The Japanese economy is said to be showing signs of recovery. And so it should. You can't keep a strong economy down for ever -- though a lot of people have been trying hard to do just that.
The problem for an economy in strife is the deluge of wrong and contradictory advice. Each pundit insists his or her hobbyhorse is the key to economic recovery.
The problems of the Anglo-Saxon economies in the 1970s and '80s were blamed on everything from taxes and tariffs to trade unions, trade deficits with Japan and the lack of female liberation. Some Japanese pundits in 1988 ran a large advertisement in The Washington Post calling on the United States to repent of its fiscal sins before it was too late. Then when Japan went into decline a few years later, it was the U.S. pundits who were warning Japan about its own fiscal deficit.