World attention focuses on the problems of the Greek economy — no doubt with a large helping of schadenfreude added: There, but for the grace of God, go the rest of us is the thought.
But Japan has already been there. Debt relative to GNP in Japan is 30 percent higher even than in Greece. The annual share of budget devoted to debt service is higher. Japan's currency and bonds may be seen as a safe haven for funds fleeing Europe. But it too has become a slave to that mistaken economic dogma called "austerity," and could be headed for the same slippery slope as a result.
Like the original concept of European Union (which many now realize was another mistake — combining indulgent Greeks, happy-go-lucky Italians and puritanical Germans in the same economic union?) — austerity had respectable origins. Just as the EU was a reaction Europe's past excessive nationalism, austerity policies were an understandable reaction to the indulgent, mainly welfare, spending in the advanced economies that began in the 1960s and '70s and has been with us — Japan included — ever since.