America’s economic crisis today is not like Japan’s in the 1990s. It is far worse. (This article was first published in the Number 1 Shimbun, the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.)

American commentators have been rushing to draw parallels between America’s recently worsening financial and economic problems with what happened to Japan in the 1990s. In many ways such parallels are reassuring and seem particularly so for Americans who have visited Japan lately. After all, not only did Japan come through its post-bubble strains without any serious job losses, let alone wider social dislocations but, as any visitor can tell at a glance, the Japanese people are now clearly among the world’s richest consumers. In the clothes they wear, for instance, they are second to none. Indeed, Tokyo has been pronounced the world capital of street fashion by influential Paris-based fashion guru Suzy Menkes. Thanks to good food and good health care, the Japanese now enjoy the highest life expectancy of any major nation. As for high-tech products, name any major nation with a more sophisticated mobile-phone system or such consistently fast Internet connections. And how many other nations boast such a high penetration of car-navigation devices?

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