Tag: Japan

King Solomon’s Great Mistake: The Keyhole tombs of Japan and lessons learned in fighting demons

Every time I go to Japan, it becomes more and more evident to me that the Kofan tombs, the many thousands of keyhole tombs in Japan, are the direct result of interactions with cultures of the Near East around 100 AD to 300 AD, which happened to be the time that the book The Testament of Solomon was written and was one of the books considered to be put into the Bible under the guidance of the Romans after the Greeks had preserved the stories over the previous 1000 years. Because Japan is an exciting culture that pays excellent reverence to its past, they have kept it better than in the West, so a window into periods of history becomes very obvious. Even though there is little to no archaeology occurring to explore the contents of these giant mounds built in the form of a keyhole, their dating points to a global culture that had a particular obsession with demons and how that spirit world rules over the minds of humanity, something that is just as concerning today as it would have been in times past. Talking to the modern Japanese, the considered wisdom from their culture points directly to their management of the spirit world through Shinto Buddhism, where they seek to utilize a relationship with the Kami, spirit creatures who roam about and work permanently in the background. In the Near East, in the times of the Bible or the Quran, we would call them Jinn, or “Genies.” In the West, we’d call them demons. And if you avoid assuming that everything over time was regional, the best window into that particular period and why they believe what they do can be reported from King Solomon himself in his book that never entirely made it into the official Bible, The Testament of Solomon.

In that book, Solomon, the great king of Yahweh, forms a relationship with a unique ring that God gave him to manage a pantheon of demons, and part of the signet was a keyhole symbol, according to legend. Solomon could use the ring to lock up the spirits and put them to work in building the great temple. However, by the end of the book, Solomon, in his never-ending quest to indulge in his sexual conquest of many thousands of women, finds one that refuses to sleep with him unless he grinds together five grasshoppers and dedicates their destruction to her god Moloch. So, Solomon does this, which makes God very angry, and essentially ends the line of kings created by the line of Abraham as the experiment to find a righteous people blew up in Yahweh’s face. At that point, the Hebrew people are doomed, the sons of Solomon are punished for their father’s transgressions, and Nebuchadnezzar soon follows to destroy the people of Israel and cast them into captivity once again. The mistake most commonly made by everyone is assuming that this Testament of Solomon is a regional story, not a global one. But I have a few maps that show the reach of King Solomon’s empire at the height of it, and it doesn’t take much creative thought to see that trade to make that empire so vast was extending into the New World, specifically the Amazon River Valley, and it spread to the East as far as it could go, Japan.

When you travel around modern-day Osaka, these keyhole tombs don’t look like much but a clump of trees in very packed urban settings. They are everywhere; some are much larger than others. But they remind me a lot of the various Indian mounds from North America, the same ones I have been saying contain the bones of a giant species of people, which is also not seeing much archaeology being done to investigate appropriately. Such a reach for the empire of Solomon is not unrealistic, traveling thousands of miles from Japan to the Middle East over a thousand years. Ironically, modern Japan’s relationship with demons of the spirit world is best captured by the work of the Near East writers, whether Arab, Greek, or Roman, or caretakers of the Indus Valley. The point is that people talk, and over the years, these stories took on a life of their own, but their point of origin was the empire of Solomon before being wiped away by a rival faction in Babylon. Solomon couldn’t have hoped to obtain such wealth without creating many enemies, and he had God’s protection with that ring as long as he was loyal to God, which allowed him to defeat his enemies and conquer many global territories. That is until he went too far by sleeping with women who worshipped all those previous gods, like Moloch and Baal, which still work in the background to this very day around the efforts of globalism. These interesting problems are best studied in cultures like Japan but still show signs of their practice. Because Japan has been protecting itself culturally from the effects of globalism, by fully embracing tradition the way they do, we can get a view into our past in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. If the mistake of assuming that Japan was always a regional culture can be avoided, more evidence of the truth can be utilized.

