Thursday, February 23, 2006

Drawing a Fine Line

Below is my comment on "Drawing a Fine Line" Page 22, TIME, Feb.20, 2006

As your article pointed out correctly, it is extremely hard to draw a fine line between free speech and hate speech when the religious belief is keenly different as the Muslims and the Christians. As long as Europeans insist on freedom of speech, the confrontation mounts in many parts of the world. There seems to be no panacea for calming the frustrated Muslims. Keep to have a dialogue with them or why not hiring the Japanese as the go-between? They could get credit from both sides and to resolve the conflict because the Japan’s belief of multitudinous gods accepts Muhammad and Jesus Christ if they stop staying on the sidelines now.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Living on the Edge

Below is my comment on your article of " Living on the Edge" Page 22  TIME, January 30, 2006

Fortunately the Livedoor case would not lead to a major setback in the Japanese economy in the short run because it is a matter of just one IT related company and its group ballooned by its stock price and its charismatic CEO and could be replaced by other giant IT enterprise such as Softbank soon.

What is at stake universally for this issue in the long run is that once a charismatic and smart top like Takafumi Horie runs the company, no one in the company including auditors and directors could stop his runaways even though he seems to go to the extremes in the market. Sound market mechanism could be established by sound corporate governance in the first place and powerful market watchdogs like SEC in the U.S. correcting the wrongdoings by such companies.