments with other loss making investments? What would be the point? It might wash with regard to the massive payment for "advice", but it does not make sense to me regarding the other payments for nearly worthless startup companies. Who conceals losses with losses?

    Perhaps I am missing something, but I think that if we were at the bottom of this Olympus would have rehired Woodford.

    Posted in: Olympus shares dive 20% as investors fear delisting

  • -1

    timtak

    I agree with ShootandScoot and Australia (the country) that sometimes cyclists should be allowed on the pavement. But separating the road and pavement cyclists is going to be difficult. Perhaps as a start, all bicycles with a cross bar should be on the road. I wish that the police would enforce the use of lights on bicycles more/first.

    Posted in: Cyclists feel under siege with new rules

  • 0

    timtak

    Now back down to 78.15 http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert/?Amount=1&From=USD&To=JPY

    Posted in: Japan intervenes in currency market to weaken yen

  • 0

    timtak

    The Japanese nation is less geared, less in debt, than the average family with a mortgage, but all the same the rate of increase in debt is very worrying. There seems to be no stopping the budget deficit and that can't go on forever.

    Masaki Yuki's excellent work on the culture of group membership http://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~myuki/paper/Yuki2003IntergroupcomparisonversusintragrouprelationshipsSPQAbstract.pdf suggests that Westerners join groups when they identify with an subscribe to the ideal of the group, whereas Japanese join groups when they see an opportunity for mutual benefit and exchange.

    It seems to me that often social welfare systems and public employment need idealism to work. The workers need to feel identified with the ethos of their workplace, to be the servant of the general public for instance. Often times however it seems that since there is no financial or other exchange taking place between the customer and provder the forkforce are often not efficient. This is the criticism leveled at social welfare and public organistaions everywhere, but it seems especially true in Japan. On the other hand, the Japanese are very good capitalists: Japanese firms are very good at caryiing for their customers, their see their mutually beneficial relationship as their raison d'etre.

    Posted in: Japan's public debt to hit record Y1,024 trillion

  • 1

    timtak

    7.8% reduction in public servants’ salaries. The public servants are upset and the unions are fighting against it. As a public university teacher it is a bit sad. Pay is higher in the private sector. But I will not be campaigning against it. As this level of public debt laying off a lot of public employees may be on the cards and I would rather a pay cut. When it comes to the bureacrats...half my students want to become public employees. I think that public employee pay can be reduced a lot before there will be no takers.

    Posted in: Noda, ministers, senior vice ministers to take pay cuts to help with Tohoku reconstruction

  • -4

    timtak

    the-east-is-red Thank you for the good point about the lack of differentiating technology in the construction industry. I think that we will find however, the relative importance of "differentiating technology" in damns and endoscopes does not result in such a difference in business practices, but I may be wrong.

    Both markets are non-consumer, often high-value large contract, bureaucratic, made by decision makers who are not end users. Fujinon (the other main competitor is Pentax) manages to summarise its gastroscopes on one page.

    The alternative is what? Some people think that the Olympus board ("the other half") are spending company billions on fast cars, swimming pools and women?! Others think they are paying criminals not to leak their dirty secrets. Come on, this is Japan, what secrets could they have, worth 1.5 billion USD?

    Have you met the sort of people you are talking about? They are company guys through and through. Here is a video of Kikugawa, the gentleman who walks in and sits down first. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfQOuBE3JKs Swimming pools? Dirty secrets? Come on...He'd die before ripping off Olympus for millions. And that in a sense may be the issue: Chairman Kikugawa may put his company before everything else.

    Posted in: Olympus chief Kikukawa resigns amid reports of FBI probe

  • -1

    timtak

    The part of the link to the economist magazine above gets converted to itallics so here it is via a url forwarder. http://tinyurl.com/slushfundrevealedjapan in that article a Japanese natioal secret bank account is described as being 'money is necessary to gather information “for the benefit of the nation”.' The Economist article the Japanese secret bank account still exists, although almost no one talks about it.

    Posted in: Olympus chief Kikukawa resigns amid reports of FBI probe

  • -4

    timtak

    katamarionda_sea When other Japanese companies (or indeed the Japanese nation) have moved funds off the books was that for the purpose allowing the top level managers to live off company largess? Read the links that I supplied and tell me that I am inexperienced with Japanese culture again.

    Posted in: Olympus chief Kikukawa resigns amid reports of FBI probe

  • -4

    timtak

    @theeastisred How can you be sure that all the funds were not used to increase shareholder dividends? A lot of funds have been siphoned off the books for with the objective of benefitting the company and shareholders in the past.

    Posted in: Olympus chief Kikukawa resigns amid reports of FBI probe

  • -4

    timtak

    ubikwit Who do you think was trying to steal from whom? Kikugawa from his shareholders? I think you would be wrong.

    Are you saying that Kikugawa does not have a good conscience? Is secrecy a bad thing? (C.f. the discussion on secret bank accounts held by salaried workers). I would say that in Japan a certain amoung of secrecy, or a certain amount of secret banking, is often seen as being a necessary thing.

    I am not sure why people think that Kikugawa is trying to rip off his shareholders. I think that on the contrary he may be all too concerned with his company and the shareholders and is prepared to go further that Woodford in order to ensure increasing profits. My guess is that Kikugawa's conscience, placing a high emphasis on the well being of his company may be clear.

    I hope that Mr. Woodford is squeaky clean, and assuming he is, I do not see that as disparaging but different.

    I think that there is a case to be made that this scandal may be linked to Japanese business practices if not culture, if the following practices/events are found to be linked to the current scandal: http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2010/05/slushfundrevealed_japan http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20090219f1.html http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20090716a5.html

    The creation of secret bank accounts and the uses put to them reduce competition. This reduction in competition can result in losses to consumers. In an ideal world they would not exist. Faced with the necessity of living in this imperfect world, I choose to live in Japan and to purchase Japanese products.

