How's Japan doing these days?

Just fine, thank you, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, "The Myth of Japan's Failure." Eamonn Fingleton, who predicted the Japanese financial crash of the 1990s, writes (all emphasis mine):

Despite some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.

Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”

But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.

Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.

Not so, says Paul Krugman. Or, at least, the story is a little more nuanced. In "Japan, Reconsidered" and "More on Japan (Wonkish)," Krugman says:

The real Japan issue is that a lot of its slow growth has to do with demography. According to OECD numbers, in 1990 there were 86 million Japanese between the ages of 15 and 64; by 2007, that was down to 83 million. Meanwhile, the US working-age population rose from 164 million to 202 million.
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What you see is that 1990-2000 really was a lost decade: Japanese output per potential worker fell a lot relative to the United States, when in the past it had been steadily rising. However, Japan made up most though not all of the lost ground after 2000.

This morning, in Bloomberg, William Pesek chimes in:

On Jan. 9, youngsters celebrated Coming of Age Day, donning kimonos, visiting temples and partying the night away. This year, only 1.2 million Japanese turn 20, half as many as in 1970. A shrinking population complicates efforts to repay a $12 trillion debt, more than double the size of the economy.

It doesn’t take a Nobel Prize to know that paying off debt gets harder when you’re running out of people.