John Kenneth Galbraith died last month. He was arguably one of the most influential economists of our time. One wonders what his comments would have been, had he been asked to say something about the course of the Japanese economy during these past few months.

Always the master of the driest of humors, he would surely have had a quotable word or two to leave us.

"The Affluent Society," the title of Galbraith's best-selling book of 1958, would certainly be a good way to describe Japan's case in a nutshell. The economy with the highest level of net savings in the world could not be called anything less than affluent. Many of the anxieties and traumas experienced by this most affluent of affluent societies are precisely the kind that concerned Galbraith as he pondered the consequences of rising consumerism in the early years of the latter half of the 20th century.