(Roughly) Daily

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, the BBC’s Tokyo correspondent, on the riddle of Japan…

This is the world’s third-largest economy. It’s a peaceful, prosperous country with the longest life expectancy in the world, the lowest murder rate, little political conflict, a powerful passport, and the sublime Shinkansen, the world’s best high-speed rail network.

America and Europe once feared the Japanese economic juggernaut much the same way they fear China’s growing economic might today. But the Japan the world expected never arrived. In the late 1980s, Japanese people were richer than Americans. Now they earn less than Britons.

For decades Japan has been struggling with a sluggish economy, held back by a deep resistance to change and a stubborn attachment to the past. Now, its population is both ageing and shrinking.

Japan is stuck…

His diagnosis and his prognosis: “Japan was the future but it’s stuck in the past,” @wingcommander1 in @BBCWorld.

* Japanese proverb

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As we ponder progress, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant exploded and released radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

The radiation releases forced the evacuation of 83,000 residents from towns around the plant.  The meltdown caused concerns about contamination of food and water supplies, including the 2011 rice harvest, and also the health effects of radiation on workers at the plant.  Scientists estimate that the accident released 18 quadrillion becquerels of caesium-137 into the Pacific Ocean, contaminating 150 square miles of the ocean floor.

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