Japanese cowboy takes a dive

So much for Takafumi Horie. Japan's #1 internet mogul never really invented anything or made anything new - his company is basically a Yahoo rip-off supported by endless mergers and acquisitions - but he did a lot for Japan, writing books and giving speeches that promoted a Western-style cowboy capitalist ethic: go for the money, fear nothing, take risks, and upset the established order. That kind of attitude has done a lot of good for corporate Japan, helping to build an entire new generation of brash confident dynamic young entrepreneurs.

Now he's under investigation for Enron-style book-cooking (another area in which he apparently copied the West). Horie, who "drove a Ferrari and dated models and actresses," bought racehorses and a baseball team, and claimed he was going to live forever, is learning the hard way that individualism has a flip side - the bigger you make yourself out to be, the harder you are liable to fall (the article I linked to has a great quote: No doubt he now realizes there is one result even worse than zero—and that’s jail." Priceless!).

But something tells me that Horie's impact on Japan won't vanish with his personal stardom. He put into people's heads the idea that they can be anything they want to be, and even the notion - poisonous but powerful - that if you don't rise to great heights you wasted your life. In other words, he gave Japanese people ambition. And that ambition will hopefully stick around long after Horie himself has joined Michael Milken and Ken Lay in the hordes of washed-up cowboys trying to cover their debts by writing autobiographies...

PLUS:
Here's a great article that basically supports my entire argument about why a Hamas win will be a good thing in the long run for the Israel and Palestine alike.