Hey, it sure didn’t hurt in the 60s.

Say what you want about the Yakuza – they know how to throw money around.

We better hope that all those assets haven’t been securitized, hypothecated, and otherwise found their way into the hands of the LDP/yakuza/inagawa-kai/Citigroup/GS masters of the universe.

I think that one of Japan’s major problems is not a lack of money, but billions and billions tied up in unproductive real estate, low interest accounts, or under the mattress. This money is not being put to use to support new ventures and it is not being thrown around to drive consumption, a potential engine of growth. A few recent books published in Japanese about this hidden wealth, and while they differ on the amount, most have similar hopes for its eventual productive use.

Not boarded up as such, just shuttered. And I have seen quite a few. However there is also the change from downtown shoutengai shopping to suburban big-box shopping to factor in there.

Not sure about cruising on the money – isn’t the whole point of a bubble that there is no actual money, just expectations of it? And it bursts when people start demanding to be shown the money.

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Boarded up shops, burnt-out businesses and in some places, bomb sites still empty after WW2. London isn’t as bad as that, but some areas are getting that way.

Most British cities have rich and poor people living close to each other. Kensington and Chelsea (the richest borough in the UK) has some social housing estates.

I have seen the blue plastic coated boxes of the homeless in Tokyo. I haven’t been aware of boarded up shop fronts. I suppose a lot of them are fairly remote haikyo. Even so, I feel that Japan has been cruising on the momentum of the boom years for well over a decade, and the mpney is starting to run out.

Indeed. Of course, I have always been entertained at how unemployment figures often drop people who have given up looking for work out of pure despair.

Once their insurance term is over, even if they still are unemployed, they fall off the statistic. The true numbers must be a lot higher.

I think that the big difference is that there aren’t many people living in those dilapidated areas as Japan is experiencing two concurrent trends – a second wave of migration from rural areas to cities and the abandonment of inherited property in the sticks.

A lot of the decay in the US tends to be urban and it also tends to be occupied by squatters. I’ve seen NGO stats that place the number of homeless in Japan at 30,000 (the government stat is down around 24,000) and the number of homeless just in LA at 50,000 – the number nation-wide is thought to have topped 1,000,000 lately. Just saw a figure that Germany has over 800,000 homeless!?