1/9/2023 Current Affairs in Japan - Comments to Editor’s 1/4/2023 Blog

Your impression of Japan after a three-year absence is very helpful (Editor’s 1/4/2023 Blog).

In short, I live my life with the same feeling. How can we revive Japan, where prices are rising, the birth rate is declining, and technological development and productivity are declining? I feel that politics is advancing day by day without showing any definite path.

The issues and problems, including declining and inherently low food self-sufficiency rate, external dependence on energy, the number of natural disasters and the gradual expansion of the scale of disasters, all of which cannot be solved unless establishing fundamental strategies and directions to solve the problems in the next 30 to 50 years.

Politicians are most likely not thinking about the main cause of inflation. The current inflation in Japan started a little before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the yen has been depreciating rapidly since then, so I believe that a causal relationship can be clarified by analysis. Without that, it is extremely irresponsible for the government to say that wages should exceed the inflation rate. Only a very small number of large companies can continue to raise wages without predicting what will happen to inflation in the future.