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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity

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To: kodiak_bull who wrote (10798)	11/30/2001 5:00:11 PM
From: Diana	Read Replies (1) of 23153

Have no fear. The Harvard Magazine says all is well in the Land of the Rising Sun. harvardmagazine.com Although low consumer spending impedes economic recovery, marks of affluence are everywhere. Japan's name-brand-conscious shoppers account for almost half of Louis Vuitton product sales worldwide, and buy one-third of all Gucci products. A sizable share of the world's premium Blue Mountain coffee and France's new-crop Beaujolais continues to go to Tokyo. Many Japanese reserve their bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau on-line from I-mode cellular phones; Japan leads the world in wireless Internet technology. In a nation with a population of 126 million, the number of cell-phone users stood at 58 million as of the end of 2000. Nor is prosperity confined to the few. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in all but a handful of Northern European countries. The Japanese live longer and even eat better than Americans. Their quality of life remains remarkably high on a surprising number of fronts, and has in fact improved during the past decade in a number of ways. The percentage of the population going on to higher education (48.9 percent) now exceeds the level in the United States (46.9 percent). Japan continues to rank first among the world's leading nations in newspaper readership. Leisure time has increased significantly: a revision of the labor standards law in 1987 reduced the legal work week, and since then, hours on the job--helped by the recessionary times, which have decreased overtime--have dropped steadily. (According to an International Labor Organization report released in September, Americans have since the mid 1990s put in more hours at work each year--adding up to three and a half weeks more, in the most recent tally--than the Japanese.) And despite a far higher population density than the United States, air quality has continued to improve; as measured by the amount of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides per capita, air pollution is now less than one-seventh the U.S. level, and the lowest of any major industrial country. I guess Ms. Pharr wasn't visiting with an average citizen . . .

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