This time is a little different from usual. The Economist had a special report on Japan, and much of the content seems like material to which you would react. So I'm going to use a number of quotes from the magazine's November 20-26 issue as springboards for discussion. Ready - set - go!

"One of the unfortunate side-effects of ageing in Japan is that it will be the young who suffer the most. Although unemployment levels may remain among the lowest in the rich world, many of the jobs will be lowly ones. The children of the baby-boomers are currently entering their 40s, which creates a secondary bulge at the middle-manager level of Japanese business. Because of a seniority-based pay system, this puts a huge strain on business costs, leaving less money to provide young people with training and good jobs. It is sometimes said that Japan's risk appetite mirrors that of its baby-boomers. In the prime of their working lives they wanted to conquer the world with their products. Now, in their 60s, they want a quieter life. The same seems to go for the country as a whole."

"Given the political quagmire, economic policy in the next few years is likely to remain a matter of muddling through. Conceivably Mr. Kan's government may not last its term, which runs until 2013. Even so, the looming demographic challenges present an opportunity that Mr. Kan should seize. The day he took office, he likened his cabinet to a ragtag militia that helped overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate at the start of the Meiji era in the late 19th century. If he can persuade Japanese voters that dramatic change is needed to secure not only their future but their children's and grandchildren's as well, last year's election may start to look like another turning point in Japanese history."

"Japanese managers say they are already feeling the strain from a shrinking consumer base. Convenience and department stores have merged to achieve greater economies of scale. Last year two large drinks companies, Kirin and Suntory, tried to join forces to offset declines in their home markets, though the merger talks collapsed over ownership disputes. GE Japan's boss, Yoshiaki Fujimori, notes with exasperation that his company has not grown in the past five years, largely because of ageing. Elderly people go to bed early, so they use less electricity. That affects GE's utility business. They travel less, which hits its airline business. Even its health-care business is slow, he says, because the elderly are not keen to adopt new information technology."

"If you travel by public transport, Japan can seem like one of the most networked countries on Earth. When they are not asleep on your shoulder, many of the under-50s are feverishly thumbing their mobile phones. You would think they had a huge circle of friends, but Yugi Genda, a labour economist at the University of Tokyo, says that many just keep on texting the same few close friends and family. Maintaining such strong bonds with a few people is very different from the Western way of keeping up with lots of 'Facebook friends', few of them close."

"The passing of the 1986 equal-employment-opportunity legislation removed most legal barriers to women in the workplace, but discrimination remains rampant. An executive at one of Japan's leading trading behemoths explained that the women who applied in this year's managerial hiring round were far more able than the men, yet only 20% of them were offered jobs because women were not considered well suited for the industrial employment the firm offered. such attitudes go all the way up to the boardroom. Only a tiny fraction of the country's high-flying managers are women. One of them, Sakie Fukushima, of Korn/Ferry International, an executive-search firm, says there are only 16 senior female executives working in Japan's top 100 companies. The glass ceiling in Japan is known as the bamboo ceiling, and is even harder to break. There is a similar bias against older workers staying on after the official retirement age. Japan has very high rates of employment among people aged 60-64 compared even with America. It generally did not encourage workers to retire before 60, as happened in continental Europe. but after 65 employment drops off sharply."

"The number of foreigners living legally in Japan has more than doubled in 20 years, but only from 1m to just over 2 m. Most of these are Chinese and Korean, and they are not always made welcome. Moreover, these countries' own populations are ageing, so they may not be in the business of exporting people for much longer. The number of foreigners who have completed their studies in Japan is pitifully low compared with other advanced economies: 0.7% of the total, compared with 29% in Australia, 16% in Britain and 13% in America, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Clearly the universities are not providing a breeding ground for bright foreign graduates who choose to stay."

"Two decades of post-bubble economist stagnation, together with an ageing population, have led to what the Japanese call the waniguchi (crocodile's mouth) effect: total public expenditure has soared whereas tax revenues have dropped. The fastest-rising expenditure item in the budget is social security (covering pensions, medical insurance, welfare and employment programmes), which has risen from 11.5 trillion yen in 1990 to a forecast 27.2 trillion yen this year. Some 70% of all social-security payments now go to those over 65. Japan's social-security benefits are still less generous than those of many European countries, but the scope to increase them is limited by the size of the national debt. Already pension payments are absorbing a growing share of the total social-security bill. In 2006 they accounted for 13% of national income, almost double the level of 1990, and their share is due to rise further."

