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The story
A comedian’s remark — “What’s wrong with a weak yen? We shop in yen, not dollars, so it doesn’t affect us” — sparked a heated debate over the pros and cons of yen depreciation on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board. The thread was started by quoting Keio University graduate professor Seki Obata, who said in a video that “a reasonable range is 90 to 120 yen to the dollar.” Replies kept piling on with concrete rebuttals citing import price inflation, consumer price growth, real wages, and GDP trends, splitting opinion between those who see the weak yen as proof of Japan’s earning power and those who say it’s making life harder. There was also disagreement over economic history — whether the 90-120 yen range actually applied during the Democratic Party of Japan’s time in power or during the Abe administration.
Seki Obata (Keio University graduate professor, former Ministry of Finance official)
“It’s not about whether a weak yen or a strong yen is good — what matters is hitting a reasonable level.”
“Opinions differ, but it’s somewhere around 90 to 120 yen.”
Source: youtube.com / Original video here
What people said
You'd think they'd at least realize they're not educated on the subject.
That's the Dunning-Kruger effect.
If anything, it's the people with half-baked knowledge who are the ones ripping into the comedian.
Your info's just outdated, lol
>Looking at the 2012-2014 period, import prices (in yen) rose a cumulative +19%, while
domestic corporate goods prices only rose +1.4% and consumer prices only +1.5% over the same stretch.
>As of 2024, domestic corporate goods prices are up a cumulative +17.4%, and consumer prices
are up +8.7%.
That's shot up fast, huh lol
The global economy runs on the US dollar as its base currency, you know? (spelled out with reading glosses on every word, like he's explaining it to a child)
Do you have any idea how much Japan suffered because the DPJ government steered things into that range?
When the DPJ government took power (basically the tail end of the Aso cabinet), the dollar was already sitting around 90 yen,
and every era after that only got stronger than that —
so what are you even talking about, saying the DPJ "steered" it to "90 to 120 yen"
and that things got rough because of it?
Reminder: the DPJ era was 75-90 yen.
90-120 was literally the Abe era.
Things got a lot weaker under Kishida, and that's continued ever since.
🤪
This is getting mocked a lot overseas, you know.
This isn't compulsory education failing by accident — it's the direct fruit of compulsory education's failure.
Both GDP and the economic growth rate are higher now than during the strong-yen era, so at the very least it beats the Japan of the "Lost 30 Years."
Takes me back to when Americans were smashing up Japanese cars.
If it were just resource imports, that alone wouldn't cause a trade deficit.
The comparison itself doesn't make sense to begin with.
What's the point of comparing roughly ¥25 trillion in mineral fuel imports against Japan's total exports of over ¥100 trillion?
Japan's total imports in 2024 came to about ¥112 trillion. Besides mineral fuels, Japan also imports food, raw materials, chemical products, machinery, and more.
Looking at the 2024 breakdown by category, mineral fuels ran a deficit of about ¥24 trillion, and food also ran a deficit of about ¥6 trillion. Meanwhile, transport equipment like automobiles ran a surplus of about ¥20 trillion, and general machinery ran a surplus of about ¥8 trillion.
In other words, Japan uses the foreign currency it earns exporting cars and machinery to pay for fuel and other imports.
Running the hypothetical that "if we only imported resources we wouldn't run a trade deficit" doesn't actually explain Japan's real trade balance.
The moment you line up one category's import total against the grand total of exports and call that "obvious," without comparing imports and exports item by item, you've already missed the point.
It's not higher — real wages were better back when the yen was strong, too.
GDP is overwhelmingly higher now,
and nominal wages (the face-value amount you actually get paid) have only just finally caught back up to their past peak.
Needless to say, GDP and wages were stagnant for ages under the strong yen and the Lost 30 Years.
If pay hasn't changed since 1997, doesn't that mean it's actually dropped by however much the yen has weakened?
Aren't you mixing up nominal GDP and real GDP?
Sure, nominal GDP did grow from over ¥500 trillion in 1992 to about ¥609 trillion in 2024. But nominal GDP includes the effect of price inflation too — that alone doesn't prove Japan's economy got overwhelmingly richer.