The giveaway to this global culture is in the site down the road from Osaka at Ishi-no-Hoden, one of the great megalithic sites in Japan and one of their current top three mystery sites. The dating for this gigantic rock that was in the process of being cut from the mountain is all over the place, with some of them dating back to 14,000 years, which would have put it in the Ice Age. During the Ice Age, these archaeological sites around Japan would have been the high ground as the entire Osaka Bay would have been drained of water, and a new oceanfront would have extended to the east, where many ancient temples are beginning to be discovered, now submerged. This is the same global culture working the stone at Easter Island, all over the Americas, and, of course, in the British Isles. Why an ancient people would go to such trouble isn’t the point, but what was is that there was a desire to work with such significant stone monuments, the same as was seen in the Near East at times before and after King Solomon for similar motivations. So, to assume that these are cultures in isolation is to do them a disservice. Therefore, to learn from history, we can look to the windows we do have, such as in the Testament of Solomon and the Kofan tombs all over Japan, and arrive at some very accurate understandings of how the people of the past dealt with malicious spirits in the politics of quantum physics. Whether we call them demons, jinn, or Kami, the modern Japanese people have been successful in managing those relationships, whereas people in the West have been seduced much as Solomon was, with the grasshoppers into throwing away everything, to sleep with another woman, especially when he had thousands of others he could have picked from. The lessons transcend time and are most apparent when visiting modern Japan, which has not used contemporary politics as a great eraser. We can still see some of the evidence left behind.

I think this map is much bigger

Rich Hoffman

Larry Fink Says Globalism is Dead: What he doesn’t understand, the nature of all productivity in life

In his usual letter to CEOs under the BlackRock portfolio management, Larry Fink revealed some carefully guarded frustrations at the end of March 2022 that are worth noting. It’s a bit humorous for me, I have been predicting this very problem for the globalists for a long time, and right on time, they are feeling the heat. These big plans they always come up with sound great in their own minds when they talk about them with each other. But reality often tells a different story. These days, Fink and his buddies at the World Economic Forum, the Desecrators of Davos that I call them, are trying to shield themselves from as much responsibility for the mess they’ve made as possible. In Fink’s letter, he declares that globalism is dead, that the war in Ukraine has wrecked everything, and now everyone must rethink everything. And just as he said that the federal government indicated that it would start enforcing ESG standards for all publicly traded companies, fulfilling some of those same strategies that Fink said were dying. The translation of the entire matter is that Fink has been called out; several top-rated books like Woke, Inc and The Great Reset have shown people what the Desecrators of Davos have wanted for a long time, and Fink has been exposed. He’s used to hiding behind a façade of celebrity and financial talk that nobody understands. But now, people understand what he has been doing with BlackRock, to essentially force progressive politics onto every publically traded company in the world and to slide outright communism under the door and call it progress. 

I’m not freaked out about any of this; after all, everything they are doing essentially traces back to repackaged Marxism, and it always fails everywhere. It’s why I felt I needed to write a book on this very problem called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Even though the book hasn’t at this point been out a year, it is showing itself to be very prophetic for these very times. When people saw the cover, I had a lot of feedback about the artwork while publishing it, which was sometimes hostile. People do judge a book by its cover, so I was very specific about how the cover for a book on business would be displayed, and it has confused people, which is purposeful. The question I get is, why is a book on business and management covered with a skull and smoking guns with poker-like emblems on the cover? The answer is that it is meant to articulate the actual situation at war in the world, the big elephant in the room that nobody wants to deal with. A question that needed to be answered by me from an old friend who is a prominent Lean sensei consultant for multi-billion dollar a year companies worldwide addresses the most common elephant in the room regarding the nature of productivity which has frustrated human beings for thousands of years. He asked me, “why don’t people buy into this Lean stuff, especially in America?” He continued, “I mean, I’m fine if they want to hire me over and over again every five years to come back and reteach their cultures Lean. But why don’t they get it?” That’s when I reminded him of the story of Deming after WWII and how Japan put their own spin on what he taught them, which became the Toyota model that the rest of the world has been trying to copy all this time. The problem is that it runs counterintuitive to reality. The Japanese people are hardworking but are collective in their natures. That is not how the West is, and nothing in the world will make people of western culture, where most manufacturing was invented, into becoming more collective based. 

I often tell people like that consultant that America invented a whole new way of doing things while Marx was coming up with his ridiculously lazy theories in Europe. But in the East, where they have openly embraced Marx and used him to manage their companies and their governments, they assume that it’s all part of western civilization that they have repackaged for themselves. But the proper elements of American life, which has the most extraordinary productivity on planet earth per capita and otherwise, it was the story of the Wild West, of the gunfighters, of law and order for individuals that is the secret sauce to everything economic. And virtually none of our modern education systems has figured it out. They have been teaching all the wrong things, which is why Larry Fink and the Davos gang are perplexed at the direction of the world they have been manipulating at the resistance to them that they are now seeing. I explained it to my friend like this, in the West, in America, business is viewed as a baby. We work to create an environment with our American Constitution that simulates the Natural Law of the birthing process. When tens of thousands of sperm are injected into a mating ritual, they all seek an egg to penetrate and start the process of human life. But out of all those attempts, only one will do the deed. We fight hard in life to create that opportunity for one to get the chance, which is the key to all economics. Management’s job is not to provide “equity” to all the sperm, so they can all have a chance to penetrate the egg. We look for the exceptional to do the task, and our job is to provide an environment for the exceptional to create something new. 

