What nothing can cost: for thirty years Japan’s money was almost free to borrow, its young were told they had risen above wanting things, and the rest of the world quietly built on both. Now the tide is coming back in.
Why we’re pointing you there
A New York Times column this week warned that Japanese money, abroad for three decades, is starting to go home. Michael Cummins takes that market story and finds a second one underneath it. The same years that made yen the cheapest money on earth also produced a nickname for a whole generation: the satori sedai, the enlightened ones, young people said to want nothing. The essay is careful to keep the two apart. A central bank made the cheap money; a joke on an anonymous message board made the name. But the name was how the stillness got told, and the world priced it as if it would last forever.
What we liked most is how far back it reaches for its measure. It opens on an ice-pop company bowing on television to apologize for a ten-yen price rise, and it ends in a ten-foot hut built by a monk in 1212, who praised his reduced life and then, at the very end, doubted it. Between them come a young Natsume Sōseki translating that monk into English, a Texas hedge-fund manager ruined by being right too early, and one number about who owns Japan’s debt that explains three decades in a sentence. Both Japanese sources are translated fresh for the piece.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
