JeffLee comments

the BOJ is leading the parade as Japan continues to march into "poverty." 

Not true at all. The corporations, which are raking in record-high profits yet have long refused to give pay raises in line with their earnings growth, are "leading the parade" to poverty.

workers in Japan should all get a solid block of 4 weeks off every year

Sure, but that's a decision for employers, not the BOJ. Why are people in Japan so reluctant or afraid to criticize corporations? The govt and boj set the rules and conditions. It's like blaming sports events organizers and umpires for a team's loss and not the team.

They keep talking and talking while price already increase from last year. 

I have no idea what your point is. They did take action with the policy tweak while acknowledging that sustained inflation is becoming more of a reality.

When the US cut off oil to Japan, that was the last straw.

The oil was to fuel Japan's war machine, which killed 10s of millions of innocent people. Under what obligation was the US complicit in that arrangement? And who says that countries are not allowed to choose their trading partners?

Japan looked around and saw they were surrounded by European and US colonies. 

Japan wasn't "surrounded" by anyone. Japan's geographic position is one of most isolated of any major power, and it was never a target of colonialism by anyone. It's ww2 adventure was purely about domination and subjugation of weaker states by a race of people who saw themselves as superior.

They also knew Japan would capitulate when Russia entered the war,

Except Japan didn't capitulate upon Russia's entry. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria continued until Aug. 20, featuring fierce, fanatical, banzai style resistance from the nearly 1 million Japanese troops. Truman's diary states the a-bombs would probably force a quick surrender and if they didn't, then Russia's entry could seal the deal. The revisionists love to misinterpret this rational and straightforward belief. Hirohito said after the war that the US aerial bombings were his primary consideration in calling for unconditional surrender.

"Facts: the enemy of revisionism"

We need an article like this pertaining to Japan. i'm tired of seeing grass areas disappear and trees removed or pruned to nothing while more and more concrete is laid in my part of Tokyo over the past couple of decades.

America had won

Too bad no one told that to the 800,000 Japanese soldiers and million or so civilian defense corps who were digging in in Kyushu in July 1945, preparing to repel the invaders in what would have surely been the bloodiest and most suicidal battle of all.

Or the two million other Japanese soldiers elsewhere in Japan waiting for their deployment orders. Millions of Japanese were fully ready and waiting to fight that summer....until Hirohito unilaterally called on them to surrender directly after hearing news of Nagasaki.

Disgusting two target a civilian population.

The US air force routinely dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets warning civilians and exhorting them to flee their cities in advance of bombing runs. The US targeted cities and their industrial and military facilities, not civilians. Japan would have never surrendered if its cities were left intact.

 lots of people opt out of it so it's not as effective as it can be. 

It's crazy that the govt bills people for their contributions, which are basically a tax. Why don't they take the money out of the tax budget if they're so worried about non-payment? Same situation with health insurance.

I stopped getting it after reclining my office chair back to almost maximum, lifting weights, doing planks and bridges floor exercises, and playing tennis or hiking once a week. Everyone's different, but that works for me.

Nenkin is excessively stingy. People pay out of pocket all their careers for very little in return. In Canada, the basic pension is universal, coming out of taxes. In the US, the average social security monthly payment is around $1,700, over twice as much as nenkin. Japan could well confront a elderly-poverty crisis in the coming years.

The Nenkin online site is good, giving lots of updated data, although I fear that the planned integration with MyNumber may deny me access to my account, as NM currently doesn't support my PC's Chrome OS.

Japan's prices are nearly the same as in Canada, and Canada pumps it from its own ground while Canadians tend to drive a lot more than Japanese.

Crude oil is currently only a little higher than five years ago. We can thank corporate greed and globalization for the exorbitant pump prices and weird market distortions that are hurting consumers so badly. Subsidies are needed to protect us from these ravages.

People are not robots

In Japan, many are expected to be.

Here in Tokyo, I never see cops hanging around combinis, family restaurants or Starbucks like I do in other countries. I don't even see them drink from a water bottle on a hot day. The koban cops in my area seem to eat and drink in a back room, away from the public gaze. Japan sees this as appropriate for some reason.

Toyota workers make more on average than GM workers.

They earn roughly the same hourly rate, but GM workers have far bigger benefits like healthcare, pensions, etc.

I expect that a wartime evacuation of civilians would be automatically taken over by the central govt, notably the armed forces, and his tiny town hall wouldn't have much to say in the matter.

Buy more tanks and planes! That's what the govt is going to do with its latest fiscal surplus.

Much of the money will go for corporate welfare. That's because Japan chooses to build or co-build much of its hardware under licence instead of buying it off the shelf, a much cheaper option.

No wonder that Japan's surpluses always end up as deficits. LOL.

Ah, nearly forgot. Once in Ikebukuro Station, I was walking with a gaijin friend who was a diving instructor in Thailand, had a tan in winter, and a general appearance of someone who spends a lot of time on the beach.

Two cops marched up, saying, "passport!, passport!" After we complied with a startled and slightly amused attitude, they went away. They were definitely not polite about it and offered no explanation as to why we were targeted.

Maybe because many prices in Japan are considerably lower than in other developed countries. Just ask the flood of foreign tourists coming here now.

And when financial markets sense that...

