Japan's economic crossroads
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Japanese people prepare to head to the polls, economic concerns are back at the centre of public life.
We explore how inflation, wages, demographics and geopolitics are shaping expectations, and whether the country can finally move beyond the "lost decades".
To get in touch with the team, send us an email to businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Rahul Tandon Producer: David Cann
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, why bond markets are so powerful, China's property bubble, and Gen Z's experience of the current job market.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and billionaire founder Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems, one of the world's largest medical record software providers.
(Picture: Office workers cross a road near Tokyo station in Tokyo, Japan, on the second of December 2025. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.5 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service with me, |
| 0:12.1 | Ruhl Tandon. Today, we're going to take you to Japan, long known as the country where prices |
| 0:18.7 | stood still. I grew up in Tokyo and for practically all my life, I never really experienced anything getting |
| 0:27.8 | more expensive. But with elections just days away, we're asking, what's changed? |
| 0:33.0 | Over roughly the past year, rice prices have shot up suddenly, |
| 0:39.2 | and because of that, it's become something that's harder to eat. |
| 0:42.4 | That's all coming up here on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:51.4 | Dear citizens, today, I, as the Prime Minister, have decided to dissolve the lower house on January 23rd. |
| 1:00.3 | Why now? It is now up to you, the sovereign people, to decide whether Sanai Takeichi is fit to be Prime Minister. |
| 1:08.9 | That's Japan's first female Prime Minister, Sanaitaki-Ira, |
| 1:12.8 | announcing another general election, |
| 1:15.6 | just three months after taking office. |
| 1:18.3 | This is a country which has been ruled by her party, |
| 1:21.8 | the Liberal Democrats, for most of the past 70 years. |
| 1:25.3 | So what is the key election issue? Like many parts of the world, |
| 1:29.2 | it's rising prices. Here's the opposition leader Yoshihiko Noda. |
| 1:37.9 | We're in a period of high prices. I do want to talk about these soaring prices now, but precisely |
| 1:43.2 | because we're in this period of high prices. We have lawmakers who want to talk about these soaring prices now, but precisely because we're in this period of high prices. |
| 1:45.7 | We have lawmakers who want to work, work, work, work, work even more for ordinary people. |
| 1:53.5 | For the past few weeks, politicians, like the one we just heard, |
| 1:57.2 | have been on the campaign trail in Japan, and as they knock on doors, they're hearing lots about the price of Japan's staple food, |
... |
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