While media commentators laud the inimitable Japanese sense of orderliness, politeness and dignity in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the northeast region, it’s also reassuring to see a senior Japanese figure lash out.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange chairman Atsushi Saito might not be making any friends in Tokyo’s foreign community – having aimed a broadside at foreigners who fled the city last week amid aftershocks, power cuts and radiation fears. But he doesn’t care. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday:
The head of Tokyo Stock Exchange lashed out at some foreign investors for being “selfish” in calling for the market to shut down following the earthquake earlier this month, saying their main motivation was to flee Japan.
“The foreign firms have called for a shutdown because they wanted to run away,” TSE President Atsushi Saito said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “I don’t really mind because I see that as selfish.”
Up to a point, he is right. Some Japanese and also stay-behind expat workers feel the same way. Nearly two weeks after the March 11 quake and tsunami, some foreigners are trickling back into Tokyo – even as many others continue to hole up in temporary refuges such as luxury hotels and serviced apartments in the western cities of Kyoto, Osaka or even further afield in Singapore and Hong Kong.
In head offices throughout Tokyo, there are tales of growing resentments within firms where mainly expat staff were seen to have fled while Japanese staff stayed behind.
Even within the foreign community, there are divisions, including these comments from an executive with a big European asset manager who was visiting Tokyo this week:
“Those of us who’ve had a long relationship with Japan feel strongly that foreign managers were foolish to desert their Japanese colleagues. It won’t be forgotten.”
Of course, many big companies offered both foreign and local staff the option to evacuate to cities west of Tokyo, although the offers of paid-for flights out with families to destinations such as Singapore and elsewhere were mainly aimed at expat staff.
The exodus of “gaijin“, the colloquial Japanese term for foreigners, was further fuelled by advisories from nearly all major embassies to their nationals to leave Tokyo, with the US, UK, France, Italy and others even arranging charter flights to help people leave amid huge demand for commercial flights out. The stampede out prompted some to label the departing foreigners “flyjin“, a term that now seems to have stuck.
None of this held sway with the TSE’s Saito, who also expressed disapproval at the propensity of investors and traders to try to make money in the extreme volatility following the quake and tsunami.
This reaction, in a note on Thursday from a Tokyo-based broker with a US investment bank, sums up the sentiments among many foreign traders and brokers in Tokyo (who aren’t ‘flyjin’):
Chairman Atsushi Saito accuses foreigners in the WSJ of being big girly-men for calling for a temporary TSE shutdown in order to allow themselves to ‘run way’ in the wake of the earthquake. Given that a lot of those foreigners are still being woken up in central Tokyo every morning by earthquakes, spending the day in buildings swaying from repeated aftershocks, and going home at night to brush their teeth with radioactive water, one is tempted to suggest that Mr. Saito go do unspeakable things to himself. This, of course, is the same Atsushi Saito who was surprised that foreigners were trading on the back of ‘emotion and rumour’ in the wake of the largest ever recorded earthquake in Japan’s history.
Ouch.
Related links:
Japan – to buy or not to buy? – FT Alphaville
ETFs are proving not so tradeable – FT Alphaville
Tokyo – the water effect – FT Alphaville
Beware your Japan ETF exposure – FT Alphaville