the whole world will be Japanized

after much silence I feel that I have something to say again, with rather high level of confidence. The ten years following Japan's real estate and monetary system collapse had sculpted the economic character of the nation for more than ten years, the lost decade they called it. The fact is that they still have not walked out of the shadows of the crisis, even though much has changed, and on the surface, Japan is so beautiful and exquisite in so many aspects that it is very difficult to convince yourself that it is actually in a deep state of trouble. And how is that related to the world today?

Consider juices. It used to be that there are two types of juices, the real expensive ones and the fake cheap ones that you buy from Safeway in litres. Then they mixed it up, there are real ones with a bit of artificial flavours to spice it up, fake ones with xx% of real juices to look more genuine, and then there are the extra fresh ones, and then there are the intentionally artificial ones like V or Mother, proudly poisonous. This is a process of diversification that fills in the grey area of the market that used to be only black or white. The extreme case of this is Japan, where there are a thousand different styles and niched products for every single type of merchandise.

But economically speaking, the idea of coming up with bottled juices created new markets in our economy, generating jobs, consumption and production that were not available before, whilst diversifying one type of juices into a thousand, mainly just disperses the demand onto thin ice without really creating anything new except maybe for the marketing industry. This is what Japan has been doing in the last decades in my opinion, creating fashions after fashions of stuff that shuffles money here and there. So it doesn't matter how exquisitely made Japanese culture is, they are meant to be fucked forever, slowly. It lacks an aggressive government and relevant financial capabilities to boost and expand, as it did from the 50s to 70s.

Now as we see in the aftermath of the government stimulus packages, the whole world is suffering but so far we don't hear many governments dismantled. It's the beginning of a prolonged process of diversification. Money would be continuously controlled by the failing giants who will come up with successful solutions every once in a while. Mitsubishi would still be mitsubishi, toyota still toyota, but their roles changed, no longer the leader that guides the rest, but the leader that prevents others from climbing to the top. The world would become more beautiful, with better notebooks, better pens, better facial products, but be prepared for an economy that goes nowhere for decades to come. In this new big Japan, look for big nations with a central government, they will the last samurais in the Meiji time.