Host:Thank you both. Now, are there any younger people with a question?

A－：That was a wonderful talk, thank you. I teach psychology part-time. Recently I’ve been going to meetups on and off, so the conversation about how work is going to go in the future has been coming up a lot. You said in your talk that only three things would be left: helping people, play and thinking. But looking at higher education, for example, the academic funding in fields like psychology, education and philosophy is getting lower and lower. In a future where the nucleus of education could be lost, I’m not so certain that thinking will be a job that continues to drive business in society.

Fukuda: With children on waiting lists for preschools and work reforms taking place, all the issues of today are tied to the matter of education. And education ultimately comes down to how committed our country is.
For example, the Nikkei Shimbun might say that the business outlook in the Philippines is good, but if you actually go there, you’ll see that there’s absolutely no money for education. There are many people who have no way to learn. I went to Shenzhen, China a couple weeks ago. The city is only 40 years old. Mao Zedong brought about the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1977, and during that time, all the teachers had to stop teaching and become farmers. That generation’s children are now around 30 and are becoming successful entrepreneurs for the first time. Their parents couldn’t go to school, so they couldn’t read and lived in poverty, so it’s this generation that is the first to become wealthy. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping launched a reform to open China up to foreign trade. This was because he when he visited Japan, he saw factories like Toyota’s and realized that China should not be ordering everyone to work on agriculture when neighboring countries had developed so much. So, China changed its society, in terms of both its system and its diplomacy. However, it’s only been 40 years, so there’s no art or design yet; it’s simply about making money.
If you look at Shenzhen, you can see the importance of politics and education. But in Japan, maybe because there are very few people who are cognizant of what they pay in taxes, there are very few people who are personally invested in politics and education. In his book, former Tokyo Metropolitan Governor Naoki Inose wrote that there is little awareness of tax payment because the company takes taxes off the top, giving its employees only what is theirs to use (tax reforms during World War II changed the taxpayer from the individual to the company to raise war funds). Does our tax system keep us from feeling involved in politics at all? It would be different if we had to go and physically pay our taxes like self-employed people, but because so many of us aren’t in that situation, politics doesn’t reflect the will of the people at all. So taxes are spent however the government likes.
However, whether we like it or not, we were born in this country, and have to live our lives defined as Japanese people as long as we are paying taxes. If we increase our awareness of politics, we notice education and science in particular. There have been Nobel Prize-winners active in a variety of academic fields thus far, but those budgets have also been cut as more is spent on defenses, which is unforgivable.
Maybe it’s best not to have a political discussion here, but after all, art is anti-establishment and liberal. I think the existence of both extremes is the very reason why there is no tension in Japan. After all, the mission of a company is about how to participate in society and how it all circles back. In Osaka, we say “it’s fine as long as you pay someone for it”. Because that’s how money circulates. But now that that awareness has faded a lot, the gap between rich and poor is growing, and everyone who has money is going to Singapore so Japanese education is declining. Right now is the worst it’s been, I think. Even if the tax structure can’t be easily changed, everyone needs to be aware of the problem. Without that awareness, there won’t be any reason or direction to change the problem. I feel an enormous amount of despair about it, but on the other side of that coin is hope, and I think that unless you first sink to the depths of despair, you can’t start to recover.