It was the weak and the lazy in the world who found a retreat in Marxism from the world’s pressures.   They have given up the desire to be exceptional in their lives, seeking refuge in collective salvation. And in every business environment, they look at those who are the best, who are exceptional, as a threat to their existence, so they are always trying to assassinate the characters who stand in the way of their desired complacency. So that is why the smoking guns and the skull are on my book’s cover. Because you have to expect as a productive and enterprising individual that all the collectivists out there will always be gunning for you, to shoot you down dead in the street and eliminate you from the competition of collectivism at every opportunity. It’s the greatest elephant in the room of modern civilization.   Because most people are not bold enough to be exceptional in their lives, they are quite happy to be content with little Marxists hiding behind ESG scores and overly managed centralized governments, either in their country or their corporations. But nothing comes from those types, which is why the rest of the world that has adopted Marxism struggles to produce any GDP. In America, in the chaos of individual rights, innovation, productivity, and money creation is abundant. In the Wild West, we figured out the nature of Natural Law not just in the making of life but also in making economies. And many jealous souls would do anything to destroy the exceptional. But in management, in all management, even in Lean Manufacturing, the rules still apply. The job of top management is to find the exceptional and to put them in a position to succeed. And if they do that, they will have successful results. But before any of that can happen, it has to be acknowledged that it’s the exceptional in the world who do everything, and our job is to find them and promote them. Every attempt at collective salvation, including Larry Fink’s extremely liberal finance policies, is doomed to fail every single time. Because what they all think, which was born from Marx and his lazy rationalization for all civilization, runs against the Natural Law of the universe and will never be made true, no matter how many people they recruit to their cause. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The CDC is Guilty of Murder, and Economic Suicide: Japan solves Covid with Ivermectin

The Solution is in Ivermectin

Another thing I have no more tolerance for is Covid. We know how to manage it. We know how we got it. We know what to do about it. And now, we are simply going through the pain of a corrupt political system trying to cover up their missteps and deliberate crimes, which is why we continue to hear all the nonsense about Covid and a CDC that is as effective as a wet paper towel these days. Out of a seven-day workweek, I speak to brilliant people in Japan about four of those days, all hours of the day due to the time zone differences, so I know firsthand how they have dealt with Covid. When they had the Olympics, because the world’s eyes were on them, they played along with the stupid World Health Organization methods of shutdowns and social distancing methods, to significant economic cost to them.   The Olympics were supposed to be good for them, but Covid wrecked their plans, and they weren’t happy about it. They are a solution-based society, so it wouldn’t take long for them to get their arms around this problem, and I knew it was coming in real-time. Once the world took their eyes off them after the Olympics were over, on August 13th, Ivermectin was granted permission for use in Japan. Fourteen days later, case counts started to plunge to near zero. Japan stayed on a health emergency status until the end of September just to make sure they were safe in their control of the virus. Then by October, they were back to full business and not shutting down again. They needed to make up lost ground and impact on their economy, and they needed all their people healthy and back to work. So they treated the virus instead of running from it like Europe, and the rest of the world have been doing. 

In my situation, I speak with people worldwide in most of the time zones, so Covid has been a continued conversation over the last few years now, and what different people were doing about it to manage their lives. Knowing what I do because of that perspective, I don’t care how big the government is, how wealthy the billionaires are, or how powerful the tech companies may be. Everyone who has participated in the Covid game should be punished in ways that would discourage the behavior in the future. Every entity that openly has lied to us about Covid, the vaccines, and the use of therapeutics such as Ivermectin has committed crimes on many levels. What they did was purposeful. Censorship from them is just another form of admission. With Twitter and Facebook taking down therapeutic mentions, they act as the Ray Epps of tech media. They are guilty of all the damage that continues with Covid crises outbreaks, from the psychological side more than the physical. The pain of Covid has been selected, by our government, specifically by the CDC, for purely political reasons. All the lost money and lives resulting from it are their responsibility. 

To prove what I’m saying, I present here in this article, while it lasts a YouTuber doctor, a very good one, Dr. John Campbell. He studies medical statistics for fun; he’s not a Trump supporter or really even political. He just likes to look at data and talk about it medically. His report verified what I had heard from Japan on the ground, that Ivermectin was a solution that the country had embraced to deal with the Delta variant. Obviously, the Omicron variant wasn’t yet on the horizon in October when the case counts went to near zero in Japan, but what we know of Omicron is that it’s even milder and is more like a cold than anything dangerous. It certainly isn’t the message that Democrats want and need to deflect the public away from their terrible performance, their lack of new ideas and their desires to turn the United States into the model for the Great Reset with the United Nations. Japan couldn’t afford more lockdowns, just as most countries clearly know by now, so they took action, and the results are apparent. The pressure from countries like Japan will kill this Covid nonsense in the future, who have just decided to create solutions for themselves instead of following the same government science into perpetual economic depravity.

