Japanese companies should be snapping up acquisitions all over the world. Balance sheets are light on debt and heavy on cash: Canon, which reported strong first-quarter figures yesterday, has $7.2bn in net cash and equivalents, more than LG Electronics, Ericsson and Xerox put together. Debt has rarely been cheaper, with higher-rated companies paying just a few dozen basis points over government bond yields. Paying with stock should be no stretch either, as the world's highest price/earnings ratios give Japanese issuers the world's lowest cost of equity. Most significantly, there is precious little nominal growth at home, where vested interests – as in the aborted $25bn Kirin/Suntory deal – often get in the way of mergers aimed at making cost savings. The clincher should be the 25 per cent swing in the yen/dollar rate over the past three years, in effect handing bidders who expect the yen to weaken again a control premium for free.

But in spite of all this, external targets represent just one-fifth of all Japanese companies' M&A since the beginning of 2009, according to Dealogic. That is little changed on the average 16 per cent share of foreign deals since 2000.

Introspection as an excuse for inaction is becoming less and less valid. The Bank of Japan should confirm this Friday, in its semi-annual economic forecast, that the risk of another recession has almost entirely passed. It is true that a combination of cash to burn and desperation to grow can lead to overbidding, as Dai-Ichi Sankyo showed with Ranbaxy of India. But these supportive conditions will not last. The yen is beginning to flag, down almost 6 per cent against the dollar since early March. Korean and Chinese competitors are not standing still. Financial buyers are limbering up too, and seem prepared to write bigger equity cheques to get deals done. Not to mention that Japan's airlines and hotels could do with the custom of a few more M&A bankers. For all these reasons and more, outbound deals need to follow, and quickly.