Inflation, especially on energy, food and other stuff.

Japan will craft an economic stimulus package this week worth about $53 billion to bolster the economy ahead of an increase in the national sales tax in April, people familiar with the process said on Tuesday.

The size of the package, ordered in October by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will be between 5.4 trillion yen ($52.43 billion)and 5.6 trillion yen, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Government ministers have said the package needs to be at least 5 trillion yen to soften the economic blow of the tax hike - Japan's biggest step in decades toward curbing its enormous debt.

Yuk.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/03/us-japan-stimulus-idUSBRE9B206020131203

I wonder which safety measures there are against serious earthquakes…

Japan has reported a record annual trade deficit after the weak yen pushed up the cost of energy imports.

Its deficit rose to 11.5 trillion yen ($112bn; £68bn) in 2013 - a 65% jump from a year ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25908413

Population dynamics

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/06/06/japans-population-problem-in-five-charts/

Energy costs are 9.1% higher YoY, TVs +8.0%, and Food +4.1%

Life is good.

Japan is done - fukushima killed it

Abenomics and bad demographics - but I think the bad demographics were driven by adverse incentives resulting from zombie banks, QE and ZIRP. To put it bluntly who would want to bring children into a world of intergenerational mortgages and debt slavery?

Hard to upset you but Fukushima have nothing to do with it.

actually it does

I prefer don't eat food from Japan. They are dangerous. After a few years, ills related nuclear will be showed.

Japan's massive Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) is working on plans to raise the amount of its assets invested in domestic stocks to about 25%, the Nikkei reported Saturday. Current investment guidelines for the GPIF -- said to be the world's largest public pension fund -- call for an allocation of 6%-18% for Japanese stocks, with the weighting at 17% as of the end of June, the report said. "The new standard will likely be about 25%, putting the upper limit at around 30%," while the allocation for government bonds will fall to around 40% from 60% currently.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/japan-government-pension-fund-to-buy-more-stocks-report-2014-10-19?link=MW_home_latest_news

Others have more moderate opinions on Japan. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/opinion/paul-krugman-apologizing-to-japan.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

EXCERPT: The point, however, is that the West has, in fact, fallen into a slump similar to Japan’s — but worse. And that wasn’t supposed to happen. In the 1990s, we assumed that if the United States or Western Europe found themselves facing anything like Japan’s problems, we would respond much more effectively than the Japanese had. But we didn’t, even though we had Japan’s experience to guide us. On the contrary, Western policies since 2008 have been so inadequate if not actively counterproductive that Japan’s failings seem minor in comparison. And Western workers have experienced a level of suffering that Japan has managed to avoid.

What policy failures am I talking about? Start with government spending. Everyone knows that in the early 1990s Japan tried to boost its economy with a surge in public investment; it’s less well-known that public investment fell rapidly after 1996 even as the government raised taxes, undermining progress toward recovery. This was a big mistake, but it pales by comparison with Europe’s hugely destructive austerity policies, or the collapse in infrastructure spending in the United States after 2010. Japanese fiscal policy didn’t do enough to help growth; Western fiscal policy actively destroyed growth.

Or consider monetary policy. The Bank of Japan, Japan’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has received a lot of criticism for reacting too slowly to the slide into deflation, and then for being too eager to raise interest rates at the first hint of recovery. That criticism is fair, but Japan’s central bank never did anything as wrongheaded as the European Central Bank’s decision to raise rates in 2011, helping to send Europe back into recession