Category: Society

Some days ago a 26 year old Japanese guy bought 33 million yen (290,000 EUR/400,000 USD) of oil futures and 3 days later he had 322 million yen (4 million USD/2,85 million EUR) in his pocket thanks to the abrupt rise of oil prices caused by the Libyan crisis. A little bit of luck that will change his life forever. The news say that if he had waited more days he could have gotten 10 or 20 million USD, but he has proudly said that he preferred not to risk more and he has uploaded a photo of his bank account to the Internet showing 322 million yen in his balance.

Source: 2chblog

The government of Japan has just published its latest GDP data confirming officially what everybody else already knew, China is the second largest economy in the World by GDP. The GDP of Japan contracted by 0.3% in the last semester of 2010; however 2010 was not a really bad year because as a whole the GDP grew by 3.9% in 2010. The prospects for this year are quite good but it’s almost sure that Japan will never be able to keep up with China, whose economy is booming.

In this article on The Wall Street Journal they say something very interesting:

“If Japan’s economy had grown 1% more per year over the past two decades, then we could have stayed ahead of China for another 20 years.”

It’s pretty impressive how a mere 1% every year can change things over a long period of time! But Japan couldn’t do it; in the last lost decades Japan hasn’t been able to adapt to a fast-changing world and hasn’t been able to keep up the pace of growth they had after the war.

Sources: WSJ 1 and WSJ 2.

Related posts:

• Japan financial crisis
• The lost decades of Japan and United States
• Land prices falling during 16 years in Japan
• Japan will be the fourth economy by 2050

In Japan, demonstrations are not something very usual; during my first years in Japan I almost didn’t see any. However, as of lately, the Japanese economy is getting worse and worse, there are more and more Japanese people without a job; there’s also problems with the pensions, with China about the Senkaku islands, etc. and Japanese people is starting to get worried and they are going out to the streets to protest and show their discontent.

I am still amazed by how well organized Japanese demonstrations are and how strict the police control over them is (sometimes there are more policemen than demonstrators). Take a look at the pictures and notice how the demonstrators march in lines of three or four along the side of the streets (trying not to interrupt the traffic nor the pedestrians on the sidewalk).

Another curious thing that has grabbed my attention lately is that there are demonstrations in where demonstrators are protesting over different things! Some of them are still protesting against the war in Iraq and two rows behind some others are protesting over how precarious Japanese pensions are.