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Comment by krrrh | Hacker News Reader

This is a good start:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)

It's also interesting to review old films and media from the late eighties (Gung Ho, and Die Hard). It's hard to comprehend if you didn't live through it, but there was a massive level of anxiety in the US that Japanese business culture and management prowess was going to be impossible for the US to overcome, and that th US was in decline.

The Asset bubble in Japan was so insane that at one point the nominal value of the Imperial Palace was equal to the value of all property in the state of California. Aother good Wikipedia article to read is this one:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble

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Also the whole structure and relationships associated with Japanese businesses and the government and like, e.g. MITI [1]. I went to business school in the mid-eighties and I remember any number of articles and visiting lecturers arguing for how the US had to emulate Japanese industrial policy and planning or we were doomed.

Certainly there was also significant attention to some of the more specific processes and practices associated with Japanese manufacturing (and far less to US manufacturing) at the time, which have been largely proven out. (And are arguably being reflected in a lot of modern DevOps software practices.) However, a lot of notable economists and others were also calling for much more systematic cooperation/planning between government and companies (especially manufacturers). Sematech was an example from the semiconductor industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_International_Trad...

It's funny that we call it the lost decade but it is now really a lost quarter century.

https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+per+capita+income&oq=j...

From 1990 to 2013 Japan's per capita income actually doubled, translating into over 3% growth per annum.

That money has been pretty unevenly distributed, to say the least.

Japan is actually one of the more egalitarian countries in the world as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_...

Well, I'm not really sure what to make of that, but this is a pretty common claim in both US and Japanese sources; here's an example: http://theweek.com/articles/453219/everything-need-know-abou...

> Why aren't they getting married?

> There are both cultural and economic barriers. In Japanese tradition, marriage was more about duty than romantic love. Arranged marriages were the norm well into the 1970s, and even into the 1990s most marriages were facilitated by "go-betweens," often the grooms' bosses. Left to their own devices, Japanese men aren't sure how to find wives — and many are shying away from the hunt, because they simply can't afford it. Wages have stagnated since the 1990s, while housing prices have shot up. A young Japanese man has good reason to believe that his standard of living would drop immensely if he had to house and support a wife and children — especially considering that his wife likely wouldn't be working.

Japan has had deflation so even a stagnating wage translates into a rising standard of living. That said, Japan has a generational gap whereby the younger people face worse challenges, but that is different from what is typically understood as income inequalities.

Well, be that as it may, the challenges of young people were what I meant to allude to with the top comment.

This chart tells a very different story.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-growth

Japan has been suffering from low inflation and at times deflation. This means that debts do not shrink with inflation. I think the stockmarket and property markets have been pretty flat too over the period. What growth there has been has been assisted by "extraordinary" (well they were before 2008) monetary measures and growth in government debt to 230% of GDP.

Japan's working age population peaked in the 80s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan so I don't know why anyone should expect robust aggregate growth, considering that it has been a maturely developed economy for decades.

I think we can say that the "lost decade" has extended itself to a "lost 25 years"

It'll soon be the lost 3 decades, the way things are going[0].

0: http://blogos.com/article/104198/

If the "lost" decade refers to the sluggish growth of Japan starting beginning of the century, let's not forget that Japanese population growth has been negative for a while. The per capita economic performance of the country is much less lost in that regard.

fwiw it started in the 90's.

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