Japan has its own problems...

Readers of my blog know, in nauseating detail, that our economic system has serious long term problems that need to be addressed.

However, there is another country that is even further along in its death throes than we:

As Charles Hugh Smith writes:

Japan's Runaway Debt Train (2001)

Imagine, if you can, an economic Hell in which the U.S. government was borrowing 40% of its annual budget, creating annual deficits of 900 billion dollars a year; where 65% of all tax revenues were gobbled up by interest payments on a mind-boggling $13 trillion public debt; and where there was no conductor in sight to stop this runaway debt train.

Welcome to Japan, where that Hell is reality.

Reports on Japan's weak economy and the mountains of bad debt in its banking system have been percolating for over a decade; every once in a while, a downgrade bubbles to the surface, and then the whole "crisis" sinks from view again, lost in the complacency of seemingly permanent malaise.

But after a decade of half-hearted attempts at reform and repeated stabs at "kick-starting" its moribund economy with pork-barrel spending, time is finally running out for Japan. For despite the endless hand-wringing about weak banks, Japan's real financial cancer lies in the public sector, run not by bankers but by politicians.

In fact, if Japan's bad bank debt magically vanished tomorrow, the root causes of the nation 's financial woes would remain untouched...

... The numbers are truly stunning: Japan's swelling public debt of $6.3 trillion is 136% of the nation's GDP--over twice the relatively modest U.S. rate ($5.6 trillion in public debt, or about 56% of GDP)--surpassing even Italy, long the European Community's poster child of public indebtedness at 120% of GDP.

In stark contrast to the universal hand-wringing which arose when the U.S. national debt hit 70% of GDP in the late 80s, this record-breaking public debt has only recently created a ripple of concern around the world.

It's not just the size of Japan's current debt that worries observers; it's how fast it's growing. Government receipts totalled only $463 billion in 2000, while its expenditures were $830 billion.

The $367 billion difference--a staggering 40% of the budget--was borrowed, with the government issuing some 33 trillion yen of new bonds to fund the new debt. Deficit spending is now a mind-numbing 9% of the entire GDP.
This is the result of a decade of denial.

Unfortunately for us, Japan is also one of our biggest financiers, holding more U.S. Debt than even China. In other words, when your banker is facing economic ruin... you know that you are living on borrowed time.

Check it out:

Reasons for Japan's Dismal Birth Rate

Both the government and companies are to blame

Hisane Masaki (hmasaki)

Japan is at a historic juncture demographically, with the rapid aging of the population. Its birth rates had precipitously declined on an annual basis until making a recovery last year. The 2006 figure, at 1.32, is still among the lowest in the world.

Even before the population showed its first decline since the end of World War II in 2005, two years earlier than widely expected, the working-age population had already begun to shrink several years earlier. The percentage of people aged 65 or over has exceeded 20 percent of the total population, while that of children aged 14 or under has declined below 14 percent.

Not only is Japan's birth rate already among the lowest in the industrialized world, but its pace of decline, until bouncing back last year, was the fastest. This has been largely attributed by experts to such factors as employment insecurity, long working hours and poor public aid for childrearing.

Economic factors are most often cited as the primary reason more and more Japanese get married in later life or choose -- or are even forced to choose -- to remain single. Working women in particular need or want to work, but it is not easy to combine employment and childrearing because of the poor quality of childcare services available, unfavorable employment practices and rigid working conditions.

I would like to make a quick interjection.

When the English language media covers Japan and her shrinking birthrate, this feminist line of thinking almost always appears.

However, those in the know realize that Japanese women are not as monolithic as this reporter makes them out to be, and that Japanese women as a group are not interested in putting in the insanely long hours that their men do [1][2].

In my view, the main cause of the falling birthrate is that the Japanese man is simply too exhausted to do his duty.

Consider:

Japanese Citizens Not Having Sex

TOKYO — The secret behind Japan’s plunging birth rate? A record 39.7% of Japanese citizens ages 16-49 have not had sex in over a month.

Among married couples, the rate was only slightly lower, at 34.6%.

"My research shows that if you don’t have sex for a month, you probably won’t for a year," said Dr. Kunio Kitamura, the family planning association’s director.

The survey comes amid concerns over Japan’s faltering birthrate, which fell in 2005 to 1.26 births in an average woman’s lifetime. The decline has stoked fears of impeding tax revenue shortfalls and labor shortages.

Kitamura partly blamed stress from busy working lives. A decline in physical communication skills in an increasingly web-based society was also a factor.

No love, no sex, no babies, no economy, no future. It really is that simple. It is clear that the feminist party line of the plight of the "working woman" isn't nearly as significant as this article portrays it to be. For more thoughts on this topic, please go here.

Continuing on with the article:

The government white paper on the labor market, released last August, said that the steady increase in low-wage, part-time workers and those in temporary jobs is contributing to the low birth rate as people become reluctant to marry because of financial insecurity. The annual report acknowledged for the first time that the changing employment system is behind the widening income gap...

... Japanese have become increasingly concerned about the future as social-security costs, such as pension contributions and insurance premiums for medical care and nursing care for the elderly, as well as tax burdens, are expected to keep rising sharply amid the anticipated long-term declining trend of birth rates and the rapid graying of society. While having to pay more pension premiums today, current Japanese workers also face the prospect of reduced pension benefits after retirement. In addition, more and more Japanese, including the elderly, are living alone.

The rapid demographic changes have alarmed Japanese policymakers. In addition to a further shrinkage in the working-age population, the decline and rapid graying of the population are matters of deep concern because they will ultimately mean lower consumer spending as well as a drop in the savings rate. All of this poses a serious potential threat to the growth potential and future competitiveness of what is currently the world's second-largest economy. Meanwhile, pressure is also growing, especially from domestic industries, to accept more unskilled foreign workers to alleviate an anticipated serious labor shortage.

All in all, it would seem that our post feminist economic model is unsustainable in the long term. All the evidence seems to point to the fact that, while a society can choose the path of rapid economic growth, the moment that society sacrifices family ties for profit, it sows the seeds of its own collapse.

Had Japan (and the United States) maintained its tradition of strong extended family networks, they would not be facing a social security crisis. If the United States (and Japan) had took a hard line against Cultural Marxist feminism and preserved its strong traditions of accountability and family, and established and maintained a regime of equal rights, not special rights, between the sexes, we would not have the familial discord that threatens to derail all of the economic gains the country has achieved.

That's a lot of what ifs.

In summary, understand that Marxist feminism is the way of death, for women, for children, for men, and even for nation states. Japan's problems are a harbringer of our own.

Welcome to the New World Order.

Don't sleep.