The financial markets have shown they have a hecka of a lot of confidence in Japan. In normal times, the yen is a leading global safe-haven currency, and this country is the world's largest creditor nation, after all.

About half a dozen times Twice for the offense of "being a gaijin walking on a public sidewalk minding his own business." No explanations were given. Once in Osaka around the time of some expo or something, not that they explained any possible connection, etc.

The rest of time on my bicycle, evidently for the office of "being a gaijin riding a registered bicycle on a public road."

A turkish guy with a dark complexion told me he was stopped EVERY SINGLE NIGHT on cycling on his way home from the restaurant where he worked. Once, two officers fled the scene of a car accident in order to flag him down.

Just wondering what it means for the yen up ahead.

Higher interest rates in Japan tend to lead to a higher value of the yen. The latest policy move allows the rates to go a bit higher than before, although we don't know how high the BOJ will allow the rates to rise.

 An 8-point match is still said to have an accuracy of about 100 million to one.

So, for all intents and purposes they know one of the perps, while the Chinese guy's silence while incarcerated sure seems to indicate his involvement.

 increasing evidence it is ineffective as a deterrent

I don't know where they get their "evidence." I only know that illicit fentanyl, for example, comes from the region of China around Hong Kong, from where the smugglers take the risk of shipping it and its ingredients all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Canada and the US.

Why not just sell it at home? Because they know they would be swinging from a rope if caught.

An early step toward policy normalization, it would seem.

Why once beloved?

She was a child prodigy and appeared on TV a lot as a cute little kid. But as she grew into an adult, she became a lot less, um, "likeable" as a competitor and as a person.

Japan still doesn't have an immigration policy like Western countries. The vast majority come here through short term work/study permits and marriage to Japanese spouses. Japan will remain ethnically and cultural Japanese - which is what the vast majority of people and government want - unless that changes, which it probably want.

Don't expect any significant change in the country's social tapestry. This ain't the West.

fxgai

So who is going to keep lending the government money if the BOJ eases up a bit?

The BOJ, which now holds most of Japan's so called "debt." And it's a public sector institution that rolls off the bonds so that the debt disappears while the principal and coupon revenue go back to the MoF. This is why Japan does what it does.

Also, social security funds including the world's biggest funds, and people, or more correctly corporations and organisations, that earn and spend tons of yen in international trade, given that Japan is the world's third biggest economy and second biggest one with a floating currency. They need to have lots of this reserve currency or liquid yen denominated securities to make their payments to the world's biggest creditor nation.

Your questions has been asked by lots of people over the past 20 years, including those who have lost their shirts betting against j-debt. Financial illiteracy can be a dangerous thing.

Good thing this was updated right away so that the commuting workers were easily alerted for alternative ways to go to work. 

In London and other places, the transit authorities usually dispatch replacement buses that cover the suspended rail routes. I've never seen this in Tokyo after a couple of decades of commuting. My experience is that you're stranded and/or told to wait until services are restored. Three months ago, I went to a pub for dinner before the early evening glitch was resolved. That was OK, although getting hoe 2 hours late on a weeknight wasn't fun.

There may or may not be an alternative route to your destination, and usually if it is, it packed beyond description, with long lineups outside the station.

It seems inevitable that the rate gap between Japan and the US will narrow. Those earning yen will need to be patient for the next 12 months or so.

Know what tends to fundamentally improve the economy....Immigration.

I come from the country with the highest immigration rate in the OECD, and the place has become unlivable to a significant percentage of the population over the past few years It boasts the world's least affordable cities. Check out the Canada-related subs on Reddit if you want to hear horror stories about full-time working people living in cars, at parents, couch surfing etc, amid a dearth of available apartments. Also those who have lost access to medical services under the crush of an ever expanding population who need to taken care of amid falling real wages with much higher inflation than here.

I'm really glad I live in Japan, where the covid and China supply effects have been much milder, and people are being better taken care of, and the policies much more sensible.

Robust wage growth has not been the result of this policy for decades,

Corporations have raked in the highest profits in their history while home buyers pay almost nothing on their mortgages under the policy. The BOJ doesn't set wages. The problem is squarely that of a greedy and enriched private secto. The BOJ has done it's part already.

More Russians are going to have to give up their old Toyotas and Hondas....for Ladas. LOL.

Both of her parents were killed in the attack.

So blame Moscow. Last summer, the Ukraine Defence Ministry issued a warning, including a PR video, urging Russian civilians not to go to Crimea on account of, hello, the dangers posed by Putin’s war. The Russian government, meanwhile, has been promoting the local beaches as vacation destinations, not caring a hoot that many would need to use a key piece of military logistics infrastructure, aka "a bombing target." 

What’’s more, the attacks were around 3 am, when the least amount of civilian lives are at risk. 

It’s clear to any sane person which side is trying to minimize civilian casualties and which side is perfectly ok with inflicting them or otherwise letting them happen, even to its own people.

All Asian airlines are far superior

Vietnam, Phillipines, China Air, Cathay, etc certainly arent. And all of mainland China's -- no way!

It's a massive inconvenience. The reason is mainly lack of concern and energy among Japan's local authorities. If they cite funding, then the govt should hit producers of bento styrofoam and other packaging with a "litter collection tax" and use the revenue to collect and treat the mountains of garbage these companies produce.