In a miraculous, parting-of-the-Red-Sea moment, Japan’s bookshops have set aside shelf space for a genre of literature that has, appropriately, generated roughly zero demand for the past three decades: inflation and what to do about it. Titles such as Inflation Japan: the Coming Era of Endless High Prices and A World of Inescapable Inflation, strike a common, cautionary and grandiose tone. In the judgment of these works, Japan’s late 2021 entry into a sustained, 20-month stint of consumer price increases after years of stagnation and deflation represents not only a profound economic shift but a psychological, social and epochal one too. On balance, that feels about right. Japan’s experience with deflation was weirdly protracted and weirdly pernicious. If it is now truly over, there is an awful lot of weirdness to work out of the system even as the country is braced for inflation to become the next problem.
日本最近迎來一個奇蹟般的、類似於《聖經》中紅海分開的時刻，該國的書店爲過去30年裏需求近乎爲零的一類書籍留出書架空間：通膨以及如何應對。