"Japan (really Tokyo, I guess) stopped being truly 24-hours post 2011 earthquake."
Really? This surprises me, given that the population of Tokyo has only continued to rise since then, and Tokyo wasn't nearly as badly affected as many other parts of Japan. How long did the power issues last following the earthquake, and why would they still continue to have effects so many years later?
The effects of the Lehman shock and 3/11 disaster hit the middle class hard, the blame is pointed at millennials for being thrifty (Why aren't young people buying luxury cars? Why do young people buy everything second hand?), but the reality is that middle class Japanese have less disposable income than 10,20, and especially 30 years ago
Japanese GDP now is ~$500B less than it was in 1995. [1] A country can't experience 25 years of economic stagnation as a whole and magically generate a large cohort of young people with money to throw around.
Things are a little better in purchasing power per capita terms [2], but not by enough to make a difference.
Changing economic conditions definitely makes a lot more sense to me. And activities in the middle of the night tend to be more expensive anyway (just think about bars and clubs), so you can save plenty of money by just going to bed and walking around for free the next day in the sunlight to hang out with your friends.
Like a bunch of other people in this thread, apparently, I was also in Japan about a month ago.
From what I saw, the whole place looked middle-class, and like everyone was doing fine. I think I might have seen one homeless person the whole time I was there (and I'm not sure about that; they were just begging, and didn't have a bunch of stuff with them); I saw more poverty in Germany, and I see far more in the US.
Japan's middle class might not have as much disposable income as it did in the 1980s, but from what I saw, it wasn't doing badly at all. It certainly looks a lot healthier than the US's middle class.
The other commenter in this thread did a good job explaining what happened re: economics, but a nitpick: just because I noted the power issues as a timeline reference doesn't mean I said it was why things went away.
Really? This surprises me, given that the population of Tokyo has only continued to rise since then, and Tokyo wasn't nearly as badly affected as many other parts of Japan. How long did the power issues last following the earthquake, and why would they still continue to have effects so many years later?