To lose one century-old, Sendai-area producer of leaf-shaped sasakamaboko fishcakes may be considered a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness. Lose three in quick succession, as Japan has done in the past 12 months, and people start talking about a “new normal”.
But should they? If ever there were a moment for Japan, for those that engage with it and those that invest in it, to embrace the certainty of a new abnormal, that time is surely now.
Clearly, times are cruel in the northeastern Japanese fishcake game. Surging costs, from pollock paste and plastic packaging to logistics and labour, are straining business models to breaking point. Changing diets have less space for fishy fare; tourists prefer local beef tongue. Behind all of these pressures, one can see the vast hydraulics of geoeconomics, climate change and demographics.
These fishcake makers have previously survived military dictatorship, world war defeat, oil crises, tsunamis, generational handover and deflation. So as well as being saddened by the abrupt, back-to-back shutterings of Takeda no Sasakamaboko (est. 1935), Bajo Kamabokoten (est. 1912) and Kaneko Hashinuma Shoten (est. 1927), there is huge temptation to conclude this is part of an unusually forceful shift away from life as Japan knows it. Key political figures actively reinforce that view. On Tuesday, Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s minister for economy, trade and industry, used a press conference to upend decades of his own party’s thinking on the role of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Akazawa is someone who knows a bit about epochal disruption of norms. His current role puts him prominently on the front line of America’s redefinition of friendship and of China’s redefinition of hostility. When Japan needed someone to negotiate its way through Donald Trump’s arbitrarily calculated “reciprocal” tariffs, and to pledge $550bn of infrastructure investment to an economy nearly 10 times its size, Akazawa was the one trusted to put on a Maga hat and give a double thumbs-up to the new world order.
And for almost a year, he has also had to field the concerns of the business lobby as diplomacy between Beijing and Tokyo has entered a deep freeze and Japanese companies have pulled out of China — Japan’s biggest trading partner — at a record rate.
In his presentation earlier this week, Akazawa did not mention the three fishcake makers, but his thesis was that Japan should expect and embrace a spate of company closures. Crucially, he argued, it has resisted this for far too long.
For decades, the government has seen its enormous SME sector as the bastion against mass unemployment. Those businesses, no matter how economically illogical at the individual level, were collectively legitimised by a broader national goal. They were given what Akazawa called a “warm and comfortable atmosphere” of subsidy and incentives in hard times. But however flabby and irrelevant they became, it remained core LDP policy that, wherever possible, no SME should go bankrupt.
With the working population now in permanent decline, that policy is clearly brimming with moral hazard. “Most SMEs have no ambition to grow,” he said, adding that “this is not exactly a capitalist mindset.” His argument? The LDP needs a new policy and Japan needs a new mindset.
Thinking in terms of “new normals” is the wrong way to form such a policy — however alluring that sounds. Japan, however desperately it would like to imagine itself as having evolved through a series of established normals, is perhaps more usefully defined by its rolling embrace of abnormality. An economy in which tens of thousands of companies are over 100 years old gives the impression of permanence; in fact it represents abnormality stacked on abnormality.
The Bank of Japan, in its long build-up to sustained monetary tightening, has talked a lot about the necessity of “normalisation”. Akazawa’s comments suggest that the country’s entire approach to capitalism needs a similar overhaul. Others lament Japan’s focus on its pacifism or immigration rules. Too often, these debates underplay just how resistant it is to having normality defined for it — either domestically or by the outside world.
At the most recent census, 11 per cent of Japanese were under 15 and 17 per cent were over 75. Others may well follow Japan down this road, but no modern country has yet arrived at these extremes — and no country will experience the transformations of environment, geopolitics and technology from a similar starting point. There is no lingering “normal” to be had for Japan, new or otherwise.