Just got back from my first visit to Japan in two years, and while I personally had a great time, I was still somewhat shocked the depth of quiet despondency I encountered.

- When I first came to Japan in 1996, it felt like the country of the future. Now, it seems increasingly to be the city of the past: aside from the occasional soulless showpiece like Shiodome or ever-snazzier Shinkansens, the entire country's building and infrastructure stock seems to date from the 1980s or earlier.
- The economy has been treading water or sinking for twenty years now, with no improvement, much less end in sight. In Tokyo, the only industries that seem to be booming are 100-yen shops and pachinko parlors, while up in doddering Yamagata (median age 60 and population shrinking fast), even the pachinko places seem to be going bust.
- The DPJ seems completely incapable of breaking the status quo or enacting any sort of meaningful reform, instead throwing more money (which Japan doesn't have) on yet more useless infrastructure and wasteful subsidies.
- Everybody, and that's everybody, I talked to had a negative to hopeless outlook for the future.

The really scary thing is that, as far as I can tell, the only reason Japan hasn't entered a total depression death spiral is that the government keeps on lending money and throwing it at sustaining the bloodsucking bureaucracy-industrial complex that has brought the country to its knees. But sooner or later, they'll find themselves at the point where they can't keep going... and what will happen then?