＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
A few years ago, while watching TV, I saw a balding man about my age with a balding head pedaling his bicycle as hard as he could and hurrying along.
The TV reporter asked, “What are you in such a hurry for?” He replied, “Today is the deadline for the shareholder special benefit, so I’m hurrying around.
My frank impression at the time was, “There are strange people out there.
This was my first encounter with Mr. Hiroto Kiritani.
1. who is Hiroto Kiritani?
Hiroto Kiritani, born in 1949, is a professional Shogi player (7-dan) and investor.
He was a student of Kozo Masuda Meijin (1918-1991), who was a dynamic and unconventional player. He “retired” from shogi in 2007. He was a “research-oriented” shogi player, which was still rare at that time, and was nicknamed “Computer Kiritani”.
He also writes a Shogi commentary, and also gives his master Kozo Masuda’s Shogi commentary in “Hiroto Kiritani’s Shogi Lecture” and “Commentary on the Great Game” on the Igo/Shogi Channel.
Although he was a student of Kozo Masuda, he was devoted to Kunio Yonenaga and worked as a ghostwriter for Yonenaga for more than 20 years, and later confessed to the media that he once broke up with his fiancee because of Yonenaga.
His turning point was the establishment of the Shogi Club at the Tokyo Securities Kyowa-kai in 1984, when he became its master and began to learn stock investment on his own.
Since then, he has become famous as a “zaiteku-kishi,” appearing in the zaiteku-oriented magazines Diamond ZAi and Nikkei Money, and explaining shareholder benefits on NHK TV’s “Household Diagnosis Recommended Yuyuyu Life.
As of 2006, he owned approximately 400 stocks with a market value of 300 million yen, of which 100 million yen were special benefit stocks. By taking advantage of shareholder special benefits, he spends almost no cash on living expenses, and with his excellent memory, which he also demonstrated as a professional Shogi player, he knows all the expiration dates of the many gift certificates he has received.
For gift certificates with expiration dates that are of little use to him, he sells them to money stores, and he tries to sell them at a high price using a variety of methods. The only cash he spends is on rent, utilities, and Internet usage, and he is able to pay for these expenses with stock dividends as well.
The Lehman Shock of 2008 and the frequent margin trading he did after his retirement backfired, and the market value of his stocks plummeted to about 50 million yen as of 2013. After that, he began to focus more on an investment strategy of holding special benefit and dividend stocks without selling them. Then, with the rise in stock prices due to Abenomics, he returned to a record high of 300 million yen in 2017.
Around 2012, she started appearing on variety shows and became famous as “Ms. Kiritani, who loves shareholder benefits.
In her personal life, she has not been married since the dissolution of her engagement, and has registered with a “marriage counseling agency.
This is to find a matchmaking partner using the shareholder special benefit coupons of “IBJ Co., Ltd.”, which operates a marriage counseling agency and marriage activity website, but so far he has not yet “reached the goal”.
２．Stock Investment in Japan’s Postwar Era
During the “high-growth” period of the Japanese economy, many stocks rose in price in step with the growth of the Japanese economy, and “par value capital increases” and “free capital increases” were also common. I have heard stories that if one had bought shares in Matsushita Electric Industrial or Toyota Motor Company shortly after the end of the war and held on to them for a long time, they would now be worth hundreds of times more.
However, I don’t think there were many people who wanted to “invest in stocks” during the chaotic postwar period, and this should only be called “consequentialism” or “theoretical theory.
During the “stock investment boom” of the 1960s, the term “money building” and “investment trusts” by Nikko Securities became popular, expanding the base of stock investment.
However, in 1961, the “Iwato Boom” came to an end and the securities market peaked in July and began to decline. The “securities recession” led to an increase in mutual fund cancellations and a decline in commission income, and Yamaichi Securities’ business deteriorated. For investors, “investment trusts,” in which investments are entrusted to experts, were not very profitable after all, were they?
Then, in 1965, Yamaichi Securities was hit with cold water due to a management crisis, including a “run on its shares”. However, the worst was averted when then Minister of Finance Kakuei Tanaka decided to provide a “special loan to the Bank of Japan.
During the “bubble period,” stock prices rose rapidly for a short period of time, but then the “bubble burst” and the Japanese stock market was in a disastrous state, and the “Lehman Shock” followed.
This contrasts favorably with the “all-time highs” of the New York stock market in the United States. I still think that the reason is that the Japanese Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan at that time did a poor job of “ending the bubble economy” and caused a “hard landing” that led to a “sudden crash”.