And for Twitter and Facebook to deprive people of these known solutions, it’s malicious at best. Our government has access to this same information. It’s not like Dr. Campbell is a crazy conspiracy theorist. Ivermectin worked for Japan and everywhere else in the world where they have used it. But Covid was never about solving the problem, which was created by the government purely for the purposes of government. Covid was about telling people what to do. As of the start of the new year of 2022, the CDC has issued new recommendations for isolation and quarantine for the general population.   Regardless of vaccination status, they are, what’s the point, to stay home for five days. If you have no symptoms after five days, you can leave your house. Then you should continue to wear a mask around others for an additional five days. How about that? That is the science of this ridiculous government that only wants to stay in charge as an authority in people’s lives and ignore a proactive solution that could make Covid disappear forever. And to perpetuate this bad, made-up science which has absolutely zero functional reality to it, the Big Tech companies are trying to scrub any information that might make people question the government science. Crimes on top of crimes, on top of crimes. After what we have learned by the CDC, particularly in ignoring Ivermectin and other treatments that could eradicate Covid, they are actively looking to eliminate any competing information from other sources, such as Dr. Campbell here, and to act like the Wizard of Oz and keep you from looking behind the curtain.

But when we come out of our cultural bubbles, as I often do, we can see the truth that is out there beyond our horizon. American science should have led the world toward a Covid solution with innovation and bravery. Instead, too many Americans chose to listen to the authority addicts at the CDC and surrender their lives to government authority out of sheer laziness in not wanting to think for themselves. And now that the government and Big Tech have tasted that power of manipulation, it will be harder than ever to convince them to surrender that power without a significant conflict. Yet there is no question now, as opposed to when Covid was first introduced, there are ways to treat it, to stop the spread. To contain it. But the government wants nothing to do with that kind of talk. Because they want us all to be submissive to them and to bastardize science for the sake of power. And the result has been one of the most destructive things ever done to the human race. For what they’ve all done, they must pay and spend heavily. We can’t let what they did with Covid ever happen again, and so far, there has been no action taken against them to keep them from trying in the future or even to change their behavior in the present. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Yes, FDR Knew Pearl Harbor Would Be Attacked: It’s the same game then as we see now

Never Forget Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor Day isn’t as celebrated as it used to be, and I think that’s sad.  People need not forget what it meant for a surprise attack against America, which drug us into World War II.  We didn’t want to be in the war; Americans didn’t want to be in World War I either.  And when we refused, the Japanese attacked us anyway, forcing us essentially to answer the call and join the world war to end all wars.  Then in the wake, we were known worldwide as the new empire, and socialists around the world tried to demonize us into the territorial conquerors and second coming of the British Empire.  Most of us have forgotten history or didn’t learn much to start with, but for me, thinking about Pearl Harbor Day, knowing what we all do now, looking back, the hindsight is quite clear.  I would refer to one of my favorite books, The Way of the Fighter by Claire Lee Chennault, the general of the famous Flying Tigers. I am quite confident that President Franklin Roosevelt knew that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.  He kept the carriers at sea and only put noncritical battleships in port in the harbor there in Hawaii.  Things that big don’t happen by surprise, but FDR wanted to drag America into the war, like all progressives and globalists desire.  It wasn’t the first time, and it certainly wasn’t the last.  We also know that the FBI knew about the terrorists of 9/11, and I said of Covid that it was the launch of World War III.  China was attacking America with a virus they created with American money and partners of our own government for a globalist agenda fulfillment in the same manner that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  No, that’s not a conspiracy, we have the records that show it all, and now that we do, we can say with certainty that FDR purposely allowed for Pearl Harbor to occur because, to him, it was an effort at the “greater good,” as he saw it.

