英文原文中还提到了中文转摘中没有提到的：在高科技、新材料、精密制造等现代化工业方面日本的优势。

日本失去的20年其实大获成功

http://www.sina.com.cn  2012年01月10日 20:49  新浪财经微博

　　新浪财经讯 北京时间1月10日晚间消息，《纽约时报》记者芬格尔顿(Eamonn Fingleton)撰文称，虽然世人皆称1989-2009年为日本“失去的20年”，但事实上日本在此期间取得了令人瞩目的成绩。

　　• 平均寿命在20年间增长4.2年，从1989年的78.8岁增至83岁，比美国人长4.8年。

　　• 互联网基础设施建设取得重大进步。在20世纪90年代中期，日本落后的互联网建设遭致外界嘲笑，但如今后来居上。阿卡麦技术公司(Akamai Technologies)近期调查数据显示，全球50个互联网服务速度最快城市38个在日本，而美国只有3个。

　　• 以1989年末为基准，日元对美元升值87%，对英镑升值94%，其汇率甚至对历来被视为最坚挺货币的瑞郎也走高。

　　• 失业率4.2%，约为美国的一半。

　　• 据跟踪全球大型建筑的skyscraperpage.com统计，“失去的20年”期间共有81座超过500英尺的高层建筑在日本拔地而起，在此期间纽约有64座，芝加哥和洛杉矶分别有48座和7座。

• 经常账户盈余2010年总计1960亿美元，自1989年以来增长3倍。与此形成对照的是，同期美国经常账户赤字从990亿美元飙升至4710亿。尽管在90年代普遍认为中国崛起过程中日本是主要的输家而美国是主要的赢家，事实却并非如此。日本对华出国1989年以来激增14倍，中日双边贸易仍然广泛平衡。(楚墨/编译)

节选

-         But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures,the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades;

-         Japan has succeeded indelivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite thefinancial crash

-         But the strength of Japan’s economy and its people isevident in many ways. There are a number of facts and figures that don’t quitesquare with Japan’simage as the laughingstock of the business pages: life expectancy;infrastructure; employment; currenct account surplus; the Yen; and skyscrapers;

-         Japan should be held up asa model, not an admonition

-         That this is not more obvious is a tribute in part to the factthat Japanese manufacturers have graduated to making so-called producers’ goods.These typically consist of advanced components or materials, or precision productionequipment. They may be invisible to the consumer, yet without them the modernworld literally would not exist.

Opinion

The Myth of Japan’s Failure

By EAMONN FINGLETON

Published: January 6, 2012

Related

·                                (TimesTopic: Japan— Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Crisis (2011))

DESPITE some smallsigns of optimism about the United  States economy, unemployment is still high,and the country seems stalled.

Time and again,Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning ofwhat the country might become if the right path is not followed, although thereis intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, ishow the CNN analyst DavidGergen has described Japan:“It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”

But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japaneseeconomy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which startedwith a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most importantmeasures, it has done a lot better than the United States.

Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluentlifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time,it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.

How can the realityand the image be so different? And can the United States learn from Japan’s experience?

It is true thatJapanese housing prices have never returned to the ludicrous highs they brieflytouched in the wild final stage of the boom. Neither has the Tokyo stock market.

But the strength of Japan’s economy and its people isevident in many ways. There are a number of facts and figures that don’t quitesquare with Japan’simage as the laughingstock of the business pages:

• Japan’s average lifeexpectancy at birth grew by 4.2 years — to 83 years from 78.8 years — between 1989 and 2009. This means theJapanese now typically live 4.8 years longer than Americans. The progress,moreover, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, diet. The Japanesepeople are eating more Western food than ever. The key driver has been betterhealth care.

• Japan has made remarkable strides in Internetinfrastructure. Although as late as the mid-1990s it was ridiculed aslagging, it has now turned the tables. In a recent survey by AkamaiTechnologies, of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet service,38 were in Japan, comparedto only 3 in the United  States.

• Measured from theend of 1989, the yen has risen 87percent against the U.S. dollar and 94 percent against the British pound.It has even risen against that traditional icon of monetary rectitude, theSwiss franc.

• The unemploymentrate is 4.2 percent, about half of that in the United States.