"Walk into the inn in the Hokkaido village of Akanko, and everything from the welcoming cry of 'irasshaimase' to the taciturn old man grilling chicken on the fire seems quintessentially Japanese. Until, that is, you hear all the customers speaking Mandarin. The Chinese have flocked to this area since it provided some of the settings for a 2008 Chinese blockbuster comedy, 'If You Are the One'. The local Japanese were shocked when the early arrivals used the onsen, or spas, to do the unthinkable: they washed their dirty clothes in the hot tubs. There is till some tut-tutting about Chinese customs - the elbows on the table, the lack of familiarity with flushing loos - but if it were not for these visitors, the tourist trade in the area would be half-dead. Before the Chinese fly out of Sapporo, Hokkaido's capital, they splurge on items like medicines and rice cookers. Tourism officials call it the 'Hokkaido boom'. Japan is a country with immaculate service, good food, beautiful countryside and excellent beaches. As the domestic population shrinks and regional economies suffer, it makes sense to encourage increasingly affluent visitors from other other parts of Asia. The Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) has at last understood this. It has set a goal of attracting 10m tourists this year, a big leap from last year's figure of 6.8m. To make this possible it has relaxed its stringent visa requirements, which used to allow in only the wealthiest Chinese. Figures up to September showed a 56% rise in tourist arrivals from China, a degree of success that has caught the Japanese off-guard."

"Since the mid-1970s, when it became clear that the number of births was resolutely declining, Japanese governments have made efforts to encourage people to have more babies. But for all that they have increased child benefits and provided daycare centers in the past 30 years, the birth rate has remained stubbornly low. One reason is that in Japan, unlike in the West, marriage is still more or less a prerequisite for having children. Only 2% of births take place out of wedlock. And weddings cost a lot of money. The more elaborate sort may involve renting a chocolate-box 'church' and hiring or buying at least three bridal outfits. The average cost of a Japanese wedding is about 3.2m yen ($40,000)."

"It does not help that unemployment is high and incomes are low among the young - especially among young men, who increasingly give up even looking for jobs. One of Japan's most prominent sociologists, Masahiro Yamada of Chuo University, thinks that most young Japanese women still want to be housewives, but are struggling to find a breadwinner who earns enough to support them. He points out that half of the young people of prime marrying age - 20-34 - still live with their parents. In the 1990s he coined the term 'parasite singles' to describe them. They seemed to be getting a good deal, saving money on rent and spending it on foreign travel and luxury goods instead. If they wanted privacy, they could always go to one of Japan's ubiquitous love hotels. Since then the 'parasites' have got older, and a lot of them are living with their parents not because they want to but because they cannot afford to live independently. They are moving towards middle age but have remained single, working for low pay or unemployed. Some have even become what Mr Yamada calls 'pension parasites', living on their parents' pensions.

Part of the problem may be that young men, who during Japan's free-wheeling boom era rarely saw their workaholic fathers, do not want to fall into the same trap. Some of them have become 'grass-eating men' who prefer clothes and cosmetics to cars and avoid life in the fast lane. Others resort to hikikomori, locking themselves in their bedrooms and refusing to talk to anyone, even the parents who deliver food to them. Many of them have watched their mothers divorce their fathers on retirement. Those men are cruelly known as 'dead wet leaves', whose wives have trouble sweeping them out of the home. The Japanese are also learning from personal experience that looking after elderly parents can be more costly and time-consuming than looking after children. That may be another factor in their calculations."

"In the Hokkaido town of Yubari, the general hospital was one of the earliest casualties of the municipality's bankruptcy. The building was so big that the heating bill alone ate up a lot of the budget, and the growing number of elderly patients put it under increasing strain. So in 2006 Tomohiko Murakami, a pioneering Hokkaido doctor, decided to turn it into a blueprint for health-care reform. His blunt message was that the money had run out, so attitudes had to change. He closed down two-third of the hospital, cut the number of ambulances in half and told his elderly patients they should walk to hospital because it was good for them. They grumbled, but it caused no obvious deterioration in their health, he says. They had to use their own initiative rather than relying on the government to look after them. It was the same when half-empty schools merged. What he calls the 'Yubari model' may hold a lesson for the country. 'It may take bankruptcy to change attitudes in Japan, but that would be a good thing,' he says."

That ought to be plenty of fuel for content.

JuMeSyn