Greetings from Tokyo,
January -- should be quite a bit colder and drier by then! We've just slammed, literally overnight, into the rainy season, so the heat and humidity are still taking some getting used to. About two weeks ago we will still enjoying drier, sunny days which were quite pleasant and kept me in the pink (skin).
Anyway, Fukushima has influenced some changes, but they're not major for most people in Tokyo, so life seems to go on as it did before. Most of the nuclear reactors are mothballed, so electricity costs are subject to the relative strength of the yen, because utility companies are burning imported carbons. As a result, offices tend to keep the air-conditioning higher in summer (26 or 27 degrees) and lower in winter (20 or 21 degrees) in an effort to control overheads.
This also affects the time that people go home -- most people I talk to leave the office before 7:00 pm, and the trains seem more crowded between 5:30 and 7:00. Again, companies want to avoid burning the midnight oil!
The other direct impact is that produce from Fukushima is cheaper than produce from anywhere else. Some people seem wary of buying vegetables from the area, and this seems to be influencing prices. Personally, I tend to be much more careful about how much fish we consume, and tend to look for imported fish. So I think there is a bit of paranoia about radiation (at least in my brain).
The biggest changes, though, are from "Abenomics". A whole lot of money flooded into the Japanese economy but none knows exactly where it went! It seems to have gone in search of high-yielding investments, driving up the Nikkei like pressure drives up a bubble, and offshore. The weakened yen encouraged a lot of companies to repatriate funds, and exporting companies were able to book "exchange rate profits". But Japanese inflation seems to be price-driven (the bad type), rather than demand-driven (the good type). A simple chain is that a weak yen means that petrol costs more, and all stakeholders transfer the increased cost to the end-consumer. However, companies will not increase wages, so there is a risk of stagflation -- inflation but no economic growth.
Graeme
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