In a miraculous, parting-of-the-Red-Sea moment, Japan’s bookshops have set aside shelf space for a genre of literature that has, appropriately, generated roughly zero demand for the past three decades: inflation and what to do about it. Titles such as Inflation Japan: the Coming Era of Endless High Prices and A World of Inescapable Inflation, strike a common, cautionary and grandiose tone. In the judgment of these works, Japan’s late 2021 entry into a sustained, 20-month stint of consumer price increases after years of stagnation and deflation represents not only a profound economic shift but a psychological, social and epochal one too. On balance, that feels about right. Japan’s experience with deflation was weirdly protracted and weirdly pernicious. If it is now truly over, there is an awful lot of weirdness to work out of the system even as the country is braced for inflation to become the next problem.
日本最近迎来一个奇迹般的、类似于《圣经》中红海分开的时刻，该国的书店为过去30年里需求近乎为零的一类书籍留出书架空间：通胀以及如何应对。