alt Hacker News> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.
It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.
On the other hand the Japanese economy has been quite stagnant since 1990, and the yen is right now on a downwards spiral, so I don't think it is such a good solution.
And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.