Deflation Is Not Preventing Consumers from Buying Items in Japan

The New York Times ran one of its periodic pieces on how bad things are in Japan. The gist of this piece is that China's economic slowdown is hurting Japan, so Japan may have been mistaken to rely on China as a major export market. As the subhead tells readers:

"A slump in exports raises questions about how effective Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic policies would have been without Chinese help."

This is a truly a bizarre sort of argument. China has the largest economy in the world on a p...