It is clear, especially after the “Red Decade,” where communism was very much alive worldwide, especially on the political left, that the Roosevelt administration supported its growth worldwide.  As a progressive, like Woodrow Wilson from World War I, when the results of that war almost put Americans into the League of Nations, the global desire for a one-world government would not disappear.  As I have said before, it might be remembered that while France, England, and America were dividing up the spoils of the world at the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler was created there.  And so was Ho Chi Minh, who would end up being the communist insurgent in Vietnam, which caused the war there.  Few people know that Ho Chi Minh was a busboy at a local restaurant near Versailles. He tried to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson to plead with him to relieve Vietnam of French influence as it was a territory at the time jealously guarded.  Globalism was always a thing; those efforts never went away; they only got worse as technology made the world smaller.  The spirits of the perpetrators were always vicious.  Ho Chi Minh was inspired by the American Revolution and wanted to free Vietnam from the French with American help.  But, Woodrow Wilson had no intentions of bringing harm to the claims of his friends, the French, so Ho Chi Minh, as a very young man, was swatted away.  So he went with the communists down the road, who welcomed him with open arms.  Several decades later, we had the Vietnam War.

Yet that was the warning Claire Lee Chenault had in his famous book. If we did not stop the communists coming out of Russia into Northern China, America would be drug into fighting the communists in the wake of World War II in the East perpetually. Of course, many years later, with Covid, he was correct.  We had a war with North Korea, which is still a political problem.  We had a war with Vietnam which the world was quick to proclaim that the American Imperialists lost, of course.  We have a very real economic war with China now and their desire to take over Taiwan and destroy the economy of America for daring to challenge them with new trade deals, which Trump was successfully implementing.  They had to get rid of him, to knock him off the great chess game these globalists had been trying to play for over 100 years, since air travel and telephones became possible to shrink the world.  It all started at the end of World War I. By the time World War II was provoked by the same characters, poking Hitler, molding him then once the war was over, taking those Nazi’s and making them Americans for the space program, the game in the East was to deplete Japan and China into collapse so that the Chinese communists could grow into power.  This is what happened just four years after World War II, and the United Nations was created to keep the world from ever fighting again.  It was kind of like what we did with the Patriot Act after the 9/11 bombing or the Covid protocols in 2020 to set the course for Democrats to conduct legal election fraud. 

We’ve seen this game over and over.  The point of World War II, by the globalists at the time, Neville Chamberland and the Royals of England were not stupid; they worked with Hitler to help him and force the world to unite to defeat him.  And in the wake, communism, socialism, and the United Nations would be created.  And whenever the nations of the world needed to unify, they would come up with some new war to steer our opinions, like the Gulf War, the war with Iraq, or Afghanistan.  Once those wars had done their public relations, the globalists would just turn off the machine and get back to the global agenda; global communism disguised any way they could sell it to the public.  So there is no question, given all that, FDR knew what he was doing; he did what all progressives in his position have done for the last century, George W. Bush included.  They played the globalists’ game and did what the Skull and Bones Society at Yale said to do in their lobby, make “War” in the world so that social progress could be aligned to those who intended to rule us all.

Americans had to drop their sense of independence and had to be kicked into World War II, and FDR was going to play his part.  He sacrificed a few to go after what he and many considered the “greater good.” Just as Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Dr. Fauci are doing now, not with tanks, planes, and guns, but with control over the medical industry and our very health.  Why kill people with bullets when you can kill them through a doctor or control them with their medical history?  Yes, we don’t want to forget about Pearl Harbor.  Our government knew about it and killed their own soldiers to drag America into a global alliance with other nations who didn’t want to be our friends.  They just wanted to cut us down and bring us under their control.  And they still want to do it today.  But we have more clarity with history than we did at the end of World War II.  This time, people are on to them.  This is why studying history is essential, and those who have, know all this all too well.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Karoshi: The difference between efficiency and a lack of ability

Recently I’ve written a few articles on the scam which is Lean manufacturing.  It’s not that the work of Womack, Jones and Roos in The Machine that Changed the World is inaccurate in its observations of mass production cultures versus lean manufacturing strategies—but that their academic lenses failed to identify the crucial ingredient that made Asian efforts superior to those in the West.  In essence, it is the Japanese word Karoshi which allowed for the explosion on the scene of the revolutionary work ethic for which those three observers tried to capture in a bottle to save the West from itself and start a new kind of industrial revolution based on Lean manufacturing methods.  The Japanese specifically are willing to outwork the rest of the world and put country before self even over small things, which is why the comparisons in The Machine that Changed the World made traditional mass producers look so terrible in side by side productivity comparisons—yet nowhere in their book did they successfully make that point.  The closest they came was in declaring that the transplant operations in America were more successful when they had Japanese managers as opposed to American.  With all things considered equal, American workers, American labor laws, and American supply chains, Lean manufacturing did show dramatic improvements in American productivity—only they typically only worked best when the manufacturing plant was conducted by Japanese leadership as opposed to those of Westerners.  If you break that down even father it is because of the Japanese tendency toward Karoshi that one was more successful than another—the willingness to put in the time to build such a Lean culture at the management level.

