What a sad country this is. Granted, Spa! magazine paints in primary colors. Maybe it's missing a nuance or two? Maybe things aren't really so bad? Maybe. Hopefully.

On the other hand, some of the statistics presented are hard to argue with — Japan's poverty rate of 16.1 percent, for example, as calculated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That's worse by far than Greece's (12.7 percent), though slightly better than the United States' (17 percent), "poverty" being defined as household income less than half the national average. In Japan, by that reckoning, you're poor if your annual household income is below ¥1.22 million. Sixteen percent of a population of 127 million is roughly 20.3 million. That's a lot of poor people for the world's third-largest economy two years into a supposed surge called "Abenomics."

Poverty is more concentrated in some population sectors than in others. Among single-parent households (overwhelmingly single-mother households) the poverty rate is 54.6 percent — highest in the developed world. Among the elderly it's 20 percent — second-highest, after the U.S.