Japan is enveloped in gloom at the dawn of the 21st century, as is much of the rest of the world. The administration of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori continues to suffer from dismally low public-approval ratings, despite the major Cabinet reshuffle he carried out last month. The reorganization of the central bureaucracy that took effect this month did not help much, either.
Across the Pacific, U.S. President-elect George W. Bush is encountering some opposition to his Cabinet nominations in the wake of the political turmoil that surrounded the presidential election.
There is growing concern over the future of the sputtering Japanese economy. Mori administration officials have been saying that the economy has already bottomed out and will start recovering later this year, but few believe this forecast. In the United States, major interest-rate cuts announced recently by the Federal Reserve reportedly failed to give a strong enough stimulus to the U.S. economy and instead merely confirmed its worse-than-expected slowdown.