The Myth of Japan’s Failure
Some choice quotes:
There are some ridiculous quotes in the article, namely concerning Michelin star restaurants and fancy cars, which are hardly indicative of anything in my opinion. As far as I know, the large majority of Tokyo inhabitants don't even have a driver's licence and although I did see some mid-range luxury German autos (BMW, Mercedes, Audi) when I was last there in 2008, they were parked in car ports attached to tiny, landless houses. I never got a good sense of what peoples' personal finances were like but the Japanese do travel a lot and the Japanese students here (of which there are not that many anymore) seem to come from middle/upper-middle class backgrounds, not from elite backgrounds like some Chinese or out of shear academic merit (like most of the Chinese grad students who study technical subjects). That seems to indicate an impressive level of actual affluence. I think the middle class seems to be on better footing there than here. I did feel that there was a big contrast between urban Tokyo and Sendai and rural, small-town Japan, even only a few hours out. It felt bigger to me than the same contrast in the United States (at least on the West Coast).[The presentation of Japan's economy as having suffered a 'lost decade' and being mired in stagnation] is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.
Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.
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Japan’s average life expectancy at birth grew by 4.2 years — to 83 years from 78.8 years — between 1989 and 2009. This means the Japanese now typically live 4.8 years longer than Americans. The progress, moreover, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, diet. The Japanese people are eating more Western food than ever. The key driver has been better health care.
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Japan’s current account surplus — the widest measure of its trade — totaled $196 billion in 2010, up more than threefold since 1989. By comparison, America’s current account deficit ballooned to $471 billion from $99 billion in that time. Although in the 1990s the conventional wisdom was that as a result of China’s rise Japan would be a major loser and the United States a major winner, it has not turned out that way. Japan has increased its exports to China more than 14-fold since 1989 and Chinese-Japanese bilateral trade remains in broad balance.
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On the calculations of John Williams of Shadowstats.com, a Web site that tracks flaws in United States economic data, America’s growth in recent decades has been overstated by as much as 2 percentage points a year. If he is even close to the truth, this factor alone may put the United States behind Japan in per-capita performance.
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Luckily there is a yardstick that finesses many of these problems: electricity output, which is mainly a measure of consumer affluence and industrial activity. In the 1990s, while Japan was being widely portrayed as an outright “basket case,” its rate of increase in per-capita electricity output was twice that of America, and it continued to outperform into the new century.
Comparing well-being is tough, obviously, because of inherent the subjectiveness and multivariate nature of the problem. But I tend to agree that the idea of Japan as a dying, stagnant economy seems ridiculous and seems only to exist to justify a lot of Western political and economic dogma. Japan's protectionism and paternalistic employment structure is the biggest point of contention and seems to be the source of some real serious social problems there. But the more I think about it, the more I've come to believe that replacing it with a nimble, Western-style labor market is not the right course of action. A Hong Kong-born friend of mine, sickened by the fact that America still does not have universal health care, remarked to me on a few occasions that Asian societies tend not to care about ideology and politics but ask 'what is the right thing to do?' I think that's demonstrably horse lavender, personally, but in Japan's case, there does seem to be some sort of sense of collective responsibility that could be interpreted this way.
I would be interested to hear what Typhoon and An have to say about this (recognizing that Thailand is a long distance from Japan culturally).