An examination of the causes of Japan’s current labor shortage reveals that it is too early to conclude that a society with a shrinking population directly causes the problem to worsen. The shrinking population has been identified as an underlying factor to Japan’s rising labor shortage in recent years. However, Japan’s labor force population (the combined population of employed and unemployed people aged 15 or older actively seeking full-time work) reached its peak nearly fifteen years ago. This fact indicates that even though the labor supply is shrinking, a surplus of personnel was considered to be a problem up until a little more than a year ago. The quick turn in the labor situation is a direct result of changes in economic conditions. Until recently, the Japanese economy was still stagnant, the drop in the demand]]> ... [Read more]

Incentivized by the economic policies of the Abe administration, the weaker yen and a sharp increase in the number of inbound tourists, investment in the Japanese real estate market is on the rise. A marked increase in investment in the Japanese real estate market first became apparent in the months following the election of Abe Shinzo as prime minister in December 2012. The Bank of Japan’s large-scale monetary easing in April 2013 arrested the steep rise of the previous months, as did the hike in the consumption tax in April 2014, but the general rising trend has continued through further monetary easing in October 2014 and the ruling coalition’s victory in the Lower House election of December last year. According to one private company, the turnover value of office building transactions by listed corporations and the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) listed J-REITs (Japan Real ... ... [Read more]

Interest in “death in the first person” Shimada Hiromi: In January this year, I published Zero-so: Assari shinu (Zero funeral: How to die a simple death). It advocates “zero funerals,” whereby the crematorium disposes of the deceased’s remains in their entirety, leaving nothing for the bereaved family to collect. This means that there is no need for the family to pay for a grave either. In actual fact, the funeral urns that bereaved families go to collect in western Japan only contain around one third of the deceased’s total remains. The remainder is disposed of elsewhere, by the crematorium for instance. From a logical standpoint, it would make sense to get the crematorium to dispose of everything. I have been known to criticize modern funerals in the past, saying that they are an unnecessary and expensive formality, but the reaction to this book has ... ... [Read more]

Future course for Japan to take Yamazaki Masakazu: On the domestic front today, things surrounding our society seem to be remaining stable at a level that has never been experienced before. This observation does not take the form of a commonly shared view in the media, however. Japan was engaged in a war when I was at elementary school. Compared with those gloomy days that I had to spend as a child during the war, our current era is so much better. It is true that our economy is struggling to take off in one way or another, with growing concern among us regarding our future amid the progress of an aging population with a declining birthrate. But if you look at the bright side, you will find that the jobless rate for young adults remains low and our public safety standards are by ... ... [Read more]

The waves of the third artificial intelligence (AI) boom are now sweeping across Japan in the same way as earlier fads did in the 1950s and the 1980s. Referring to the ongoing craze in the country, leading Japanese economic magazine Shukan toyo keizai wrote in its 5 December 2015 issue, “not a single day passes by without hearing about AI.” Many companies in Japan are making AI-related announcements one after another. Seminars on AI are held in Tokyo almost every day. But the question we must ask is this: Is the development of AI good news for mankind? From early on, many people in the world outside Japan forecast a dystopian future if AI were to surpass human intelligence. To cite an early example, Bill Joy, a U.S. computer scientist dubbed the Thomas Edison of the Internet, cautioned that robots with higher intelligence may ... ... [Read more]

Mr. Kuroda, it was 20 March 2013 when you were appointed as the 31st Governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ). Almost three whole years have passed since then. Today I’d like to have you reflect back over your time as governor since your appointment, and to hear about your outlook for the future. Firstly, could you please tell us about the way in which Prime Minister Abe Shinzo approached you with regard to your appointment to the role of Governor? Kuroda: At the time, I was working as president of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). I received a direct call from Prime Minister Abe at the ADB headquarters in Manila, in the Philippines. I’d prefer not to elaborate on the details of exactly what was said to me; but if I tell you my own feelings, it’s a fact that I was extremely ... ... [Read more]

Dr. MIURA Atsushi: Today, I will be speaking with Dr. Campbell, who emphasizes the importance of documents and materials written in scripts such as kuzushiji (cursive-style Japanese script) and hentaigana (obsolete or nonstandard variants of Japanese phonetic hiragana characters); writing styles that could be referred to as a kind of Japanese writing heritage from before the Meiji period, and which to most ordinary Japanese people are now unreadable.
Dr. Robert CAMPBELL: For example, when most ordinary Japanese people go into a soba noodle shop and see the word kisoba written in kuzushiji-style hiragana, most of them can read it, right? But that’s because it’s a soba shop. As another example, poems and such are often scribbled onto ]]> ... [Read more]