Comment by Yrlec

One of the most important lessons that we have learned from the past years is that you cannot look at a country's standard of living in isolation. You also have to look at the debt levels to see if it is sustainable in the long run. Japan has the highest government debt-to-gdp ratio in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_pub... (higher than Greece!). I suspect that they have a huge hangover coming their way.