Japan's lost decade could have been worse

http://www.truth-out.org/japans-horror-story-not-so-scary-after-all63776

Japan’s demand failure hasn’t been as severe as the G.D.P. figures suggest. Most of the relative decline of Japan’s G.D.P. as compared with the United States’s would probably have happened even if Japanese economic policy had managed to avoid the deflationary trap in which the economy is currently stuck – this is when falling prices make consumers and businesses less willing to spend because they expect additional declines in prices, further depressing the economy. In Japan’s case, the result has been a depressed economy, though the nation is not officially in a depression.

By the same token, Japan’s fiscal policies have not been the utter failure that some economists and government officials portray them to be. The Japanese have not created self-sustaining growth because these policies have never been sufficiently forceful to restore full employment and pull the economy out of deflation.

But the policies have kept the economy afloat.

Japan’s is not a good story by any stretch of the imagination, but it is not as terrible as you may have heard; certainly not as terrible as some policy makers would lead you to believe.
And given the way we in the United States responded to the bursting of our own bubble, I think Americans need to stop being so hard on the Japanese.