And consumers aren t consuming. Part of that is the average household income is on a downward trend. Part is because consumers are hoarding cash. The bad news for them is that many financial experts in Japan fear banks have lent consumers savings to dubious business ventures, meaning some of those people will find their retirement savings have vanished. The population is growing very slowly and aging rapidly.
Younger couples have fewer children.
The government expects the population to begin declining in 2007, something almost unheard of for a modern industrialized nation. The old system of lifetime employment is gone. Smaller companies are relocating their manufacturing operations overseas. The unemployment rate in 2000 was 4.7 percent compared with only 2.1 percent in 1991, but Japanese officials say their rate should be doubled to make it comparable with how the United States calculates its unemployment rate. Click here for a photo gallery from Japan Homelessness is on the rise, especially in larger cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, where plywood shacks and tarpaulins in public places provide shelter for an increasing number of people, and where some people, unemployed for the first time in their lives, ride the subway into the city the same as they have for years and sit in a park until quitting time.