• According to skyscraperpage.com,a Web site that tracks major buildings around the world, 81 high-rise buildings taller than 500 feet have been constructed in Tokyo since the “lostdecades” began. That compares with 64 in New York,48 in Chicago, and 7in Los Angeles.

• Japan’s current account surplus — the widestmeasure of its trade — totaled $196 billion in 2010, up more than threefoldsince 1989. By comparison, America’scurrent account deficit ballooned to $471 billion from $99 billion in thattime. Although in the 1990sthe conventional wisdom was that as a result of China’srise Japan would be a majorloser and the United Statesa major winner, it has not turned out that way. Japan has increased its exports to China more than14-fold since 1989 and Chinese-Japanese bilateral trade remains in broadbalance.

As longtime Japan watcherslike Ivan P. Halland Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr. point out, the fallacy of the “lost decades” storyis apparent to American visitors the moment they set foot in the country.Typically starting their journeys at such potent symbols of Americaninfrastructural decay as Kennedy or Dullesairports, they land at Japanese airports that have been extensively expandedand modernized in recent years.

William J. Holstein, aprominent Japanwatcher since the early 1980s, recently visited the country for the first timein some years. “There’s a dramatic gap between what one reads in the United States and what one sees on the ground inJapan,”he said. “The Japanese are dressed better than Americans. They have the latestcars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models. Ihave never seen so many spoiled pets. And the physical infrastructure of thecountry keeps improving and evolving.”

Why, then, is Japan seen as a loser? On theofficial gross domesticproduct numbers, the United Stateshas ostensibly outperformed Japanfor many years. But even taking America’sofficial numbers at face value, the difference has been far narrower thanpeople realize. Adjusted to a per-capita basis (which is the proper way to dothis) and measured since 1989, America’sG.D.P. grew by an average of just 1.4 percent a year. Japan’s figure meanwhile was even more anemic —just 1 percent — implying that it underperformed the United States by 0.4 percent ayear.

A look at the underlying accounting, however, suggeststhat, far from underperforming, Japanmay have outperformed. For a start, in a little noticed change, United States statisticians in the1980s embarked on an increasingly aggressive use of the so-called hedonic method of adjusting for inflation,an approach that in the view of many experts artificially boosts a nation’sapparent growth rate.

On the calculations ofJohn Williams of Shadowstats.com, a Web sitethat tracks flaws in United Stateseconomic data, America’sgrowth in recent decades has been overstated by as much as 2 percentage pointsa year. If he is even close to the truth, this factor alone may put the United States behind Japan in per-capita performance.

If the Japanese have really been hurting, the most obviousplace this would show would be in slow adoption of expensive new high-techitems. Yet the Japanese are consistently among the world’s earliest adopters. If anything, it isAmericans who have been lagging. In cellphones, for instance, Japan leapfrogged the United States in the space of a fewyears in the late 1990s and it has stayed ahead ever since, with consumersmoving exceptionally rapidly to ever more advanced devices.

Much of the story isqualitative rather than quantitative. An example is Japan’s eating-out culture. Tokyo, according to the Michelin Guide, boasts 16 of theworld’s top-ranked restaurants, versus a mere 10 for the runner-up, Paris.Similarly Japan as a whole beats Francein the Michelin ratings. But how do you express this in G.D.P. terms?

Similar problems arise in measuring improvements in theJapanese health care system. And how does one accurately convey the vast improvementin the general environment in Japanin the last two decades?

Luckily there is a yardstick that finesses many of theseproblems: electricity output, which is mainly a measure of consumer affluence andindustrial activity. In the 1990s, while Japanwas being widely portrayed as an outright “basket case,” its rate of increasein per-capita electricity output was twice that of America, and it continued tooutperform into the new century.

Part of what is goingon here is Western psychology. Anyone who has followed the story long-termcannot help but notice that many Westerners actively seek to belittle Japan. Thusevery policy success is automatically discounted. It is a mind-set that is much in evidence even amongTokyo-based Western diplomats and scholars.

Take, for instance,how Western observers have viewed Japan’s demographics. Thepopulation is getting older because of a low birthrate, a characteristic Japan shareswith many of the world’s richest nations. Yet this is presented not only as acritical problem but as a policy failure. It never seems to occur to Westerncommentators that the Japaneseboth individually and collectively have chosen their demographic fate — andhave good reasons for doing so.

