In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a television weatherman forced to relive the same day over and over again until he gets it right.
It all happens when he goes to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual groundhog festival. Every morning Murray's character wakes up to the same day, at the same moment, to the same cheesy tune playing on the radio.
That's been Japan's experience over the past year. Every morning brought the same gloomy news on the economy -- falling prices, rising unemployment and corporate bankruptcies. Each and every day featured hollow pledges from politicians to fix things.
Yet each and every time folks rolled out of bed it was with the knowledge that their finances hadn't -- and wouldn't -- improve.
No laughing matter
The film Groundhog Day was a comedy; for the Japanese, this year was anything but. A new year is about to start just as this one began. Pessimism is pervasive; uncertainty reigns. In many ways, the economy moves into next year on even worse footing. Banks that promised a year ago to write down bad loans and let deadbeat companies fail didn't. Companies that pledged to reduce debt levels haven't. Japan biggest problem -- bad loans -- worsened.
That doesn't mean this year was devoid of new -- and hopeful -- developments. Topping the list was the emergence of Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's charismatic and wildly popular prime minister.
The self-styled maverick came to office vowing to shake things up in Tokyo. For all his talk, however, Koizumi hasn't accomplished anything of note.
That is, except for the kind you don't write home about.
Economic-record trackers had a busy year where Japan was concerned. It fell into its third recession in a decade.
Industrial production hit a 14-year low. The national debt approached ?666 trillion, the biggest in the industrialized world. Unemployment hit an all-time high of 5.5 percent. The number of corporate bankruptcies hit a 17-year high. And Japan offered the lowest interest rates among developed nations: zero percent.
Bad news seems good
Things looked so dire that even bad news seemed good. Take the rash of corporate firings over the past year. Marquee-caliber corporate names appeared to trim jobs as rarely before. The trend had pundits predicting the death of lifetime employment.
Closer inspection shows just how exaggerated such claims were. Jobs not eliminated via expensive early retirement packages were cut overseas. Many "firings" meant employees were shifted to affiliate companies. It's yet another example of how subjective words like "change" and "reform" can be in Japan.
The rising number of corporate bankruptcies over the past year was also read as a triumph for change. This too comes with a gaping caveat. Yes, companies such as Mycal Corp, Aoki Corp and some other household names went bust this year, exciting investors who saw the trend as evidence Koizumi was for real. Yet for every company that ran out of breathing space, there were 50 big ones that banks continued to carry.
The sense of deja vu here in Japan came from the Koizumi administration itself. For all its talk about "no-pain-no-gain" economic reform, it quickly resorted to protecting the status quo. Rather than increasing competition in the economy, Koizumi's Cabinet spent most of its time trying to weaken the yen.
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