Considering that a period of change is a period of opportunities, I believe that the industry could potentially accelerate its growth by satisfying the unfulfilled needs of the Japanese economy. From a broader perspective, Japan’s headline growth figures over the last 20 years remained low, and the period is often described as the lost decade or decades.
Nevertheless, the impact of the bubble bursting in the 1990s was well contained, relative to what we saw recently following the Great Financial Crisis. Weak growth, at least in the second decade after the bursting of the bubble, can be explained, to some extent, by adverse demographic trends, or more precisely, a failure to adapt to such trends.