Comment quoted in The Economist
Kenji Kushida
A wonderful piece in the Economist that opens with the late Aoki Masahiko's prediction that it would take 30 years and a generational change for the Japanese economy to emerge from its "lost decades."
He was my mentor at Stanford (my undergraduate thesis advisor and then again later when I was a researcher in the office next to his), and I'm sure everybody who has known him still misses him terribly. I know I do.
It was extra special to be quoted in this same article for my framing of traditional Japan coexisting in parallel with the new and dynamic areas. This framing, which I labeled "syncretism" for my PhD dissertation and early work on foreign multinational firms in Japan, is also quite useful for understanding how Japan's startup ecosystem emerged and is maturing.
Noah Sneider doesn't have a byline in this article, but it's obvious he wrote much of this; both the Economist and Japan are lucky to have him as their Tokyo correspondent.
Link to the article: https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/11/16/is-japans-economy-at-a-turning-point
