Caught in economic and demographic atrophy—and stewarded by countless false-start prime ministers, the country has become a hub for zombie banks, a generation of disenchanted youth, and fading brands

Yes.....

And? What else is new ?

We are coming into our third decade of financial malaise with no end in sight-depressing....

Not sinking like a stone. More like a dead goldfish. Floating up a little, down a little but dead all the same. Abe, Noda or some guy from the Hashimoto crowd, none will help matters one bit.

Obviously he has never lived here or probably even been here, doesn't know the language. Yet this type takes it upon themselves to blab about Japan like some kind of expert. However, this fits in with what Japanese want the world to think about Japan in order to talk down the yen. You see, people who actually have money and know what is really going on and put their money where their mouth is have lots of yen. So the yen is expensive. The dollar is cheap. That is a measure of everything. Financial commentators are a useless bunch.

If Japanese banks are zombies I wonder what the European banks are?

However, this fits in with what Japanese want the world to think about Japan in order to talk down the yen.

gokai -- absolute rubbish. Japan did not create over three decades of economic stagnation along with a shrinking and aging population as some kind of brilliant strategy to weaken the yen. They did that by years of reliance on simply borrowing to pay for government projects and unwillingness to adopt the needed structural changes. Farzad is spot on.

I wonder who they're going to blame for all this... Criticizing Japan itself has been a blasphemous taboo for a long time. Maybe this will finally get them to break that taboo, since it's now undeniable that there's something wrong with the Japanese system, and being in continual denial is not going to help them. Genuine criticism must be directed towards Japan instead of denying and blaming somebody else for their problems.

Oh, and this must not be turned into a "moral" problem of the people, of the youth, etc, it's a complete systematic failure of the post WW2 Japanese system.