{"text":[[{"start":6.84,"text":"English speakers often reach unconsciously for the number 17. Its three syllables give it a rhythmic, emphatic edge over all other sub-20 cardinals; its prime, non-roundedness gives a sense of both the deliberate and the random."}],[{"start":20.78,"text":"These qualities make 17 the constant ally of the songwriter, the hyperbolist and the huckster. It feels precisely the wrong number, however, for the waging of economic war in a time of world order overhaul and weaponised industrial policy."}],[{"start":35.16,"text":"A full year into her premiership, and without the excuse that the number resonates at all in Japanese, Sanae Takaichi has anointed 17 sectors as the centrepiece of her quest to end decades of low growth, reverse more than a generation’s worth of structural under-investment and build a “strong and prosperous” nation. The risk she runs is that this number both highlights and anchors the idea that Japan in its current form is too thinly spread for strength and too indecisive for prosperity."}],[{"start":64.48,"text":"Takaichi’s growth strategy marks an attempt to revive Japan’s once formidable but long-enfeebled industrial policy for a post-free-trade world where having one is no longer excoriated but expected. There is regret, detectable in Takaichi’s ambition, that this revival did not happen much sooner."}],[{"start":82.34,"text":"Last week’s IMF and World Bank meetings added urgency, with numerous delegates acknowledging on the sidelines that the intensifying rivalry between the US and China requires countries everywhere to conceive an industrial policy now, before it is defined by someone else."}],[{"start":97.72,"text":"The execution of this strategy is a test Takaichi must rise to before a slump in popularity diverts her attention. Still, the going seems good. The PM’s growth strategy is buoyed by the sort of “Japan is back” momentum that feeds on the country’s broad industrial exposure to the AI investment boom and a stock market that has doubled in value in five years."}],[{"start":119.14,"text":"Takaichi’s questionable choice, though, was to declare a focus on 17 “strategic fields” — sectors of the economy that the government, in consultation with industry, labour unions and academics, has handpicked for promotion, investment and which, it believes, can “outperform the world”."}],[{"start":134.98,"text":"The 17 areas are not, in themselves, irrational choices. They range from semiconductors, cyber security, quantum and AI to port logistics, advanced medical care, nuclear fusion and digital content. Many of the subdivisions, which include ship repair, green steel, land-based aquaculture and lunar exploration, also make sense as potential recipients of transformative investment. The omission of the entire traditional automotive industry from the list, say senior industrialists, remains baffling: is it already too big and successful to require promotion or is the signal perhaps that it is doomed?"}],[{"start":170.84,"text":"The problem, though, lies in the collective fuzz of the number 17 and the uncertainties it creates. It is slightly too large a number to connote or promise real, hard-edged focus as, say, six might have. And, as the omission of the traditional automakers suggests, it is not big enough to feel like a comprehensive reckoning of Japan’s industrial future and thus allow a meaningful conclusion about which — if any — sectors Japan will ultimately decide it can live without."}],[{"start":196.92,"text":"The Takaichi administration has also not been forthcoming about how it got to the number, which is unfortunate fuel for the doubters. Japan’s heyday of industrial policy, in the 1970s and ’80s, may have been formidable but it was definitely not without errors and blind spots. The private sector has never been convinced that the government should be allowed to pick winners; the government has been at pains to never, ever suggest there might be losers."}],[{"start":221.24,"text":"The great problem with 17 is that it rather gives the game away. Japan’s economic glory days were defined by a magnificent lack of focus and the fact that, over time, the country took the form of a giant conglomerate. It stood parent to thousands of world-beating elements but, ultimately, had a discount placed on the sum of its parts. It remains, defiantly, in that state. Its companies, for all of the government’s efforts to make them consolidate and streamline, remain prodigious in number and less focused than any of their competitors elsewhere in the world."}],[{"start":251.92,"text":"Japan’s attempt to re-establish a comprehensive industrial policy is laudable and, under the circumstances, entirely necessary. It could have gone for six or 60. But the choice of 17 strongly suggests it has not yet acknowledged how brutal the industrial policy war is about to become."}],[{"start":270.52,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792904316_2060.mp3"}