Rising in the East

Articles and commentary touting the accelerated rise of Asia in the face of global economic calamity are easy to find. But this WSJ piece in particular tucks away a crucial, nuanced point:

The global financial crisis has accelerated Japan’s increasing orientation toward Asia, economists say. High unemployment and personal debt have made typical American consumers less of a focus for Japanese companies, compared with their increasingly wealthy Asian peers.

Granted, as James Fallows has pointed out, there is lingering uncertainty about China’s true heft due to the inconvenient fact that most Chinese lack basic domestic necessities (running water, for instance) enjoyed by the entire developed world, most notably their South Korean and Japanese neighbors. Regardless, the slow turn of the world’s third-largest economic power towards a billion new consumers is really a huge change worth acknowledging, if not only in the beneficial short-term for China, but also in the detrimental long-term for the United States. If there was ever a way for Japan to avoid another lost decade, this could very well be it.