I've lived in Japan for a while now. Everyone understands a weak yen is a preference for major business here and that the government of Japan strongly prioritizes for major business happiness.

There is almost zero concern for the populations economic prosperity and there is no political opposition. This isn't a "vibe" this is fact. If you go far back as the 90s economic collapse, most of it was ultimately caused by the mingling of politicians being executives of the banking sector and ultimately looking after their own interests. Rather than doing the right things to fix the situation then, the government did the wrong things.

It's really sad but your average Japanese citizen has very little interest or idea about politics and policy and the population and the country suffers greatly because of this.

Democracy isn't in their DNA, it was imposed.

I will tell you though, the "vibe" here is, things aren't good, they just haven't worked out they're allowed to blame the government for poor monetary policy yet. Which IMO is what the government is starting to worry about. Personally, I don't think much will manifest from this, and Japan will just continue to slip backwards while the major corporations are taken care of.

Vibes do matter when it comes to the share market, clearly.

> Democracy isn't in their DNA, it was imposed.

this is an aside but the 1889 constitution had democractic components. Turns out a military coup stops democratic progress for a while. Japanese popular participation in politics has a lot of dimensions to it, including popular uprisings and authoritarian pushback by the government (including post-1945)

I've also lived in Japan for a while, and I've always found any sort of argument around the different nature of Japan based in "people be different" to be unsatisfying.

Usually you can dig just a bit more and find very straightforward material explanations for people's behavior. Or even at worst the same kind of behavior you see everywhere, just shifted around in intensity a little. Maybe this is too nihilistic but sometimes there are less magical explanations (like not caring about interest rates being downstream of them being near 0 percent)

I don't really understand this statement ,can you clarify?

I've also lived in Japan for a while, and I've always found any sort of argument around the different nature of Japan based in "people be different" to be unsatisfying.

I would say that your analysis seems to be based on tropes about Japanese people that are familiar to me as someone who has never visited Japan. I can't speak to the accuracy of your analysis, but for this reason it is not very satisfying. You don't get the kind of "aha!" moment that you might expect to get from an analysis based on a deep familiarity with Japanese culture, history and politics.

I'd say this level of push back is fairly common. People don't want to believe society here actually works differently. But there is a strong culture in Japan which I don't think you can just experience by being on holidays. Some of the stories I tell people are hard to believe.

I'll give you a simple real world example. The other day I left my wallet in a bag on a towel rack at the gym, my wallet was visible.

I was mid workout and I didn't want to go back to get it. Honestly, knowing Japan well enough, I just left it there , and sure enough, when I got back, it was still there, not a single dime taken. Thieves exist here, but they're the exception, not the rule.

I would never do this in any other country. Tell me that's familiar to anyone living in the US.

I mean it's familiar in the sense that it conforms to well-known cultural tropes about Japan. I'm not saying that all of these tropes are necessarily inaccurate, only that they're so well known that an analysis based solely on them feels a bit slapdash (even if it might still be correct). Japan is widely known as being a society with low crime, high trust, etc. etc. This isn't something only known by people who've lived in Japan for extended periods.

So no, I'm not at all surprised by your story about the wallet, and I don't think most people would be. (To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened in the US either – it's not like everyone in the US is a criminal and all unattended wallets reliably get stolen.)

These aren't "tropes" they are real aspects of the culture. These cultural features do have an effect on how democracy works in Japan and how the government perceives and responds to the public reaction to certain events, especially in regards to the economy. I have not heard a single, not a single person say the administrators of the country are doing a bad job which is why we're in this mess, no, they just seem to talk like there is some external, mysterious force causing these issues. Now maybe people are thinking differently, but when it comes to the democratic process, the public discourse is important and it's lacking.

I have personally only heard one, I repeat one person criticize a politician in my entire time being here, can you believe that? He was a politician himself :)

The only other time I remember there being some suspicion about politics was after Abe's assassination, there was some conspiracies going around about how Korea is running the government because of his affiliations with a Korean cult. Even then, everything I heard was radically civil.

If this stock market and currency collapse was in the USA, you could imagine the discourse around it right?

I'm sorry but there is a real stark difference between cultures and the effect it has on the democratic process and therefore the urgency in which a government would react to negative public opinion. In this case, In Japan the government is almost always siding with big business, because why not? What will happen? The LDP will be removed?

The government in Japan is practically authoritarian at this point, they have no opposition, they're not going to adapt very quickly for the sake of worrying about the polls. Also worth reading about is Japan's "online defamation laws" which are also pretty dystopian in my opinion.

>These aren't "tropes" they are real aspects of the culture.

These are not mutually exclusive categories.

>I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened in the US either

I would. There's not even any cash in my wallet and I was pickpocketd in broad daylight (I'm not exactly exuding "rich dude" so I'm an odd target). I'm just lucky I had an apple tag in it and the thief ditched it in the bathroom when they assumedly saw it (before I activated it).

Even if there was nothing in the wallet, I wouldn't be surprised if my unattended wallet was shuffled, drop, and probably dripping wet when I came back. Part of why I switched to a metal one, actually.

> It's really sad but your average Japanese citizen has very little interest or idea about politics and policy and the population and the country suffers greatly because of this.

Japan has been an effectively ”managed” democracy for the entirety of the postwar period, so I find this argument to be unconvincing. In the postwar period, the ruling LDP party was assembled by U.S. intelligence services from a mix of war criminals and far right business leaders and funneled millions of dollars and provided other forms of support for decades. There was widespread unrest as a result of this up until the early 70s, where the tensions around America’s use of the country as a FOB for the Vietnam War came to a boil and state police and security services engaged in widespread violence and crackdowns, ANPO was reauthorized, and it was demonstrated that no, actually, things will not be allowed to change. From this point on, most Japanese people became increasingly disengaged from politics because they correctly determined that their votes and protests did not matter, except to the extent that they reinforced the status quo.

> Democracy isn't in their DNA, it was imposed.

Separately, your depiction of the imposition of democracy is also entirely incorrect and ignorant of history. Japan had one of the most politically active and engaged populations in it prewar period, but this was strangled by its ruling elites because popular political movements were almost universally left wing. The perfect example of this was that the expansion of universal male franchise in response to widespread labor unrest was paired with the outlawing of left wing political parties.

Why is the argument unconvincing to you after you've just provided a bunch of evidence as to why Japanese people aren't engaged in politics and there is no opposition here?

I disagree specifically with the framing that the “the population and the country suffers greatly because of this” as it was demonstrated that mass political movements would never be allowed to exert control over its politics. It’s an entirely rational response to a sham democracy. The country (now) suffers greatly as a result of the course the U.S. set it on by subverting its democracy to protect its own interests.

As someone who has a decent grasp on Japanese culture, I think your take is too conspiratorial. The issue is simpler than this. Japan has an extremely hierarchical society and authority must be respected. This isn't a great combination, especially when combined with a severely aging population.

Young people have very little chance to enter into politics or gain any traction at all. There is almost zero chance a 75 year old will vote for someone in their forties.

Combine that with the natural tendency for some to a lot of corruption among politicians and it's just a perfect storm of stagnation, corruption and vested interests, there is absolutely no US involvement required.

This comment continues to be an entirely ignorant of the country’s modern history, which belies the claim that you have a decent grasp on Japanese culture. I recommend you spend some more time reading and less time making Orientalist claims of no substance.