Now it is at least semi-official: Japan's economy is on the skids. A report just released by a think tank that is part of the Nippon Keidanren, the country's most powerful business organisation, says that by 2050 Japan will no longer be a developed country, and predicts years of declining output from 2030 onwards.
'Unless something is done, we are afraid that Japan will fall out of the league of advanced nations and again become a tiny country in the Far East,' says the report in Japanese by the 21st Century Public Policy Institute (21st CPPI), the research institute of Keidanren.
The report should serve as a wake-up call to Japan's economic and political establishment to take radical remedial reforms. The worry must be that there are few people inside Japan Inc who have a clue about how to remedy the situation, still less the necessary political clout.
Indeed, Japan has lost its way politically, so that it may be hard to muster the imagination or will to rescue the country from sliding backwards. Some economists say Japan is already engaged in a determined effort to commit economic suicide.
The report predicts that in the very best-case scenario Japan's gross domestic product in 2050 will be only one-sixth of China's and one-third of India's, as the country struggles to stay ahead of Brazil as the world's fourth biggest economy. If Japan does not take remedial measures, it will drop to ninth place in the world, behind France and barely ahead of Indonesia.
The reasons why Japan's economy is faltering are predictable enough: a dwindling workforce caused by a chronically low birth rate, together with slowing industrial productivity and shrivelling investment. Japan is the industrial world's trendsetter in ageing population, and last week the government announced its population had fallen by 0.2 per cent to 127.8 million in the year to October.