Nobody knows, because it's never happened before to a degree where the change would stick, but whatever it is, I know that my Japanese coleagues are seriously sick-and-tired of the slump they've been in for the last 15 years, and want something to *happen*

(By the way... guess what triggered their slump... it was overvaluation of Tokyo real estate because they made it super-easy for Japanese citizens to get mortgages... combined with banks using that overvalued real estate as part of the fractional reserve against their liabilities... sound familiar?)

And it's going to affect a lot more than just how things happen in Japan.

It used to be that Americans bought Japanese electronics, and Japanese bought American food, to the extent that one third of each year's crop of American food production was being bought by Japan with no complaining about the cost, insolong as Americans would buy their electronics.

Now Americans are buying S.Korean and, perish the thought, Chinese electroncis, but Japan has still been buying American crops at American prices.

The new party is looking at switching long-term commitments of food purchase to places like the Ukraine, New Zealand, Brazil, and Argentina.

But having Americans switch their purchase of consumer electronics back to Japanese would only be solving half the problem, because the other half is that over the last 15 years, the bulk of American food production has switched from real farms to industrialized factory farms, which employ far fewer people, which means fewer people having money to buy Japanese electronics, so to keep Japanese buying American crops and being able to pay for it by Americans buying Japanese electronics, it also means that Americans would have regain a degreee of control of their farms back into the hands of more people, and since that's probably not going to happen, the new party will go ahead with making new agreements with the Ukraine et al, which means America's largest overseas market for food will go away, which means, at the very least, that food in the US should become cheeper as the producers look for new ways to get it sold.

That means more fat farms for overweight americans, which means a good time to invest in weight-reduction tools and diet-plans and spas...

It will be interesting, because that change of government in Japan is going to affect a lot more people than just Japanese, and you thought it was only change of american government that could affect the planet outside the nation's borders.

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