Kiyohito Okuda is a businessman and an optimist, and so he has found at least one redeeming angle to Japan's slow-motion economic decline: Never has the pain felt too acute to bear.
After years of shrinking sales and curtailed ambitions, he can still handle a little more bad news. When Toyota Motor Corp. recently urged its suppliers — Okuda's auto parts manufacturing company among them — to cut prices 3 percent, Okuda said OK.
Indeed, the request sounded fair. Okuda's profits will wither, but he won't need to take out loans, he said, and he won't lay off any of his 130 workers. The company will still throw its end-of-the-year drinking party.