Japanese Mafia Steps Up With Disaster Aid
The writer, Jake Adelstein, is one crazy mo-fo.
He is the pre-eminent Tokyo police-beat reporter writing in English, specializing in vice and organized crime.
He was also the first American to work for a Japanese newspaper as a Japanese language reporter.
His reporting of the UCLA organ transplant scam (because of their tattoos Yakuza often have kidney and especially liver problems) garnered him a few death threats and from time to time his sources decide to beat him to a pulp....
And his latest, from Asia Times, December 31:
Japan pays a high price as it goes down market
TOKYO – Japan is cheap. Yes, you read that right. This may surprise – or astonish – those familiar with the country’s high value-added brands, its “bubble era” or Japanese land prices – touted as among the most expensive in the world.
It certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom. But decades of stagnant wages, deflation and the gut-punch left by Abenomics have left Japan the Daiso of the world.
Examples? Out of 141 countries, Japan has the fourth-lowest starting salary. It has the lowest entry price for Disneyland. And Big Mac prices in Japan are on par with those of an emerging economy.
The high price the world’s third-largest economy is paying to be “cheap” is the subject of one of this year’s most talked-about vernacular bestsellers, Cheap Japan: Stagnation Indicated By Prices (Nikkei Publishing Inc, March 8, 2021).
The book, by financial reporter Rei Nakafuji of the Nikkei, paints a dismal picture of present-day Japan, where multiple measures to provoke some inflation have failed, to the point where some prices have fallen to the level of those in emerging economies.
On the macro level, Japan is becoming a “cheap” country in terms of, not just its prices, but also its human resources. It has abysmally low starting salaries for graduates, and – exacerbating existing labor shortages – is facing a brain drain.
Nakafuji argues that Japan is on course to becoming a poor nation, dependent on tourism, where the young and brightest minds leave the country for better jobs with better pay and working conditions.
It’s all an astonishing decline for a country that 30 years ago was the world’s most expensive.
The land of the non-rising price
Despite Japan’s reputation as a high-price destination, if you’re visiting from a wealthy country, you will find many things incredibly low-priced.
A luxury hotel room that might cost you US$1400 in the US a night is available for $700 in Japan. You can get a delicious beef bowl for 300 yen ($2.61) or a cheap Big Mac for 390 yen ($3.39) – slightly more than half it would cost ($5.74) in the US.
If family entertainment is your thing, Japan offers the lowest entry price among all Disneylands. Or why not go shopping? One Japanese global retail success of recent years is Daiso – noted for its plethora of cheap goods.
Daiso’s concept stems from the “100-yen store” where everything is priced at 100 yen ($0.87). Of course, many goods now actually cost 200 yen, 300 yen or more, but the idea is firmly grounded: Shop here for cheap stuff.
According to recent figures, Daiso has 2,248 stores in 26 countries and regions overseas. There are 1,365 operating in South Korea, 120 in Thailand and 44 in the United Arab Emirates. But only in Japan can goods be bought for 100 yen, or the local equivalent....
....MUCH MORE
There has to be some way out of the trap the Japanese economy is in. We are talking about one of the brightest populations on earth, with capital resources and trading talent that can run rings around most everyone in the world. But the powers that be have not yet hit upon a solution.
re: trading talent - excluding of course Mr. Hamanaka and the Sumitomo copper affair.