For whatever reason at the end of the 2017 calendar year a lot of people have been pushing me to discover what my next book will be.  Honestly, I have a number of fiction projects brewing on the back burner but at this point in my life it’s all about business.  To many people from the outside they look at my life and think I, like the Japanese, are functioning from Karoshi—which is their word for burnout—or death by work.  After all I do work with people from those far-flung places on the other side of the world and even by their standards I work longer days and compress more into my 24 hour day than they can imagine.  What makes me different from other people is that I have this background in Western arts, (a form of martial art) that has also made me a very efficient person—personally, which for Christmas this year I shared with some of my employees for their benefit.  (click to view)  Working harder isn’t necessarily good—but working smarter is.  My lessons to others about the nature of the bullwhip is about more than just a novelty act—it’s an actual philosophy for which I run my life—and without it I’d be in the same boat as everyone else.  And now for the last couple of years I have been experimenting with Cowboy Fast Draw which has led me to several conclusions regarding Lean manufacturing—and that my next book will likely deal with these Western methods of approaching business that are of the next generation of thinking.  I need to tweak a few things first before committing them to paper—but my next literary project will likely have to do with this crucial issue.

One thing that led me to Cowboy Fast Draw to begin with was my engagement with many American manufacturers who were getting frustrated with my methods as we were setting up a massive supply chain together and many of them put up a lot of resistance—which ran counter to my way of thinking. Most of these people were classic mass production people—which I think still has a lot of merit to it from a traditional standpoint.  Their companies have made them adapt Lean techniques so being the typical students of Western education systems they went and memorized all the charts and graphs—and the Japanese words for things without understanding the core philosophy of what Lean manufacturing did.  When they ran up against me they would frustratingly utter that I’m all too willing to “shoot from the hip” too often which led to a name they called me behind my back as a “gunslinger” which to their minds was an insult.  We call quarterbacks in football gunslingers when we want to insult their impatience in the pocket to throw too many risky passes.  Only the risk isn’t that all that risky to my mind.  Using bullwhips and now shooting techniques that do not involve aiming I am extremely accurate and fast in those hobbies and naturally I carry those elements over into my personal life.  Just because you can make fast decisions on critical elements without a process map to guide you, it doesn’t make you risky, only “ultra efficient.”

With the help of Womack and many others Japan has been placed at the top of manufacturing respectability for the last half of a century and why not, they earned it. But there has been a cost.  Their very industrious culture in Japan is suffering from Karoshi to the point where 1 in every 5 people are suffering tremendously from it—and if you subtract females and elderly people, that leaves most of the adult males from age 20 to age 50 pressed with overburdened stress that actually makes them less productive.  Of course the slack-jawed hippies and micromanaging academics think that the solution for the entire industrial world is to force companies to regulate their workers to a 40 hour work week—which is pretty stupid.  That is no solution—because the work demand is a product of production necessity.  There is a need for the work, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.  And forcing workers to only work 60 hours a week forces payrolls higher which hurts companies because they have to add to their overhead—which academics don’t care about because that’s their solution to everything—being that’s their role within education societies.  The work is needed and you can’t just throw bodies at the problem because all those bodies are not equal—everyone can’t perform work at the same level.  But we can focus on performing work in the most efficient manner possible, and doing that we can greatly reduce the need to overwork ourselves.

I personally work 60 to 70 hours per week and I still have time for many things in my life.  Outsiders might look at my pace and declare that I’m at risk of Karoshi myself—but they don’t understand.  To explain it to them I’d use one of my bullwhip tricks in putting out a candle with it to show how speed, accuracy and judgment can all come together to project focused efficiency into very tight target radius.  Or in the case of Cowboy Fast Draw where a gun has to be drawn from a holster and shot into a target in under a half a second—the work still gets down.  If the goal is to shoot a gun into a target, that task can be done whether it takes a half a second or up to a minute as the shooter takes their time aiming the weapon and firing.  The fast draw artist is obviously much more efficient at performing that basic task.  They might be able to shoot that same target 20 or 30 times while the cumbersome minded shooter wastes huge amounts of time pointing and aiming. The aiming is only a task needed for those who lack the faith in themselves to perform the task.  So in essence, the reason that countries like Japan have so much trouble with Karoshi is that they have brought in so much work—their society cannot process it all on time using the methods of approaching that work which they are utilizing now.  They need methods that still perform the work, but only much faster and still have the accuracy needed.

