The Economist has a long article dealing with Japan's travails. It doesn't make for particularly uplifting reading.

...or do I? I am not quite sure. Anyway, decide for yourself about WhyJapanSucks but watch out for those cow-shit bombs.

It's a more or less annual event: the publication of statistics once again confirming Tokyo as the most expensive city on earth (see the Times).

I spent only three days there so have very little to go on. Train fares seemed much the same while beer was considerably more expensive. But what really did it for me was when I met up with a friend in Shinagawa, to the south of the city.

She had promised to take me to a noodle bar but obviously the plans had, at some point, changed and she had decided to book us a table at the hotel - housed in one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo, next door to one of its busiest stations. It was a very good restaurant she informed me.

I must have turned white. Plush restaurant, landmark building, expensive city. There was nowhere to turn. If I was lucky I was going to get taken to the cleaners. If I was unlucky my card was going to max out. I decided the only way out was to enjoy myself and hope the judge showed leniency.

In the end I was only half right. We had a great meal and the bill came to the princely sum of £15 a head. And the tip? This was Japan - there are no tips.

Last year I commented on Japan's astonishingly low crime rate. Some of the Times's reporting of the trial of a British citizen might go a long way to explaining why:

“His treatment has been barbaric, something out of the Dark Ages. He’s been held in solitary confinement for months and can be punished even for making eye contact with a guard or combing his hair at the wrong time of day...

Japan’s courts have an extraordinarily high conviction rate of 99 per cent. Prosecutors are usually armed with a full confession from the accused, often achieved after a period of solitary confinement and reduced rations.

Prisoners are not told of most of the rules and learn them only when other inmates tell them or a guard punishes them. For much of the day, prisoners are banned from talking or looking at each other. Making eye contact with a guard usually results in instant punishment.

This is not a misprint. Asahi Shimbun

Another instalment of holiday snaps. I always like to know what a city looks like. These were taken in Tokyo on 10 October.

You don't have to look at government statistics to know that Japan has a low crime rate - the evidence is right there in front of you. Japan is extraordinarily clean. There is almost no litter (remember littering is still an offence, even in the UK), few fag butts and even very little chewing gum. There is some graffiti but you have to go looking for it. Vending machines are everywhere selling drinks, cigarettes and newspapers. I never saw one with even a hint of vandalism. Trains are free of the litter, graffiti and glass graffiti that commuters in the UK have learnt to treat as a fact of life. At Tokyo airport I saw people leave their bags outside as they went into the loo.

But there is another aspect of Japanese behaviour which I can't help but think is related. It is the extraordinary consideration for others that the Japanese show one another. On trains people don't have mobile phone conversations except in the vestibules. They are asked to keep phones on vibrate and they do. I was never inconvenienced by that annoying tish-tish sound from a Walkman. On station platforms people line up in neat queues by marks on the platform edge. That way there is no unseemly huddle outside the train door.

As I said, I can't help but think that a low crime rate and consideration for others are related. If this is true and human nature is universal it's pretty bad news for the idea of crime and punishment. You can punish people as much as you like but if that basic consideration for others isn't there you will never succeed.

It is also (potentially) rather bad news for my own crime manifesto. My way would be to relegalise guns, relegalise self-defence, relegalise drugs and privatise public space. Oh, and allow the owners of that public (now private) space to impose whatever law they feel like. But Japan seems to do it without any of these things. (Err, I'm not sure about the self-defence bit.)

It's a mystery.

Back at the dawn of blog time - that's March this year - Brian Micklethwait wrote an article entitled Don't write off the Japanese in which be mused on Japan's future.

Now, I would like to claim that having spent a week there I know everything but of course I don't. So, I'll confine myself to a few observations which may or may not lead to some... conclusions.

One of the big themes of Brian's piece was the idea that Japan might be about to lurch in the direction of free markets. The problem is that Japan is pretty much there already. Take taxation. As I understand it Japan's taxation rate is about the same as in the United States. It has regulation, plenty of it, but what major economy doesn't?

I have a personal interest here. In 1990 I started working for Phillip Oppenheim, then a Conservative Party MP. Shortly afterwards (nothing to do with me I'm afraid) he published a book called "The New Masters". In it he demolished many of the myths surrounding Japan's success. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was far weaker than usually supposed. Business could and did stand up to government. Taxation was low; regulation benign. Keynes didn't get a look in.

Another theme was the idea that the Japanese keep their rows to themselves. This is allied to the idea that the Japanese don't have opinions. Which is odd because I have not met a Japanese yet who didn't have stacks of opinions.

