The reality is Japan’s economic hierarchy...

Editor's note: ...is unlikely to change because the very institutions that run the country—its elite bureaucrats, megabanks, and corporate groups—have every incentive to keep the system frozen in place. Japan's entrenched bureaucrats are the highest-paid in the world, and they sit at the center of a self-preserving structure that prioritizes stability over reform, even as wages stagnate and the population shrinks. With an aging electorate demanding continuity and policymakers deeply invested in maintaining their own power and privileges, Japan remains locked into an outdated model that its leaders have neither the will nor the political pressure to dismantle or reform. Japan's recent $110 billion "stimulus" will no doubt trickle down to the people in the form of $110 cups of dried instant noodles—if they're lucky.
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Why Japan Won't Change Its Economic Hierarchy

November 20, 2025 | By AD News

Japan's economic system—an interlocking hierarchy of elite bureaucrats, megabanks, corporate cartels (keiretsu), and the Bank of Japan—has remained essentially intact since before World War II. And it will stay that way, not because Japan cannot reform, but because the country's political and social culture refuses to. The same institutional instincts that built postwar prosperity now functions like the "Great Wall of China" (built by the Romans by the way) keeping out the "Mongols" of modernization.

Japan's bureaucracy still governs like a priesthood, answering to itself rather than the electorate. Corporate groups cling to lifetime employment, seniority pay, and closed networks that shut out outsiders and innovators. The BOJ keeps interest rates near zero and prints money endlessly to prop up a government addicted to cheap borrowing. All of these participants have a shared incentive: preserve the old order at any cost, even if it means stagnation, declining wages, and a shrinking future. Japan's economic and financial system is a hidden tax regime, extracting resources from ordinary citizens through high consumption and social insurance taxes, suppressed savings returns, and subtle inflationary policies to sustain government debt, bureaucratic privileges, and corporate hierarchies.

Demographics reinforce this paralysis. An aging majority votes overwhelmingly for continuity, not change, ensuring that politicians who even hint at reform are punished at the polls. Younger generations—smaller, overworked, and politically disengaged—lack the numbers to shift the system. And when foreign pressure isn't applied, Japan defaults to its habitual mode: cautious, incalcitrant, conservative, and institutionally immovable.

In short, Japan will not overhaul its economic structure because the people who hold power benefit from keeping it exactly as it is. Until the system itself breaks—from debt, demographics, or external shock—Japan's leaders will tighten their grip on an outdated hierarchy rather than risk the uncertainty of true reform. Japan is doing what is necessary to keep its system from breaking—but not what is necessary to create a healthy, dynamic future. Japan is not building a future—it is extending the life of the past.

Japan's public school system is still built on a 1950s industrial-era model: rigid hierarchy, rote memorization, conformity over creativity, and crushing workloads. While the economy stagnates and society ages, schools continue producing students for a world that no longer exists. Instead of fostering independent thinking, innovation, or adaptability, the system reinforces the same cultural habits that keep Japan stuck—risk-avoidance, obedience to authority, submission and fear of standing out.

Even children absorb the cost of Japan's institutional paralysis. An estimated 300,000 elementary school aged children (even children are killing themselves) have stopped going to school. They innately recognize it is antagonistic to their own well being. The country clings to an outdated educational model just as tightly as it clings to outdated economic policy. And in both cases, the people with the least power—workers, families, and now students—carry the burden for a system that refuses to evolve. The average Japanese family buys expensive Toyota and Mazda cars with a ten year loan and eat at MacDonalds. While individual Japanese like most island people despise criticism. They can't deal with it. 

A striking example of form without substance is Japan's local political culture. Local politicians spend election cycles blasting citizens with loudspeakers mounted on cars driving through neighborhoods, shouting cheap sloganeering with empty promises and giving the illusion of choice and democratic participation. It's almost comical. It's like watching a Monty Python skit only a Japanese version. The Japanese call them "salary thieves." Yet these same politicians operate within the rigid hierarchy of the national bureaucracy and entrenched party structures, where real decision-making power resides. There was even a poster of a local politician holding up his right hand like he was some kind of messianic savior promising redemption to his constituents—almost comical enough to make you wonder if he also cures bad luck for the superstitious Japanese and tax audits on weekends.

No matter how loud and obnoxious their campaign messages are blasting through loud speakers mounted on cars and vans with females with white gloves on waving out open windows, they cannot challenge the keiretsu, the BOJ, or the life long career bureaucrats who actually control budgets, policy, and economic direction. It's a political theater designed to keep the populace pacified—or at least distracted—while the real levers of power remain untouchable.

In other words, it's preposterous but entirely predictable: Japan's system preserves itself by giving the people a performance of democracy without granting meaningful power to effect any serious reform. And it is almost hilarious watching millions of tourists (huge source of revenue for Japan) coming to Japan every year because of the depreciating yen enjoying the great food, cute girls, beautiful cultural sites and how "generous" the Japanese are.

Japan being an "anomaly" or "unique" as a country and people is not necessarily healthy: compared to people in other countries, many Japanese men face social isolation after retirement, lack meaningful friendships, and often become boorish, abrasive or disengaged, contributing to Japan's world-leading suicide rate among developed nations. With a rapidly aging population on some levels living in Japan is like living in a large open air nursing home.

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Japan considering stimulus package sized around 17 trln yen, Nikkei says

By Leika Kihara | November 15, 2025

TOKYO, Nov 15 (Reuters) - Japan is considering spending around 17 trillion yen ($110 billion) in new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's first stimulus package, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Saturday, underscoring the administration's focus on expansionary fiscal policy.

A supplementary budget to fund the package will likely be sized around 14 trillion yen, exceeding that of the previous year, the paper said, a move that may add to Japan's already huge public debt.

Since taking office in October, Takaichi has pledged to compile a sizeable package of spending measures to cushion the economic blow from rising living costs, and boost investment in growth areas such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors.

The size of the package, which is being worked out by the Ministry of Finance, could change depending on upcoming negotiations among ruling parties, the Nikkei said.

The package will include bigger exemptions on income tax, tax cuts on gasoline, subsidies to slash utility bills and funds appropriated to prefectures for spending on food aid, it said. The government was not immediately available to comment.

The administration is expected to finalize the package with approval by the cabinet on November 21. ($1 = 154.53 yen)

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They don't chase money, cars, or even love anymore. In a country once obsessed with success, Japan's young people now choose peace over ambition. GenZ in Japan have said, "F*ck this." This video explores how the nation's "low-desire generation" came to be—and what it reveals about the future of work, happiness, and society in Japan:

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