The government provisionally concluded Friday that Japan's most recent recession lasted for seven months to November 2012 and was the second-shortest since the war.

Japan's shortest postwar recession started in July 1951 and lasted for four months.

A panel of economists at the Cabinet Office concluded that the latest recession started in May 2012 and was caused by the European sovereign debt crisis and the yen's appreciation. But Japan's economy hit a cyclical trough in only seven months before rebounding on a recovery in private consumption and reconstruction efforts following the devastating March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, it said.

"The recovery since November 2012 has been rapid, thanks to consumption and export growth," the panel's chairman, University of Tokyo professor Hiroshi Yoshikawa, said at a news conference.