However by 2004 the share market had begun to show some life and some optimism was returning at last. ![]() Some skeptics may insinuate a priest and last rites may be more appropriate. There are just so many complex choices to be made, and done in the right order, if the patient is to survive. As the country’s politicians and bureaucrats, playing the metaphorical role of paramedics, attend to the driver at the side of the road, they have many difficult decisions in their treatment. I read recently that Japan’s economy of the early 21st Century was likened to a driver thrown from a speeding car. However I have yet to see any management books based on the financial sophistication or enlightening precepts of The Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution or crowd-control in Tiananmen Square. Nowadays they are blaming the Chinese instead. This was most noticeable in America where business and political leaders spent most of the 1980’s frothing at their mouths and reading a steady stream of best-selling books on Japanese management that were cranked out faster than Toyota minivans. This was perhaps to the relief of some of the other major economic powers. By 1992 TIME’s covers now led with headlines such as, ‘Japan’s Recession, Why the powerhouse will never be the same’, ‘Japan’s new anxiety’ and ‘The mighty fall’. History shows that the 1990’s, now known as Japan’s ‘lost decade’, brought something very different. The covers of TIME screamed headlines like, ‘Super Japan’, ‘Yen Power’ and ‘How to cope with Japan’s business invasion’. Just chalk it up to notions of insecure paranoia. Japan could do no wrong and the idea was floated that corporate Japan could “…wind up owning the Grand Canyon, the Lincoln Memorial, and the New York Stock Exchange - and still have enough left over to buy Latin America.” Though why they would want to do any of that is beyond me. ![]() was considered to be on its way to being the world’s number one economy. Bloated by the excesses of towering land prices, political kickbacks, and money leant to dubious projects and criminal gangs, Japan Inc. Students of economics will remember how Japan’s economy never missed a beat after the stock market crash of 1987 that had sent other major economies into a tailspin. ![]() Police sadly reported that there was no food left in the apartment and the woman only had a sparse eight yen left in her purse. One such case was reported in February 2005 when a 27-year-old mother and her three-year-old son were found starved to death in their apartment near Tokyo. On the other hand, some families on ever-reducing low-incomes are experiencing such extreme poverty that there have even incredibly been some cases of mothers and their children dying from malnutrition. Youth arrested have apparently told the police that they were “killing time,” “getting rid of stress” and “disposing of society’s trash.” Others sit in lawn chairs in front of their shacks, reading novels.” These homeless have become easy targets for Japan’s newly disaffected youth and assaults are soaring. As a sign of the suburban life many had led, some have transformed tiny patches of land into gardens. In Kawasaki, outside of Tokyo the homeless have, “erected scores of wooden shacks, neatly spaced, with locks and, sometimes, ornamented windows and doors. Since I arrived in Japan the problem has not improved but become even greater and more institutionalized. These men, but no women, I guessed were an obvious sign of the recent economic decline in Japan after the bursting of the ‘ bubble economy’. As we wended through Shinjuku station we found the hundreds of homeless living in cardboard boxes. A word of thanks to Japanese taxpayers is appropriate at this point as I will never be able to afford to stay there myself, nor fly business class most likely. We walked out from our hotel, the very salubrious Hyatt - that was most recently made famous by the movie ‘Lost in Translation’. What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers? ![]() Economic Bubbles and the Salaryman’s Vomit…
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