Give your outlook for the economy of Japan or your home country over the next 2-5 years,

and the reasons for your assessment. In the past recent years, Japan has been experiencing difficulties to sustain economic growth and to resist the shrinking of GDP. It is uncharacteristic for a country that its economy was once regarded as the fastest growing economy that nobody will see any other country matching such a success given the global economic downturn situation. How is Japan going to be like in the next 2-5 years remain largely a question not only to the Japanese citizens, but also international stakeholders who had already invested heavily in Japan, both directly in Japan and in offshored Japanese companies. This essay will walk you through the history and devise the past happening to give you a forecast of what is going to happen in the short-tomiddle term from now. The Japanese economy, as we all have known empirically, depends largely on consumption from a consumer-level than a corporate level; and it is the prior that drives the latter. Some regards the spending culture of the Japanese society as consumerism and so many theorists went on to explain the growth phenomenon of Japan based on such term. Most of the published figures on purchasing power parity and spending per capita (and also spending per average household income) illustrate the consumerism economy of Japan quite well. As a country with more than 120 million population, one may think that Japan can totally be dependent on domestic consumption without having to rely much or heavily on inflows of funds from selling export goods, provided that it reaches the export target set forth by the government every year, in-which they always exceed it. However, since the number of population began to saturate or slightly shrink from 1990s, Japan is faced with slow growth, fluctuations, and recessions as happened elsewhere in the world. This largely affects the trust of the society that as a result, citizens not only spend lesser and lesser as it gets more difficult. The fear of population problem that correlates to less spending does not stop there. The Japanese society is quickly becoming an aged society where it will have fewer workers; less people who would earn money to finance themselves. The society will have more kids and elder citizens, both of which require financial care from another source, namely the government. Regardless of strong government policies to solve the situation (i.e. using tools such as interests to make a disruption to markets), consumerism never restored to the level these policies aimed for. There is less cash and more goods in the market. Having goods became more solid and cash becoming less liquid had thus further Japans difficulties in the global economy with the non-stop rise of its currency. From an international standpoint, Japans situation left doors open for emerging countries to capitalise. China took this opportunity to develop its economy to become a force in the world economy with its labour-intensive industries that somehow manage to deliver goods at a cheaper price in a much larger scale than machines in Japans industries can produce. Investors began to pull out investment from Japan and deployed elsewhere, particularly in South East Asian countries. Japan, well aware of the fact, has tried to expand abroad but failed in so many countries. The series of these happenings inflict nothing other than further injury to Japans economy. Despite the constant growth of GDP for Japan from 1960s onwards such that the graphical representation of the set of data may look as an exponential curve and still growing, Japan in the next 2-5 years will never be Japan as we know in the early 1990s.[unfinished] For Japan to survive in the long run, the government should encourage the culture to internationalise the country from inside out and to move bases of sales and distributions

offshore to earn money from external income. For the latter to be possible, Japanese company should also learn to implement proper localisation rather than employing the same old culture that corporation of Japanese nationality employed when go about doing business abroad as they do in their home country.