When I hear some inefficient person—whether it’s the president of a company that is filled with inefficient workers and is struggling to meet quotas, or an old-fashioned engineer who says we are working too fast to not make mistakes I get pretty mad.  What they are really saying is that I should bend my life to their limits because I can do all those things fast and accurate.  Speed does not mean a lack of quality—it’s only a detriment if the person performing the task is an inefficient human being.  And that is the essence of human behavior that Womack never addressed in his Lean manufacturing work—and why I’m not a big fan of the guy.  The reason the Japanese beat the West in manufacturing over the last several decades is not because of Lean methods.  It’s because they simply were willing to outwork the world to climb back on top after they lost World War II.  It was their path to redemption.  Now however that the world has looked to them for the method to perform work, the pressure is crushing their culture with high incidents of Karoshi.  And I’m saying there is a better way, one that still has all the efficiencies—but puts more of an emphasis on speed so that productivity doesn’t stack up behind the incompetent—but that the good manager can figure out who can do more in less time than the sluggish mind of those less capable.  That is how we solve the problem of being overworked even as the world demands more productivity at a much more rapid pace.  We can’t say no to that challenge—we simply have to figure out a better way to do it—which I’m thinking seriously of helping to formulate.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

Godzilla the Destroyer: Why Japanese culture wins at business and politics

Large companies strapped with labor union rules have turned to Japan hoping to learn something through Six Sigma or some other borrowed manufacturing method to improve their delivery times and product quality.  But they seldom ever work with spectacular results leaving companies to “cook the books” so to justify their commitment to such programs because the workers are still operating with the same type of mentality that they did before any written procedure.  The Japanese people think differently than other people in the world.  The root of their differences is their firm commitment to Shinto Buddhism passed down to their culture through their Samurai history.  To understand a bit of Shinto Buddhism one must understand the nature of what Shinto is.  The most modern example of Shinto to Japanese culture is the films of Godzilla—which is about to get a major upgrade from Warner Brothers in 2014.  See the preview below which has me very, very excited.  I love Godzilla—King of the Monsters! 

Godzilla’s allegiance and motivations have changed from film to film to suit the needs of the story. Although Godzilla does not like humans,[38] it will fight alongside humanity against common threats. However, it makes no special effort to protect human life or property much the way Japanese people see the world [39] and will turn against its human allies on a whim. It is not motivated to attack by predatory instinct: it doesn’t eat people,[25] and instead sustains itself on radiation[40] and an omnivorous diet.[36][41] When inquired if Godzilla was “good or bad”, producer Shogo Tomiyama likened it to a Shinto “God of Destruction” which lacks moral agency and cannot be held to human standards of good and evil. “He totally destroys everything and then there is a rebirth. Something new and fresh can begin.”[25]  Godzilla represents Japanese culture and their ability to deal with major tragedy and give rebirth to their country over and over again.  It is in this resiliency that the Japanese people find they are one of the most productive countries in the world—and able to embrace capitalism with a warm support that has caused their economy to swell.  Per capita, they are among the most productive people in existence.  Below are just a few attributes and interesting facts about Japanese culture.

Japanese children clean their schools every day for a quarter of an hour with teachers. This led to the emergence of a Japanese generation who is modest and keen on cleanliness.

* Any  Japanese citizen who has a dog must carry special bags to pick up dog droppings. Hygiene and their eagerness to address cleanliness is part of Japanese ethics.

* A hygiene worker in Japan is called “health engineer” and can command salary of USD 5000 to 8000 per month, and a  cleaner is subjected to written and oral tests!!

* Japan does not have any natural resources, and they are exposed to hundreds of earthquakes a year, but this has not prevented its becoming the second largest economy in the  world.

* In just ten years Hiroshima returned to what it was economically vibrant before the fall of the atomic bomb.

* Japan prevents the use of mobile phones in trains, restaurants and indoors.

* For first to sixth primary year Japanese students must learn ethics in dealing with people.

* Even though one of the richest people in the world, the Japanese do not have servants.The parents are responsible for the house and children.

* There is no examination from the first to the third primary level because the goal of education is to instill concepts and character building.

* If  you go to a buffet restaurant in Japan you will notice people only eat as much as they need without any waste because food must not be wasted.

* The rate of delayed trains in Japan is about 7 seconds per year!!
The Japanese appreciate the value of time and are very punctual to minutes and seconds.

* Children in schools brush their teeth (sterile) and clean their teeth after a meal at school, teaching them to maintain their health from an early age.

* Japanese students take half an hour to finish their meals to ensure proper digestion because these students are the future of Japan.

The Japanese focus on maintaining their own culture.
Therefore. . . .

