So it's official. Or so the officials say. The Japanese government's latest monthly report on the state of the economy proudly announces that recovery is now steadily in progress.

On the face of it, the official announcement does not look too far off the mark. Corporate sentiment is improving, profits look better, share prices are holding up, and even business investment appears to have found a steadily upward mobile path. Yet look a little bit deeper and the murkiness of the waters becomes immediately apparent.

Indeed, the window of opportunity for officially proclaiming recovery doesn't look as though it will remain open much longer. For what the officials claim to be the ongoing recovery is nothing more than an extremely fragile, precarious and narrowly based pickup in activity for large businesses that is more or less dependent on exports and the digital household equipment boom.