The True Story of Japan

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I don't see Japan as being in decline, though it is, like almost everywhere else, a mixed bag that goes through dramatic ups and downs and social reversals in changing circumstances.

Japan's debt burden is a genuine problem.  Its buildup was complicated by its faltering approach to dealing with its own financial crises in the '90's, but its economy was starting to recover until first the American slowdown, then the financial collapse, and then the tsunami, nuclear meltdown and their aftereffects provided over time a devastating 1-2-3 punch to the society.  But its marriage situation is a mixed back.  While around 15% of Japanese women never marry, the divorce rate for first marriages, though higher in recent years, is still only around 25%, far less than in the U.S.  Many of these divorces and the phenomenon of permanently single women are actually a result of expanded economic and educational opportunities for women and the oppressive circumstances that traditional roles of marriage imposed upon women.  True, there are luxury item fetishes in Japan, but also fairly large numbers of people who don't entertain such fetishes.  The rate of disposable income savings of individual Japanese is, even with such fetishes and with often dramatically higher real estate prices, markedly higher than that among individuals in the U.S., so widely addicted to credit and the individual debt it results in.   The U.S. has too many of its own problems with commodity fetishism to be throwing stones at another society where young women buy a few too many expensive purses.  The social disorders that Nathan speaks of are certainly real, and there remain, in my own experience, very serious communication problems between both individuals and generations in Japanese society.  But, whereas Japanese talk with one another too little in the attempt to solve problems, I think Americans (including myself) blather too much and make them worse in the opposite way.

Japan has some serious challenges facing it in the coming decades, but it also has powerful things going for it, including levels of resilience, productivity and large cross-sections of genuinely talented people that will help it marshal through in the long run.