Japans recovery not felt at street level
AFP
AFP, TOKYO: Like every day for the past 40 years, Kunihiko Kato dusts down the shelves at his electrical goods shop and meticulously lays out his selection of batteries. But the customers have long since gone as Japans economy languishes. We used to sell a lot of TVs, but now... tails off the 76-year-old glumly, as he recalls Japans world-beating bubble economic boom in the 1980s.
We have been going downhill for a long time, Kato tells AFP.
Reviving the once-great Japanese economy is the key domestic battleground of Sundays election, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe touting his trademark Abenomics policy as the best way to secure the countrys future.
Abe says his Abenomics, a combination of ultra-loose monetary policy and big fiscal spending, has resulted in strong growth and solid business confidence in the worlds third-largest economy.
On the face of it, the Japanese economy is in relatively robust health, enjoying its longest period of expansion in more than a decade, with low unemployment and the stock market at a 21-year high.
But this masks a seemingly unwinnable fight against deflation and a mountain of debt twice the entire economic output of the country.
And at Katos shopping area in Tokyo, there is precious little sign of the benefits of Abenomics.
One shop owner, 67-year-old Kozo Ito, says that visitors to the Shotengaior traditional Japanese shopping streetthink there is a bank holiday because so many shops are shuttered.
I tell them: No, they have just shut down, he says.
Like Kato, Ito reflects wistfully on the post-war boom times that extended into the 1970s and 1980s.
Ito tells AFP that he now makes in one month what he used to make in a day at his butchers shop, opened by his father in the year he was born.
He snorts at the idea that Abenomics has improved lives for ordinary people.
I dont feel its real. There is a widening gap between workers at big companies and those on temporary contracts.
I miss those days
Throughout the street, elderly shopkeepers told AFP the same story, of a steady decline, reflecting a pattern seen in the wider economy.
Michiko Hachiman, 72, said her clothes shop used to be packed in the evenings but complained that young people cannot afford her boutique offerings, preferring to pick up fashion items at cheaper stores.
On a good day, when I was just married, we had lots of customers here in the evening because there were many meat and deli shops. I miss those days but they will not come back, she said.
She said the effects of Abenomics were not trickling down to street level.
The economy might be good for big companies but they are keeping all the profits and arent sharing them with the employees, right?
She said her sons dont really see their pay rising for all their hard work.
Hachiman put her finger on another key election battlegroundin fact the reason Abe called the votea lack of support for childcare provision that is keeping many young women out of the labour force.
Young people nowadays simply cannot afford to have children, she argued.
Despite the economic expansion, median household income stood at 4.28 million yen ($38,000) in 2015, according to the latest available figure, a drop of 20 percent compared to two decades ago.
If not now, when?
Abe has vowed to use part of a planned sales tax hike to make some childcare facilities free of charge, arguing that a declining working-age population faces having to support a rapidly ageing society.
His main opponent, popular Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike, has called for a freeze in the sales tax hike, arguing it could throttle growth.
Yuichiro Yanai, an economist at Barclays, noted Japan had a rare opportunity to raise taxes, given a
strong economy, low
unemployment and solid government.
If not now, then when? said the economist, adding that there was a clear need to swell the coffers.
