Sometimes Japan seems to be on the wrong continent. Everywhere else in Asia, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Jakarta, there is an aura of perpetual motion, a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. The region is on a frenetic 365-day-a-year hurtle into a brighter future. Japan once shared Asia's dynamism and mission. But not anymore. Today, Japan is an island of inertia in an Asia in constant flux. Japan's political leadership is paralyzed, its corporate elite befuddled, its people agonized about the future. While Asia lurches forward, Japan inches backward.
And yet no one in Japan is doing very much about it. For 20 long years, ever since the spectacular collapse of a stock-and-property price bubble in the early 1990s, the economy has existed in a near cryogenic state. The postbubble period of malaise called the "lost decade" has stretched into the lost decades. Growth has been practically nonexistent, the welfare of the Japanese people has suffered and the old industrial titans of Japan Inc. are retreating on the world stage. Japan will likely lose its cherished status as the world's No.2 economy this year, to a more energetic China. Though that was inevitable, the fact that China is so quickly closing the gap in economic power doesn't bode well for Japan's standing in the world...more at TIME Magazine.
At the current time it seems that most people expect "when" to be sometime in mid-2011, but it wouldn't surprise me to see things drag out until late 2011, shitty as that thought is.
