The problem with this article and any like it is that it equates appearances with substance. To any casual visitor or even resident, Japan looks affluent. The city is clean and safe. People are dressed nicely. However, the truth is that Japan is propping up its economy with soaring debt, funded by the extremely high savings from the better years. The reality is that the economic growth is stagnant and population is declining.
Unemployment is artificially low but the labor market is skewed. There is a substantial number of people seeking full-time employment without success. Many able workers are trapped in contract employment or part-time jobs with low pay (in Japan it's prohibitively hard to fire people once they are "full-time" for whatever reason short of sever economic loss or extremely gross incompetence). If you ever put out an ad for a job opening you'll likely be surprised by the number of over-qualified applicants who have ended up "off the rails" of Japanese society for whatever reason.
One thing the article does get right, is that many Japanese probably feel that the lost decade is a myth as well. That is mostly because people have also learned to downgrade their lifestyles gradually (no need for a car in the cities thanks to public transport, no need for TV thanks to YouTube, NicoNico, piracy, no need to buy video games thanks to mobile gaming/social gaming, etc.).
However, the day of reckoning is approaching on many fronts such as the withering competitive advantage of flagship industries (especially electronics), the rapidly aging population, and soaring national debt. Japan has the highest suicide rate among youth across all industrialized nations and a declining birth rate, whether people acknowledge it or not, there is a large segment of the population that doesn't feel confident about Japan's future prospects.
Japan has the highest suicide rate among youth across all industrialized nations
I'd like to know what source you have for this statement, because the last time I checked the issue with World Health Organization figures, the statement you just made was incorrect. The WHO figures are stratified by age groups (which, if followed over time in WHO annual reports, can be tracked as age cohorts), and although Japan has long had a higher AGGREGATE suicide rate than the United States, manifested especially in a high rate of suicide by the elderly (age cohorts born before World War II), it has often in my lifetime had a lower YOUTH suicide rate than the United States. Moreover, in many of the postwar decades the youth suicide rate in Japan was declining while the youth suicide rate in the United States was rising.
Here's a little snippet of a FAQ I prepared in the 1990s to show the youth suicide trend for the United States to that decade: "In the United States, recent studies suggest that between 5 and 10 percent of adolescents have made suicide attempts . . . Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death among 15-to-24-year-olds, . . . Moreover, this incidence has increased threefold from the 1950s to the 1980s (Berman & Jobes, 1991; Fingerhut & Kleinman, 1988) . . ." -- James Zimmerman, "Treating Suicidal Adolescents: Is It Really Worth It?" in Treatment Approaches with Suicidal Adolescents (1995).
As in all such matters, if any participant here can point to current officially gathered statistics by an internationally comparable methodology (for suicide, that is the WHO statistics) with age stratification and a time series for each country, I would be glad to check the details.
Unemployment is artificially low but the labor market is skewed. There is a substantial number of people seeking full-time employment without success. Many able workers are trapped in contract employment or part-time jobs with low pay (in Japan it's prohibitively hard to fire people once they are "full-time" for whatever reason short of sever economic loss or extremely gross incompetence). If you ever put out an ad for a job opening you'll likely be surprised by the number of over-qualified applicants who have ended up "off the rails" of Japanese society for whatever reason.
One thing the article does get right, is that many Japanese probably feel that the lost decade is a myth as well. That is mostly because people have also learned to downgrade their lifestyles gradually (no need for a car in the cities thanks to public transport, no need for TV thanks to YouTube, NicoNico, piracy, no need to buy video games thanks to mobile gaming/social gaming, etc.).
However, the day of reckoning is approaching on many fronts such as the withering competitive advantage of flagship industries (especially electronics), the rapidly aging population, and soaring national debt. Japan has the highest suicide rate among youth across all industrialized nations and a declining birth rate, whether people acknowledge it or not, there is a large segment of the population that doesn't feel confident about Japan's future prospects.