Japan household spending falls again in November

Japanese household spending fell for a second straight month in November and by more than forecast, suggesting that higher sales taxes may weigh on private consumption for sometime.

Why it's becoming a surprise?

Japan has some of the lowest minimum wages in the developed world. It raised consumption tax to 10%, ignores corporate greed, fails to integrate women into the business world, has a high national debt to GDP, 20% of children are living in poverty, housing is too expensive, banks don't pay any interest on people's money and you wonder why household spending falls!

The Japanese economy has been like this for 30 years-nothing changes...

Tax up wages stagnant 60% of the population on short term contracts. I'm suprised the figures are that good...wait a minute these are government figures. Next month they will admit that a disabled worker made a mistake due to a heavy workload. And they hope to gain understanding about this regrettable situation. Shogani, screw you is what Shogani actually means.

It's very easy to feel bitter when as long term resident you go from permanent to contract roles. And... by contract it means you get paid 1/3 of what you previously got paid,and although you have set contract hours - you have to work the same hours as you did previously when permanent, but simply not declare them, as the Company wont pay you unauthorised overtime... yeah, very easy to feel bitter, but hey, at least I have a job, and can pay those higher taxes.... so what's left in my wallet at the end of the month, not as much as i had when I was permanent staff, so like most reasonable people, I won't be spending what I don't have to spend.... now why would anyone be surprised at that - it's common sense right ? I guess, its the same story for the rest of the 60% mentioned by Cricky... why would any sane person be surprised at that ?

Japanese corporations are sitting on large cash reserves for no good economic reason. So they could easily feed some of that back through the economy by raising the wages of the lowest paid (it’s been shown across the world that extra money paid to the lowest paid is spent mainly on necessities which are mainly domestic, so little goes on imported luxuries but is recycled through the economy). Failure to do so shows a lack of basic economic understanding from senior managers.

@englisc asprygend - Current Capitalism does not support your argument. Why pay our lazy workers more ? They do the job they are paid for, otherwise they can leave - and then and only then will we have to pay more to acquire workers to do that job, but we can always move operations overseas to a cheaper Economy where we can pay even less, and the Workers there will be happy to be paid for working at that rate... Sounds Familiar ?

Plaza accord.

My form of protest will be to actually go to the election to submit no vote just to have me included in statistics and to avoid spending money on anything in Japan besides food and transportation.