Word: japanism
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...least, they were. The economic crisis has hit world trade hard. Ports throughout the world are dramatically less busy than they were just a few months ago; air traffic is way down. Exports from Japan were almost 50% less in February compared with the same month in 2008; China's exports were down 26% in February. The World Trade Organization is predicting global trade will shrink by 9% this year, the steepest annual decline since World War II. This contraction is not only deep, it is also a latter-day rarity: global trade has increased continuously year after year since...
...Swiss franc had been doing pretty well amid the chaos. The Japanese currency, for instance, rose more than a fifth against the dollar in the last four months of 2008, as previously big-spending investors cashed in risky assets overseas and brought their earnings home. But that's changing. Japan's economy is in freefall. In its latest assessment of the global economy published March 19, the International Monetary Fund forecast the country's output shrinking by 5.8% this year, much more than in the U.S. or eurozone. With interest rates close to zero for months now, there's speculation...
After surpassing Germany to become the world's third-largest economy behind the U.S. and Japan, hosting a successful Olympic Games and conducting its first space walk, you'd think China would be happy. Even the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May 2008 had positive aspects-Chinese volunteered en masse to help their stricken countrymen. (See pictures of China's Sichuan quake: six months later...
...easy to spread the blame for this sorry state of affairs. The meeting is being held under the auspices of the G20, an informal grouping that has none of the bureaucratic trappings that can help ensure fine words are turned into concrete action. Reaching a consensus among the U.S, Japan and Europe in the old G7 cartel was hard enough; doing so in the G20, which includes China, India, Russia, Brazil and Mexico, is exponentially harder. It doesn't help that members' interests vary so sharply. China, for example, owns so much U.S. government debt that it's publicly worrying...
...TIME: OK, last question: I've read many times that you have always been fascinated by the history of the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century. Is there something about that period that people can take today and use to reform Japan...