    Posted in: Olympus chief Kikukawa resigns amid reports of FBI probe

  • -11

    timtak

    I don't think that Kikugawa would do badly for Olympus. Kikugawa is a company man and he lived for Olympus. He and his board are not the sort of men to want to rake off a few hundred million for personal use, at the expense of the company they have lived for.

    Neither are they incompetant (except in their choice of CEO perhaps) either.

    Due to the nature of Olympus' main business, selling very expensive endoscope equipement to hospitals and health procurement officials all over the world, including recently increasingly China, Olympus may have been asked to provide sales and marketing expenses that would not look good on the books.

    Mr. Squeaky Clean Englishman (we hope) comes along and demands that all expesnse be detailed publicly on the books. The board fires him for a conflict of management style, and the shares tumble.

    Sad story?

    There may be a silver lining. The ensuing scandal - which looks set to continue for a while - may result in increased free competition in the endoscope market so that people like me who are prone to stomach ulcers, get to have a higher tech endoscope. Having said that, I hope it is made in Japan and does not break down. (Go on Panasonic or Casio, buy them out.)

    Posted in: Olympus chief Kikukawa resigns amid reports of FBI probe

  • 0

    timtak

    I think it unlikely that the board are so stupid as to invest in loss making companies over and over again or pay such ridiculous sums for advice alone. At the same time, trusting as I am of Japanese old men, it seems unlikely there is a board-room full of old geezers wanting to purchase retirement castles, or high class prostitutes for themselves. I can see no reason why organised crime would be able to force them to siphon off this much to them. So where is the money going? An alternative explanation....Since Olympus makes most of its money in the health market, supplying large numbers of hospitals with endoscopes, in high value contracts made by a small number of health ministers and or health ministry bureacrats, I wonder how Olympus have managed to be so persuasive over the past decade that they sell more endoscopes than their next three competitors combined. This scandal could get a lot bigger.

    Posted in: Olympus ex-CEO pursues the $687 million question

  • 0

    timtak

    It is thought to have come down somewhere in South East Asia http://tinyurl.com/3g9a9yv

    Posted in: No reports yet of debris from falling satellite

  • 1

    timtak

    Quite a few people (Ruth Benedict, Arimasa Mori,etc) say that the Japanese lack the moral fibre to make value judgments individualy, rather basing them on what other people think, on the 'vox populi' as it were. Perhpas because I have been in Japan for a long time, I have either lost my moral fibre, or come to think that looking at context is a good idea. So when judging this act of not having returned historical documents to a former conquest, I wonder what is par for the course: the "vox nationalis" what other countries are doing, have done.

    I happen to know that my country is holding on to a lot of similar sorts of historical relics/archive from other conquests. Perhaps the moderator is simply someone who believes that one can comment, and make judgements void of context: from the heart as it were, without taking into consideration similar acts elsehwhere. I can not. The moderator has been so kind as to let my comment stand this time perhaps since I made the connection more clear. In the previous version I only mentioned more concrete examples giving a URL to a list of similar documents that the UK has not returned.

    Does that make Japan's tardiness okay then? I would not go far as to say that at all. I am sure that the Koreans are upset, especially since the Koreans are rare in never having conquered anyone in historical record. But at the same time putting the shoe on the other foot tempers my condemnation at the Japanese. "War crime" is not a term I would use. Perhaps just plain "war." I am, however, pleased that Noda gave the scrolls back, and I hope that there is a lot of repatriation of historic relic/archive all over the world.

    Posted in: Noda returns looted royal Korean books to Seoul

  • 2

    timtak

    On this forum their appear to be several Westerners showing their disapproval toward the fact that Japan holds in its possession the historical artifacts of their ex-colonies. The fact that Western countries have in their possesion the historical treasures of their ex-colonies was deemed, however, to be off the topic of this forum. How could this be off topic? Could it be that the way that JapanToday censors comparisons of Japanese and Western colonial past to be an expression of an ongoing colonial attitude: we are civilised, they are not?

    Posted in: Noda returns looted royal Korean books to Seoul

  • 1

    timtak

    @Kevin Lee Brooke (and JapanGal) Yes people do 'pick other people's noses' for them. Japanese mothers regular suck the snot out of their children's noses orally (here is my wife: http://www.burogu.com/2011/06/baby-snot-sucker.html ) However, there is also a paper on grooming in couples in Europe, where it is seen as a form of affection. Men are more likely to do it to women in Germany. https://blackboard.newpaltz.edu/bbcswebdav/users/geherg/GlennGeherContinuousWorks/GlennGeherPublishedWorks/nelsongeher2007.pdf I think that the grooming is done by different people in different ways in different cultures. The Japanese family tends to be more verticle so it is more often mothers on kids.

    Posted in: Japan's ear-cleaning salons offer childhood fantasy

  • 2

    timtak

    zichi, The general vibe here is that trust and truth is what relationships are based on so from that perspective one should be bold and ask for beer money, or not drink.

    Is it a pan-cultural given that truth and trust are the foundations of a relationship? Could it be argued that a little bit of deception greases the wheels of a relationship and makes all parties happier? In human affairs generally, is it good to be honest all the time? Is the truth that which motivates people? Whither euphamism, flattery, being dimplomatic, cosmetics, corsets, wigs, romance, dreams, and secret bank accounts?

    I recon that logocentrists, people who love and or worship the Word, are more concerned about "truth." Others are more concerned with the reality, and sacrifice words when they think reality will benefit.

    Posted in: Sneaky salarymen scheme, skim and hide cash from their wives

Follow us

Facebook
Twitter

View all