A foreign visitor to the tourist districts of any big city will often go home with the impression that everything is dandy. Only locals know what goes on one alley behind the show windows full of light and colour. But in the Japan of the so-called lost decades, the lights and colours have kept growing brighter — even for some of the locals.

Japan is often held up as some kind of spectre: this, the warning goes, is what could happen to Europe if it too heads down the dead-end road of deflation, stagnation and resistance to change. Yet for many in Japan itself, or at least for certain groups, “Japanisation” has not proved quite so lethal.

If you belong to the 60 per cent in full-time employment, the 45 per cent who are aged over 50, or the 65 per cent living in big cities, the pain of the lost decades that began in the 1990s may well have passed you by — especially if you are male. You have a good, steady income, a job until retirement and a state pension that pays two-thirds of the average wage for men. Since prices are stagnant or falling — at least until recently — it does not matter so much if wages rise by only a meagre amount. In any event, in the jobs for life prevalent in Japan, your salary rises along with your age. [MENTION TODAY’S FIGURES: UPWARD REVISION OF HOUSEHOLD CONSUMPTION? AND WORTH A NOD TO ABENOMICS?]