* No political leader or a prime minister from an Islamic nation has ever visited Japan – not the Ayatollah of Iran, the King of Saudi Arabia or even a Saudi Prince!!

* Japan is a country keeping Islam at bay by putting strict restrictions on Islam and ALL Muslims.

      1) Japan is the only nation that does NOT give citizenship to Muslims.
      2) In Japan permanent residency is NOT given  to Muslims.
      3) There is a strong BAN on the propagation of Islam in Japan .
      4) In the University of Japan , Arabic or any Islamic language is NOT taught.
      5) One CANNOT import a ‘Koran’ published in the Arabic language.
      6) According to data published by the Japanese  government, it has given temporary residency to only 2  lakhs,(Muslims), who             must follow the Japanese Law of the Land. These  Muslims should speak Japanese and carry their religious rituals in their                 homes.
      7) Japan is the only country in the world that has a negligible number of embassies in Islamic countries.
      8) Muslims residing in Japan are the employees of foreign companies.
      9) Even today, visas are not granted to Muslim doctors, engineers or managers sent by foreign companies.
    10) In the majority of companies it is stated in their regulations that NO Muslims should apply for a job.
    11) The Japanese government is of the opinion that Muslims are fundamentalist, and even in the era of globalization they  are                  not willing to change their Muslim laws.
    12) Muslims CANNOT even rent a house in Japan.
    13) If anyone comes to know that his neighbor is a Muslim then the whole neighborhood stays alert.
    14) No one can start an Islamic cell or Arabic ‘Madrasa’ in Japan 
    15) There is NO Sharia law in Japan .
    16) If a Japanese woman marries a Muslim, she is considered an outcast  forever!
    17) According to Mr. Kumiko Yagi, Professor of Arab/Islamic Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, ” There is a mind               frame in Japan that Islam is a very narrow-minded religion and one should stay away from it, permanently!

Years ago when I was younger I worked at Cincinnati Milacron as a lathe machine rebuilder, and on my tool box where my co-workers had pictures of naked women, cars, and sports figures, mine had a photo of The Millennium Falcon and a list of the 9 Ways of the Samurai taken from Miyamoto Musashi’s epic book called The Book of Five Rings.  They are as follows:

  1. Do not think dishonestly.

  2. The Way is in training.

  3. Become acquainted with every art.

  4. Know the Ways of all professions.

  5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.

  6. Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.

  7. Perceive those things which cannot be seen.

  8. Pay attention even to trifles.

  9. Do nothing which is of no use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings

I studied and studied and studied those words, and read Miyamoto Musashi’s book over and over again—I still do.  The book means so much to me that I gave a copy of it to both of my son-in-laws so that they could learn how to be a proper man with those basic foundations.  Godzilla is the monster embodiment of all those 9 Ways and is unique to Japanese culture.  They are also the key to why the Japanese are so epically successful while other aspects of world culture struggles.

I don’t agree with everything the Japanese do—for instance they are gross collectivists.  But the 9 Ways of the Samurai are something that should come out of American culture and the cowboy lore of our foundation rather than the Samurai of Japan.  But what I do admire is that they have a value system which they preserve, and those values show up in their economy.  You don’t hear of labor unions ruining the Japanese people—they wouldn’t put up with it—because their Shinto Buddhist belief system would prevent them from adhering to union rules in the fashion so prevalent in the United States or communist countries.  The movie monster Godzilla is the embodiment of their belief system, the destructive nature of terror mixed with the life renewing force of rebirth.  To them, rebirth is an opportunity to correct things and live again, where in the West it is something to be terrified of, and avoided.  Godzilla is their way of dealing with the bombing of Hiroshima, and most recently the tsunami that caused such havoc over much of their country.  In Japan, they embrace fear, death, and sorrow with a boldness which allows them to get right back on their feet again and keep producing—because their value system holds them together.

American businesses have tried to study the Japanese with the hope that they could copy off their paper without adopting their way of thinking.  I watched labor disputes end Cincinnati Milacron while I worked there and read Musashi’s quotes as workers protested the loss of their jobs.  I used to contemplate that the people I worked with were fools not in touch with the Way of life—the Way of a living force for good and bad.  The Japanese tap into this energy and make vibrant economies with a land mass the size of most states in America.  The miracle of their society is within those 9 Samurai Ways.  But their mythology is most impressively—and metaphorically present in the movie monster Godzilla—a creature from the distant past—victimized by mankind’s destructive trends—only to become a destroyer of all that is oppressive—in a process that is life-renewing…instead of considered traditionally destructive.

To read more about Miyamoto Musashi click the link below:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi

And be ready to see Godzilla in the summer of2014.  I’ll be the first in line!

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com