The cabinet approved a doozie of a budget with a horrid deficit. Yet it relies on accounting shenanigans. In reality, the government will borrow a disastrous 56.2% of every yen it spends. The vaunted trade surplus has become a trade deficit, the working population is declining, the savings rate plummets…. But the government has a solution: a miracle.

Plunging approval ratings of Prime Minister Noda follow tradition. Public approval is high at the start when voters still have hope. As reality sets in, approval skitters down a steep slope for 8 to 15 months. Then a new guy is installed. But bureaucrats and corporate interests stay in place, public debt turns into a mushroom cloud, and the endgame continues.

“Japan’s economy is likely to continue to face a severe situation for the time being, especially with respect to exports,” said the Governor of the Bank of Japan. He blamed the European debt crisis and the strong yen. But his bland central-banker language marked the end of an era.

Yakuza just can’t catch a break. Now it’s life insurance companies that are tightening the noose. Organized crime is big business in Japan. Extortion, built on a culture of shame, is phenomenally successful. But…. In 1963, there were 184,000 yakuza. In 2009, they were 80,900. And new laws disrupt the ambiguous relationship between them and society.

Tokyo’s organized crime exclusionary laws went into effect in October—and are wreaking havoc. Now doing business with the yakuza is a crime. In an ingenious twist, paying off the yakuza is also a crime. Even victims of blackmail—hush money is an outright industry in Japan—commit a crime if they pay.

The new ministers just can’t keep their mouths under control—that’s the problem with the cabinet of Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, himself in office only since September 1. This time it was Tatsuo Hirano, ironically the Minister for Disaster Management, who issued the latest gaffe by calling tsunami victims “idiots.”

All heck re-broke loose online when the Associated Press reported that a local resident, equipped with a dosimeter, had discovered a highly radioactive hotspot in a residential area of Tokyo, 145 miles from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. Foreign media jumped on the story and speculated. But this time, it was different. And what else is hidden under floorboards?

520,000 Japanese soldiers died in the Philippines during World War II. Years later, the Japanese government began to search for and repatriate their remains. The process worked well for decades, but then someone had the smart idea to outsource it.