Same goes for wages. Nominal wage growth being high lately and wage levels actually hitting an all-time high are two different claims.
In fact, in 2024 nominal wages rose, while real wages fell for the third year running.
On top of that, it's a stretch to blame the strong yen alone for the Lost 30 Years. There's also the demand shortfall after the bubble burst, deflation, labor productivity, and shifts in employment structure, all tangled together.
Pulling out just the nominal GDP figure and declaring things are overwhelmingly richer now isn't a sound way to read economic indicators.
If you're going to compare, you should be looking at real GDP, GDP per capita, and real wages too — not just nominal GDP.
That's only true if you convert it to yen after weakening the currency.
Measured in dollars, it's actually fallen way below the "nightmare DPJ era."
Looking at it in yen terms is meaningless since a country can manipulate its own currency however it likes — guessing you don't know much about macroeconomics either?
If something that cost $1 used to run you ¥120 and now it's ¥160, wouldn't you just raise the selling price?
A business that's 100% pure import reselling like that is basically just simple stuff like bananas, right? lol. Realistically, how many companies out there just resell imports with zero processing?
Imported materials don't even make up that big a share of production costs, so even if the dollar going from 80 to 160 yen doubles import prices, domestic prices only go up maybe 10% at most, pal.
Daiso, Nitori, fast fashion, home appliances —
it's all imported goods!
Is the US, in the middle of unprecedented dollar strength, actually poor? In reality it's stuck in an inflation spiral with sky-high rent and prices, and the Republicans just got crushed in the midterms over it.
Flip side, China's in a deflation spiral where prices are cheap, but because they've over-automated jobs with AI and high tech without enough stimulus to offset it, the economy's stagnating — and that's way scarier than Japan ever was during its strong-yen years.
Exchange rates only directly matter when you want to buy something like an iPhone or a foreign car — imported goods.
It doesn't follow that your income dropped because of the weak yen.
Exactly — Japan today is full of imported goods.
Finding something actually Made in Japan is a struggle.
Japan has few natural resources, so of course it imports them.
But those resources are dirt cheap, so Japan imports them in huge volumes, and then Japanese economic activity — processing, manufacturing, shipping, selling — multiplies their value many times, even dozens of times over, into goods and services that get sold. That's literally how the Japanese economy works. Still haven't grasped that, huh? That's exactly why you guys don't get it.
Japan's digital trade deficit says it all — domestic smartphones barely sell at all, losing not just to the iPhone but even to Samsung and Chinese phones…
It's really just cars carrying the whole thing.
Well, thing is those processing plants already moved overseas back during the strong-yen era.
My company followed Toyota's lead too and built a plant in Southeast Asia.
Globalization has gone far enough that Japanese companies abroad now effectively "export" back into Japan, so a simple trade-balance argument doesn't mean much anymore — really, slicing things up by nation at all is a stretch.
I work at an auto parts company, so our sales are hugely exposed to exchange rates — but speaking from experience, life genuinely feels harder now with the weak yen.
Well, if you're talking about overseas investments, US Treasuries, and other globally dollar-denominated assets, Japan's wealth has absolutely exploded thanks to the weak yen… but instead of bringing that back home, it just keeps getting funneled into more overseas investment.
Background and key points of this debate
One thing that often gets muddled in weak-yen debates is the difference between nominal and real figures. In the thread, posts citing nominal GDP and nominal wage growth as proof that “things are richer now” ran alongside — without ever really engaging — the point that real wages, adjusted for inflation, have fallen for three straight years. The quoted remark from Seki Obata was really making the point that “it’s not weak yen versus strong yen — the goal should be avoiding extreme swings and settling into a reasonable range (90 to 120 yen to the dollar),” which is subtly different from the thread’s framing of “is the weak yen a win or a loss.” Posters’ memories also diverged over which administration actually presided over that range, with some mixing up the Democratic Party of Japan era and the Abe era. Differing readings of the statistics and differing memories of exchange-rate history made it hard for the discussion to really connect.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (“Nandemo Jikkyo G”) thread “Genius Comedian: “What’s Wrong With a Weak Yen? We Shop in Yen, Not Dollars, So It Doesn’t Affect Us”.”
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