Coping – Feb 23

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When Consumers Cut Back: A Lesson From Japan
Hiroko Tab, New York Times
As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.

Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming ’80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990.

The Takigasaki family in the Tokyo suburb of Nakano goes further to save a yen or two. Although the family has a comfortable nest egg, Hiroko Takigasaki carefully rations her vegetables. When she goes through too many in a given week, she reverts to her cost-saving standby: cabbage stew.

… [Young Japanese] tend to be uninterested in cars; a survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.

.. Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies.
(21 February 2009)

Say what you will, it’s still about the money
Alix Christie, San Francisco Chronicle
… I came of age during what was called the “first energy crisis,” the years of panic at the pumps that also coincided with the seismic shift of mass divorce. Which means that while the sky now falls, and the vast Ponzi scheme of the past decade crumbles around us, all of this feels extremely familiar. And, perverse as it may sound, I find that I am glad to see the old austerity back.

It’s more than the thrill of recognition from my thrifty Scottish roots, though I was raised not to waste by a single mother who sent all five of her kids to college. The fact is, I never felt entirely comfortable with all that consumption, the glam decorating ethos of La Martha, the relentless march of the high end into the kitchens and bedrooms and closets of those of us fortunate enough to be counted upper-middle class.

I recognize that this meltdown is going to be terrible and painful for many millions of people. I’ve been a foreign reporter long enough to know that the end of this mad buying spree will likely trigger unrest and conflict in the many developing countries that produced all those great cheap, stylish goods, as well as at home, where all of us – including me – bought them. But in the end, it all seems like a necessary corrective.

Alix Christie is a former foreign editor for The Chronicle. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, the Economist and on Salon.com.
(22 February 2009)

One way to cope? Grow your own
Rod Dreher, Dallas Daily News
… Last summer’s fuel crisis seeded the popular culture with talk of reviving Victory Gardens, which helped feed America during World War II. Now that the economy has stumbled into the composter, there’s even more incentive to make your back yard do something more than look good this spring and summer.

Unless you’re an expert gardener, discard the illusion that you’ll be able to support your household on what you can grow on your little urban patch. The best most of us will be able to do is to supplement what we buy at the grocery store – at least, in the short run.

Russian émigré writer Dmitry Orlov, though, notes in his recent book, Reinventing Collapse, that in the face of Soviet-era agricultural collapse and mass poverty, “kitchen gardens turned out to be lifesavers.” It would be unwise to assume we Americans will never need kitchen gardens.

It also would be unwise to assume that all you need to do is throw a few seeds into the ground and wait for the harvest. Trial and error is a master teacher. Better to acquire those skills now, while you have the luxury of making mistakes.

We haven’t seen economic uncertainty like this since the Great Depression, when gardening, and the skills it required, was far more common in our country.
(20 February 2009)

Fix-It Nation: In Tough Times, Tailors and Cobblers Thrive
Sean Gregory, TIME
Where’s the trendiest place to shop these days? Try your closet. To wit: Kelly Thorsen, a school secretary from Lakeland, Florida, needed a nice pair of boots for the holiday season. A new pair would have cost some $200, but a splurge was not an option for the mother of two. “Last year, I might have gone out and started looking around,” says Thorsen, 46. “Now, we are being a lot more careful with where our dollars are being spent. To go out and purchase a new pair of boots was not in my realm.”

So she literally dusted off a decade-old pair of ragged black leather boots sitting in her closet, and visited a shoe repair shop for the first time in her life. For a fashion-conscious woman, the thought of recycling 10-year old boots with worn out heels did hurt her pride a bit. “I walked in with my tail between my legs,” she says. “It was something, initially, I was not proud of.” Then she saw the price: $16. And the work: the boots looked good as new. “I walked out of there going, ‘okay, all right,” Thorsen says. She proudly wore her healed heels to all her holiday parties.
(20 February 2009)

Amish Home and Garden Show
Beverly Keller, The Budget (Sugarcreek, Ohio)
Careful estimates are slowly coming in that predict as many as 15,000 people could converge upon the Holmes County Expo Center located between Walnut Creek and Berlin, just off State Route 39.

This weekend two unique shows will be going on simultaneously at the center. The first is the Amish Home and Garden Show. It consists of hundreds of booths that will feature what promoters are calling “some of the finest Amish carpenters and craftsmen in Ohio.”

There will be vendors who specialize in cooking products, building items, furniture, landscaping, kitchens, bathrooms as well as flooring, windows, siding and services.
Taking “center stage” at the event will be literally a stage filled with talent and experts. There will be how to clinics on a wide variety of topics as well as cooking classes put together by LeeAnne Miller on both Friday and Saturday.

“This will be a very unique event for people to visit,” said Jody Witzky of JW Promotions, promoter of the show. “Curious folks won’t be disappointed. There will be something here for absolutely everyone.”

According to Witzky, the difference from other large-scale home and garden shows is found in the name. “Most of our vendors, approximately 75 percent actually, are Amish and we are excited to be a part of promoting them to the local community as well as those who are visiting from other areas,” she said.
(21 February 2009)
EB contributor Bryan S. writes:
I can’t justify the 15,000km trip but I’ll bet someone there could sell me the corner Bit & Brace I’m looking for.