Politics & Power Quote by Kiichi Miyazawa

Miyazawa’s line lands like an imported scolding: not just “you’re lazy,” but “you’ve lost the moral engine that made you rich.” As a Japanese politician speaking in the late 20th-century shadow of Japan’s postwar boom and America’s fitful deindustrialization, he’s leveraging an old rhetorical weapon in international economic rivalry: the contrast between disciplined production and decadent consumption.

The phrasing is telling. “I suspect” pretends to be cautious while still delivering a sweeping indictment. “Work ethic” is less about hours clocked than a civic religion - a claim that national character, not policy, explains economic outcomes. Then comes the biblical-industrial image: “sweat of their brow.” It’s Protestant grit repackaged as geopolitical critique. Subtext: the U.S. has shifted from making things to managing, consuming, and financing them; its prosperity now seems unmoored from visible labor. That’s a complaint about the dignity of work, but also about trade deficits, hollowed factories, and the perception that Americans expect high wages without the collective discipline that once underwrote them.

There’s a strategic edge here. By moralizing economics, Miyazawa dodges the messy details - currency policy, corporate strategy, labor law, automation - and turns competition into virtue. It flatters Japanese audiences (we still “sweat”), pressures American leaders (restore seriousness), and legitimizes Japan’s rise as earned rather than merely advantageous. The barb works because it hits a cultural nerve: Americans admire hard work, fear complacency, and bristle at being told they didn’t earn their comfort.