The finance people have a point. The high level of government services and comfort thereby provided are funded by unsustainable levels of government debt that a

The finance people have a point. The high level of government services and comfort thereby provided are funded by unsustainable levels of government debt that are well beyond any Western country, and practically all of it is privately held. By old people. At some point, the old people are going to start dying, and then there won't be anything to fund that debt anymore. So Japan will default. It will be the biggest sovereign default in the history of mankind. And of course, dead old people will be footing the bill. In the meantime, the birthrate continues crashing and the young in Japan will languish. This is why it's said that Japan will rot, but it will rot in isolation. The big unknown that I'm interested in is how the collapse will take hold. There are two runaway trains that I can see. The first will be the debt. It seems likely that we will see a restructuring towards a bureaucratic economy that takes care of the old people, but eventually all the old people will die. Then we may have another runaway train if the mechanisms for defunding the services racket are in place.