LAND OF THE SETTING SUN - Japan Has a New Emperor and a New Era, but a Dark Future

Source: The Daily Beast

by Jake Adelstein | April 30, 2019

TOKYO—The name of Japan's new imperial era, Reiwa, was announced on April Fools’ Day with great fanfare and a great big linguistic lie. The official government party line is that it translates as "Beautiful Harmony," but what it means literally is more Orwellian: "Commanded Peace."

Of course, a certain portion of the Japanese population realizes that the explanation given for the new imperial name is not the truth, but they probably were not surprised. Akihito posed a problem for Abe because while considered a divine being his actual words disagreed with Abe's political agenda.

Japan has grown numb to the deceptions and lies of its elected rulers. As of January this year, for instance, 79 percent of the Japanese public no longer believed the Japanese government’s statistics, and you probably shouldn't either.

Everybody lies, they say, but there's a problem with lying to yourself and to the public, because reality doesn't listen.

No Longer 'Cool Japan' but 'Cruel Japan'

While the Japanese government relentlessly promotes the image of "Cool Japan" and mega-tourism, the current reality is a country run by sociopathic Hitler-loving plutocrats, with plummeting press freedom, endemic poverty, rising censorship, deliberate destruction of public records, continual death by overwork, a corrupt bureaucracy, and a medieval justice system. Despite the triple meltdown of Fukushima, the government is rushing to start nuclear power plants again with reckless abandon.

The population is aging and shrinking. One out of five citizens is now over 70; in 2017, nearly 400,000 more people died in Japan than were born. Abysmal working conditions, low wages, lack of maternity leave (not to mention paternity leave) a chronic shortage of affordable daycare, and excessively long hours virtually ensure Japanese women and men don't have time to date, mate, or procreate.

Raising a kid alone? Very difficult. If a woman chooses to be a single mother there is a 50 percent chance she will live in poverty. The failure of anything approaching a baby boom over the decades is already invisible. The shortage of workers is forcing many businesses to close.

Women might take up the slack of a worker shortage, but sexism is rampant and gender inequality is institutionalized: Japan ranks 110 out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's global gender equality rankings for 2018.

Japan is working on haphazard plans to introduce foreign labor that are exploitative and doomed to fail in an environment where xenophobia is encouraged as is homophobia.

The highlight of the Reiwa era will be the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe believes will add luster to his legacy. The 2020 Olympics were secured with bribes, corrupted by yakuza, and will be billions of dollars more expensive than the original forecasts. They are foolishly scheduled around August, assuring that there will be deaths from heat-stroke and crises at hospitals unable to handle the triage that will be necessary.

Japan's trickle-down economic plan, Abenomics, is faltering. According to Japan's Tokyo Shoko Research, bankruptcies of smaller companies are rising, and it may be that its much touted success turns out to be based on falsified data. Meanwhile, as a result of the government of Japan trying to prop up the Japanese stock market using public funds, Japan's aging population faces the danger of having no pension money left for themselves. The Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) announced this February a record quarterly loss of over $135 billion, half of it in investments in domestic shares. If the losses continue, it will eventually impact pension payments to the elderly.

The future is bleak.

Please go to The Daily Beast to read the entire article.
________


This is just insane. The Japanese Central Bank printing up billions every month while buying ETFs (exchange traded funds) and stocks. What kind of a way is that to run an economy? Japan is running the biggest scam of all and the most amazing thing is, it's the biggest scam in the world. Japan's central bank is printing up as much money as it wants, then turning around and buying up all the assets in Japan. Central banking is essentially theft. This is the complete take over of Japan by people connected to the central bank who produce nothing except printing up money? This can and will end in disaster:

Bank of Japan's ETF buying hits yearly record


Related:

The Developed World Is Headed for a Japan-Style Zombification