Wednesday, March 30, 2005

J-News Roundup:
1) A very special photo show is here. Hai! Camura desu!
2) Aichi Expo 2005! I'm going in April! Killa!
3) If Japan loses to Bahrain in tonight's World Cup Qualifier, Zico will be in trouble.
4) An Officer and a GerbilMan: Koizumi brings shame to Japan. Dare to look?
5) Recession might be in the works for Japan's Economy.
6) Japan's mortal enemy uses a Japanese URL for anti-Japanese propaganda. Fun stuff. Forget 7 year grudge: This is a seven hundred year grudge.

4 comments:

James Bow said...
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James Bow said...
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James Bow said...

I wrote something and deleted it because I thought it sounded too facetious. Let's try this again: I'm surprised to learn that Japan's economy may be heading back into recession. Hasn't it already been fairly stagnant since 1993? What's it been doing these past twelve years?

Shamrocks! said...

James:

You're right. The last 15 or so years, ever since the massive Nikkei implosion have been up and down. Yahoo has a good rundown of the shenanigans here: http://biz.yahoo.com/ifc/jp.html

The 97-98 Asian crisis put them in a downward spiral for a bit, but they have other problems. The banks have a lot of bad debt and they don't want to call in bad loans to these huge companies with mountains of bad debt - They are called 'Zombie Companies'. Typically construction companies that have built lots of unneeded infrastructure.

But the Banks, the FSA and Koizumi have been managing somewhat. The banks have stopped issuing dicey loans, and there is some reform going on. Bigger challenges (ie: depopulation) loom on the horizon though:
http://rhymingrenegades.blogspot.com/2005/03/japan-population-and-policy.html

After 2002 it looked like the country might be headed upwards, and I think even the economist was predicting 2% growth for this year, but the last quarter was a contraction, and it might be the same for this one too.