While Japan's population is toiling under what by now is insurmountable import price inflation, leading to soaring prices for anything that isn't produced domestically and has to be purchased with rapidly depreciating Yen, the reality is that - thanks to the biggest collapse in real wages in the 21st century [5]- the deflationary mindest is now more embedded than ever. Case in point: the first tuna auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market. It was here that earlier today the highest price for a bluefin tuna fell below ¥5 million for the first time in eight years, coming in at ¥4.51 million for a 180-kilogram tuna caught off Oma, Aomori Prefecture.
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According to Yomiuri [7], Kiyomura, operator of the Sushizanmai restaurant chain in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, won the bid for the tuna. The price works out to about ¥25,000 per kilogram.
The company said it will serve the tuna at prices ranging from ¥128 for akami (red-flesh tuna) to ¥398 for otoro, the parts with the most fat, at its Sushizanmai restaurant.
Since 2009, the annual bluefin auction at Tsukiji Market has been extremely competitive among buyers.
In 2013, a 222-kilogram bluefin tuna went for a record ¥155.4 million. Last year’s most expensive bluefin tuna weighed in at 230 kilograms and was auctioned for ¥7.36 million.
In other words, all else equal, the price of tuna has crashed from ¥32,000 to ¥25,000 per kilo: an unprecedented 22% price drop, one that screams deflation. Why? Because all the other disposable income is going to pay for all those other things, like hamburgers [8], electricity [9]and iPhone [10], whose prices are soaring. And since Japanese wages aren't rising, there is that much less cash to pay for everything else.
Don't worry though: this is just a little deflation and nothing that the BOJ monetizing 150% of all Japanese treasury issuance, instead of only 100%, can't fix.
Sarcasm aside, will anyone in Japan actually notice the country's now irreversible decline into a failed-state status? Probably not: according to another report in AP [11], when some 128 people were rushed to hospitals after choking on mochi - that would be Japanese rice cakes - during New Year's celebrations, with nine actually dying, the government felt compelled to advise the population how to, well, chew.
The department advised people to cut mochi in small pieces, chew slowly and learn first aid. In addition to the Tokyo deaths, three people died in Chiba Prefecture, while one each died in Osaka, Aomori and Nagasaki prefectures, the Yomiuri reported. In the Nagasaki case, an 80-year-old-man choked on a mochi that was in sweet bean soup served for free at a Shinto shrine.
In retrospect, otherwise completely inexplicable, and in fact idiotic, events in Japan, suddenly seem far more understandable.
