Superfrog Could Not Save Tokyo After All

I do not know if anyone has read the short story Superfrog Saves Tokyo. It is in after the quake,  a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami published in 2000 as a response to the 1995 quake in Kobe, Japan. On of these stories was Superfrog Saves Tokyo. (There is a creature named Worm beneath Tokyo who is about to wake and cause the quake. Superfrog and Mr. Katagiri must prevent this.)

I mentioned this story a month ago just after the quake in Japan and the tsunami. What is very interesting is the description of the Japanese economy in a brief paragraph about Mr. Katagiri, the main human character, and his job at the bank:

As a member of the Trust Bank lending division, Katagiri had fought his way through many a battle. He had weathered sixteen years of daily combat since the day he graduated from the university and joined the bank‟s staff. He was, in a word, a collection officer-- a post that won him little popularity. Everyone in his division preferred to make loans, especially at the time of the bubble. They had so much money in those days that almost any likely piece of collateral--be it land or stock--was enough to convince loan officers to give away whatever they were asked for, the bigger the loan the better their reputations in the company. Some loans, though, never made it back to the bank: They got “stuck to the bottom of the pan.” It was Katagiri‟s job to take care of those. And when the bubble burst, the work piled on. First stock prices fell, and then land values...

Sounds rather familiar. Asset bubbles. And you have read about Japan's Lost Decade, ten years of economy in the doldrums, and you wonder if that's what's in store for the rest of the world?
I have read different opinions. I think that given the fact that we are no longer interested in job creation - which I consider more important than budget balancing, although both need attention - we are headed for the lost decade scenario.

Our financial system is still more interested in speculations than it is in real economic benefits, and our corporate culture has no ethos that states that there is a long-term committment and goal for the safety of the customer and the nation and the world.
We are suspiciously akin to TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which touted cheap energy while relying on "socialized risk bearing" when things go wrong. (They carry no insurance, since it would make "cheap" energy suddenly "expensive", so we pay for their mistakes... socialized risk.)
It used to be Japan led the world in robotics. Now the robots working at Fukushima are from the USA. Why? Why is it that Japanese robots are devoted to uses as toys and frivolity, and the robots designed for work in hazardous environments are not available in Japan?
TEPCO. TEPCO did not want to pay for robots, so it sold the bill of goods that nothing would ever, ever go wrong. Hence, no Japanese robots yet.

The lack of insights are not very different from what I see here. Individually and on a small scale, there is some great work, but on the larger scales, there is a desert out there... a desert mentality that sees it acceptable that everything be budget and nothing be job stimulus.
I seem to remember they did that once before, but I may be remembering Mr. Hoover's times poorly. However, I do know that when trillions of dollars disappear, that's like a tremendous earthquake, and the ripples and waves go a long way and last a long time.
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