The big squeeze

[Hachiko]

The news from Japan these days is untypically sunny. The economy is performing at its sharpest clip for 13 years, investment and profits are up and analysts are gingerly forecasting a sustained recovery.
And like a giant exclamation mark to the optimistic predictions, along come three of Japan's four giant banking groups to declare that they returned to the black in fiscal 2003, perhaps signaling the beginning of the end of Japan's bad-debt nightmare.

But beneath the sunny economic landscape are thousands of tales of misery thanks to the ruthless pruning of payrolls and bank balance sheets that it took to to put Japan Inc. staggering back on its feet.

Japan Times