Learn from Japan?

Politicians everywhere are now telling us that we must spend our way out of the recession, but voices that suggest over-spending might have caused it are ignored. We might eventually learn something the Japanese have known for centuries: consumption for the sake of it may not be such a desirable way of life.

During the 1980s the Japanese certainly knew how to save not just their income but their energy. I remember when I first visited Tokyo in the (northern) autumn of 1983 the metropolis followed a compulsory program of organised brown-outs. Everyone was warned in advance when their neighbourhood or business would lose power for two hours and had to work accordingly. It was a policy left over from the oil price hikes of the 1970s. Ironically, by the 1990s the Japanese were being urged by the power companies to use more electricity (because of over-supply thanks in part to all the nuclear power stations built around the coastline). And suddenly, in the years of stagnation, the toilet seat warmer became a household must.

That first year I was told the Japanese never bought second-hand goods, so my friend and colleague Rick Tanaka easily furnished a flat in Shibuya from discarded but usable furniture and appliances he found in the street. This year at the annual two-day Tokyo boroichi (“rag”) market in January half a million people jostled for bargains - anything from home made string and used car parts to deep fried fishballs and pre-loved kimono.

It's been a strange ride: from enforced national abstemiousness to obligatory greed in less than three decades. Perhaps the relatively recent adoption of consumer avarice and a throwaway culture in Japan is skin deep, with only one generation growing to maturity through the era of the rampant consumerism, whereas in America from the early 1950s, most people took it for granted they had a right to borrow to consume.

Those who want to get things back to “normal” are hoping the recession will recede. The international consensus of finance journalists says the Japanese still save too much; and maybe beneath the Australian critique of Japan's “failure” in the 1990s there is a sense of deprivation. If Japan had continued on its growth trajectory Australian life might have been even sweeter.

Professor Tony Aspromourgos, a Sydney university economist, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald in mid January, that the Japanese might now teach us something else from that experience: how to survive the deflation that follows a property bubble.

They have their ways: a Japanese man recently completed a round-the world drive in a 4WD powered by used cooking oil cadged from local restaurants. In Kyoto you might think that there's something wrong with the ignition system on municipal buses, because at every stop, to set down passengers or pause for traffic lights, the engine cuts out so the heating, air conditioning and display system run off the batteries. I'm not sure what the total efficiency of such a ploy is, but it's an instant do-it-yourself mass transit manifestation of the hybrid vehicle, and less disruptive than the brown-outs I encountered in 1983. And do hang on to those pieces of string.