* It’s about “Who, whom?” as usual.
Foreign investors i.e. American hedge funds, banks, etc. don’t like Japan because Japan’s real estate and financial markets have been flat. That’s what’s meant by “lost decade”. It’s not that it’s been that bad for ordinary Japanese, what’s been “lost” is the opportunity for these foreign investors to make capital gains and extract more money out of Japan for themselves.
What the foreign investors wanted was for Japan to sell its people out and gin up its real estate and financial markets by things like immigration population growth.
A flat, low real estate and financial market is not necessarily a bad thing for your ordinary citizens. It keeps the costs down for your ordinary citizens to buy.
This applies not only between foreign investors and ordinary Japanese, but also between Wall St. and ordinary American citizens in fly-over country.
* Japan, like Finland, is a great counter-argument against people who claim the only way to have a competitive high-tech economy is to throw open the floodgates of 3rd world immigration (also against people who claim that it’s impossible for high-wage countries to maintain a manufacturing base). In the long term a smaller population will probably be good for Japan once they get over the demographic hump, resulting in more affordable real estate, less crowding, and higher wages. I give them credit for wanting to preserve their culture and ignoring the many commentators who have called for them to combat their declining population by importing a servant class from southeast Asia into an already overcrowded island.
Another important statistic the article didn’t mention: Japanese cities are light-years safer and cleaner than American ones. The comparison of the Japanese reaction to Fukushima and the American reaction to Hurricane Katrina remains instructive.
