You would think that such a terrible, untenable, broken economy as I hear the Japanese economy described (oh no, it’s not growing fast! The horrors of checks notes equilibrium) would precipitate a very dirty landscape, vast swathes of nature torn down, civility breakdowns, mass homelessness, and a high murder rate, bridges collapsing out of nowhere, etc.

I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.

Instead of those things, Japan has extremely high suicide rates, extremely low rates of coupling, extremely low rates of family formation, extremely high rates of loneliness, etc.

It's a clean place to live with no economic growth prospects, where you have to work far longer than people in other developed nations, and where your chance of companionship and having your own family is the lowest it can possibly be in the world.

But at least it's clean

    > extremely high suicide rates

This is no longer true. Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Sort by "All" and you will see Japan is #30, far below many other highly developed nations.

Okay, fair enough. The rest is still true.

They're also very unhappy on average: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250410/p2a/00m/0na/01...

To be clear, the economic performance of Japan is pretty similar to Italy. They have incredibly low population growth (or shrinking), but their GDP per capita continues to increase year-over-year. Surprisingly, quality of life is pretty good in Japan and Italy (the second will be a bit controversial here). As long as you have a middle class job, your life will be pretty good.

People are incredibly unhappy with their lives in Japan. Why do people continue to believe otherwise?

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250410/p2a/00m/0na/01...

I am going to make a wild claim: "Happiness" is a stupid metric for quality of life. So many of the answers are tainted by local culture. Most Japanese people would feel like they are bragging to say they are somewhat or very happy. The very question is flawed. And I guarantee the survey was created by people with mostly Western European culture. To be clear: I said "quality of life" not happiness. There is a big difference. Let me tell you what "works" in Japan: health care, education (primary, secondary, and tertiary), home buying/building (wildly cheap by world standards), labor protections, national pension, mass transit, personal safety, taxation... I could go on and on. Quality of life is objectively extremely highly in Japan when compared to other nations.

I wish you had actually read the article.

> Among Japanese respondents who said they were not happy, the most common reason was their "economic situation," cited by 64%

> Only 15% of Japanese respondents said "overall quality of life will be much better in five years," the lowest among all nations surveyed. In contrast, the highest optimism for the future was seen in Colombia at 79%, followed by India at 78% and 76% each in Argentina, Indonesia and Mexico.

> Only 13% of Japanese pollees answered that their current quality of life is "good" -- the lowest among all 30 countries. This was less than half the average of 42% and notably lower than Hungary (22%), the second lowest, and South Korea (24%), the third lowest.