The story begins inthe terrible winter of 1945-6, when, newly bereft of their empire, the Japanesenearly starved to death. With overseas expansion no longer an option, Japaneseleaders determined as a top priority to cut the birthrate. Thereafter a cultureof small families set in that has continued to the present day.

Japan’s motivation isclear: food security. With only about one-third as much arable land per capitaas China, Japan has longbeen the world’s largest net food importer. While the birth control policy isthe primary cause of Japan’saging demographics, the phenomenon also reflects improved health care and anincrease of more than 20 years in life expectancy since 1950.

Psychology aside, a major factor in the West’scomprehension problem is that virtually everyone in Tokyo benefits from the doom and gloom story. For foreign salesrepresentatives, for instance, it has been the perfect get-out-of-jail cardwhen they don’t reach their quotas. For Japanese foundations it is the perfectexcuse in politely waving away solicitations from American universities andother needy nonprofits. Ditto for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in temperingexpectations of foreign aid recipients. Even American investment bankers havereasons to emphasize bad news. Most notably they profit from the so-calledyen-carry trade, an arcane but powerful investment strategy in which the wellinformed benefit from periodic bouts of weakness in the Japanese yen.

Economic ideology has also played an unfortunate role. Many economists,particularly right-wing think-tank types, are such staunch advocates oflaissez-faire that they reflexively scorn Japan’s very different economicsystem, with its socialist medicine and ubiquitous government regulation.During the stock market bubble of the late 1980s, this mind-set abated but itcame back after the crash.

Japanese tradenegotiators noticed an almost magical sweetening in the mood in foreign capitalsafter the stock market crashed in 1990. Although previously there had been muchenvy of Japan abroad (and serious talk of protectionist measures),in the new circumstances American and European trade negotiators switched tofeeling sorry for the “fallen giant.” Nothing if not fast learners, Japanesetrade negotiators have been appealing for sympathy ever since.

The strategy seems to have been particularly effective in Washington. Believing that youshouldn’t kick a man when he is down, chivalrous American officials havelargely given up pressing for the opening of Japan’s markets. Yet the great United Statestrade complaints of the late 1980s — concerning rice, financial services, carsand car components — were never remedied.

The “fallen giant” story has also even been useful to otherEast Asian nations, particularly in their trade diplomacy with the United States.

A striking instance ofhow the story has influenced American perceptions appears in “The Next 100Years,” by the consultant George Friedman. In a chapter headed“China 2020: Paper Tiger,” Mr. Friedman argues that, just as Japan “failed” in the 1990s, China will soonhave its comeuppance. Talk of this sort powerfully fosters complacency andconfusion in Washingtonin the face of a United States-China trade relationship that is alreadyarguably the most destructive in world history and certainly the mostunbalanced.

Clearly the question of what has really happened to Japan is offirst-order geopolitical importance. In a stunning refutation of Americanconventional wisdom, Japanhas not missed a beat in building an ever more sophisticated industrial base. That this is not moreobvious is a tribute in part to the fact that Japanese manufacturers havegraduated to making so-called producers’ goods. These typically consist of advanced components ormaterials, or precision production equipment. They may be invisible to theconsumer, yet without them the modern world literally would not exist.This sort of manufacturing, which is both highly capital-intensive and highlyknow-how-intensive, was virtually monopolized by the United States in the 1950s and1960s and constituted the essence of American economic leadership.

Japan’s achievement is allthe more impressive for the fact that its major competitors — Germany, South Korea, Taiwanand, of course, China— have hardly been standing still. The world has gone through a rapidindustrial revolution in the last two decades thanks to the “targeting” ofmanufacturing by many East Asian nations. Yet Japan’s trade surpluses have risen.

Japan should be held up as a model, not an admonition. If a nation cansummon the will to pull together, it can turn even the most unpromisingcircumstances to advantage. Here Japan’s constant upgrading of itsinfrastructure is surely an inspiration. It is a strategy that often requirescooperation across a wide political front, but such cooperation has not beenbeyond the American political system in the past. The Hoover Dam, that iconicproject of the Depression, required negotiations among seven states but somehowit was built — and it provided jobs for 16,000 people in the process. Nothingis stopping similar progress now — nothing, except political bickering.

Eamonn Fingleton is an author who predicted the Japanesefinancial crash of the 1990s; he is working on a book about the end of theAmerican dream.