I am in Japan, it hurts. Not just the yen growing weaker, but how rapidly it has. When I first moved to Japan it was always around 100 yen to a USD, and has more or less stayed within 10 yen of that point. Over the course of 2022 it went from around 110 to like 145. Now it is 156. The general cost of living in my area hasn’t changed dramatically, but any foreign goods we buy are noticeably more expensive. A lot of people have taken to just saving all their money that they don’t need for daily expenses.
International travel is basically off the menu for us given the cost of airfare and poor spending power of the yen abroad, but the amount of foreigners coming in is skyrocketing. I work in hospitality so while it is technically good for my industry, it hasn’t helped most of the actual workers.
I actually know a guy in finance who was like “No man, it’s totally fine, it helps the companies and it will eventually help the workers too. Plus I get paid in US dollars, so it’s great!”
A lot is how closely tied we are to the US economy, but also some kneejerk reactions that weren’t well thought out besides the immediate political gain. We shut down most of our nuclear power plants after the Fukushima earthquake, but didn’t have a good backup power plan thought out yet. Electricity costs skyrocketed. Our main fallback had been Russian gas, but we jumped on the sanctions before, again, we had any fallbacks. Now we are restarting coal production. Russia is a huge trading partner for us, they are obviously very close, and supply a lot of industries. You might be surprised how much of our seafood is actually from Russia.
Rising electricity costs have resulted in more people than ever dying from freezing/heat stroke than ever before, especially the elderly, because people simply can’t afford/don’t want to pay for the electricity cost of AC.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
