2005 Story;New Optimism About the Japanese Economy After a Bleak Decade

[TuskCracker]

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. A big splash on business section of NewYorkTimes. I had the printed edition.
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New Optimism About the Japanese Economy After a Bleak Decade
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: December 7, 2005

TOKYO, Dec. 6 - College graduates face the best job market in a decade, and wages are rising again. The lead stock market index has doubled in value in two years. Corporate profits are the highest in recent memory. And for the first time since 1990, land prices in Tokyo are up.

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Now, the merged company, JFE Holdings, is one of the most profitable steel makers in the world, forecasting a $2.6 billion net profit this fiscal year.

Its sprawling Keihin Works, on a man-made island in Kawasaki, an industrial city next to Tokyo, has a highly productive new $200 million furnace that makes up to 12,500 tons of steel a day. The furnace, a 12-story-tall caldron that turns black iron ore into orange molten steel, achieves its productivity with a novel method of speeding combustion: adding natural gas, coal dust and even scraps of plastic to the traditional fuel, coke.

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Other Japanese companies never stopped investing money in research into new products and greater efficiency, even as they were cutting back elsewhere. For the last 12 years, Japan has spent more on research and development as a percentage of the economy than any other major industrial nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, a grouping of 30 of the world's relatively prosperous countries.
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There is also increased enthusiasm for Japan among American and other overseas investors. In mid-November, Goldman Sachs held a hedge fund conference in Tokyo; 700 fund managers attended, mostly from the United States and Europe. That was seven times the turnout at the first such conference six years ago, participants said.

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