One of the most fascinating examples of this appears in the book/poem "Requiem for the Battleship Yamato" by Yoshida Mitsuru. He was a junior officer on the Yamato (the biggest battleship ever built) in 1945 when it was ordered out on a suicide mission. Everyone knew it was a suicide mission and the officers kept asking themselves "Why us?"

OK, maybe not a major league row but there has been a huge one in recent weeks. About a month ago the Bank of Japan attempted to auction off some debt - debt that was to be used to buy shares in Japan's bankrupt banks. The auction was undersubscribed. This is the first time this has ever happened.

The Bank of Japan then came up with the quite extraordinary claim that it did what it did in order to show how stupid the FSA (Financial Services Authority - another arm of government) was being. Anything but quiet. From my own specialist area I am aware that there are all sorts of rows about new roads and railway lines. And this is all rather genteel in comparison with the violent convlusions which presaged the Meiji Restoration or the rise of the military in the 1930s.

As I understand it the causes of Japan's current problems are fairly straightforward. In the early 1990s, the property market collapsed. A huge swathe of business effectively went bust under the weight of loans secured on property. But the banks wouldn't admit it so propped up the businesses. Then the banks went bust. But the government wouldn't admit it and has spent the last decade propping them up. And now the government is going bust.

It's going to be nasty when it happens but I believe Japan will sort itself out very quickly. Deep down Japan is in good shape. It has excellent infrastructure, a well-educated workforce, a low crime rate and a leading position in many high-tech industries.

People are quick to suggest that the Japanese only ever copy but already they are the main innovators in areas such as mobile phones. And anyway, this is a well-trodden path. The Americans, too, copied like crazy until one day, kaboom, and you had Woodrow Wilson telling Europeans how to run things. And where, exactly, did we get the printing press from all those centuries ago?

So to sum up (or should that be conclude?) although I think things are bleak and that there will be a crash and that Japan will recover I think it will be able to do so without any great cultural convulsion - all the elements are pretty well in place right now.

and get a bigger version. The reason I have posted up thumbnails is because lots of large photos is going to cause major problems to people with puny connections - like me.

Thanks to Brian Micklethwait for pointing out the confusion.

I was in Japan last week on a study tour with the Railway Study Association. Most of the details will appear on UK Transport but there were a few general things I noticed which aren't really transport related. So, they're going to get a mention here.

We are told that Japan has been in recession or thereabouts for a decade. So, while I was there I thought I'd try to spot the evidence. It wasn't easy. Cars are new, people are well-dressed, there doesn't seem to be much abandoned property, restaurants seem busy enough, there don't seem to be any sales.

I did however spot a shanty town. This one was in Tokyo and there was a similar if smaller one in Nagoya. Even in destitution the Japanese beat us. Quite simply they have a better class of dosser. Take a careful look at the photos and you will spot that in addition to the regulation cardboard box these people also have blue tarpaulins. Pretty sensible really. I also saw plenty of coat hangers presumably so that could hang out their shirts ready for that all important interview. Japanese cardboard cities also don't smell of stale urine. How they do it I don't know because public toilets in Japan seem pretty thin on the ground.

Another feature of the destitution phenomenon is the authorities' attempts to deal with it. I kept on seeing pedestrian overbridges with the bit under the bridge and not on the road sealed off. Presumably to stop the dossers spoiling the view.

The only other evidence I could find for Japan's recession was this: OK, it's an empty carriage floor. But just a minute, the picture was taken at 1721 on a Wednesday evening on a train on the Yamanote Line (Tokyo's Circle Line). Imagine finding that amount of space on the Tube at that time of day. Not bleeding likely.

So, when do they go home? From my limited experience it seemed that the peak was between 2100 and 2200 in the evening. I also understand that many Japanese also work Saturdays. They're not paid for it but they do.

Recently, I have started listening to NHK's broadcasts in English. They follow something of a standard format:

Item 1 - the World Cup - who can blame them

Item 2 - the latest corruption scandal

Item 3 - those beastly Chinese

Item 4 - the latest news on the economy. If it comes from the government it is all about how the economy has bottomed out, how they've turned the corner and everything is going to be just fine. If it comes from anyone else it's all gloom and doom.

For 300 years until the Meiji Restoration Japan was closed to the outside world. The Japanese held on to this policy until it was absolutely no longer tenable. During the Second World War Japan kept on fighting until, once again, it was absolutely no longer tenable. If history repeats itself we will see absolutely no change to the government's Keynsian pump priming policies until it defaults on its debts. Oh boy.