‘It is with much embarrassment, but I have returned.’

It has been four years since Gordon Brown’s claim that he had ended ‘boom and bust’ was so spectacularly contradicted. Since then the UK, as well as much of the world, has struggled to adjust to a new age of austerity.

Now that we all have razor sharp 20:20 economic hindsight it is blindingly obvious that the housing bubble just covered up the cracks and that we were technically in a downturn from the early part of the noughties. We were just encouraged to borrow artificially inflated equity from our properties in order to keep the wheels of the economy lubricated.

What is interesting however is our current obsession with ‘growth’ and our unswerving belief that this will solve all our ills. The only problem with this strategy is that growth is not part of the solution, it is part of the problem. It just sounds better than austerity to the voters.

Growth is the politically correct term for boom, just as austerity is the same for bust. They are merely opposite ends of a scale and as a society we just ride the pendulum that swings between the two. The problem is that when you are on the pendulum it is difficult to gauge exactly where you are in the swing and by the time you’ve worked it out it is normally too late as a certain Lieutenant Onoda would attest.

The Lieutenant started life as plain old Hiroo Onoda, born in Kainan in Japan in 1922 where he led a very ordinary life until he was drafted into the Imperial Army in 1944 and trained as an intelligence officer.

The Japanese had recently invaded the Philippines and stationed troops on the various islands to defend them from the US supported Filipino forces that were trying to reclaim them. Onada’s mission was to hamper the enemy attacks through any means necessary including destroying the airstrip and pier that was vital for any invading forces. It was essentially a one-way trip as the war was nearing its conclusion and the Japanese were massively outnumbered, only being able to afford a handful of soldiers on each of the 7,107 islands collectively known as the Philippines. The Japanese generals were optimistically hoping to defend the island from American warships with a few rag tag soldiers armed with little more than some harsh words. Consequently, they were more of a nuisance than any meaningful resistance. They were also expressly forbidden by their superiors from surrendering or taking their own life.

Unfortunately, when he arrived on the island he was outranked by the soldiers who had been sent there previously and they prevented him from destroying the landing strips. This made it even easier for the Americans who soon overwhelmed them. Only Onoda and three other soldiers survived the battle and now that he was the highest ranked soldier, he ordered them to the hills to embark on a guerrilla war against the inhabitants.

Now, the Japanese are probably the only race on Earth better at austerity than us British for whom ‘going without’ is an Olympic sport. In Greece, mobs of public sector workers have been firebombing parliament in protest at not being able to retire on full salary until age 52 whereby we are being told we must work until 68 to get our state pension and have responded largely by sending strongly worded letters to newspapers and muttering between ourselves at bus stops about bankers. Even the public sector strike day was perhaps the most civilized strike in the world ever and the first to include tea and scones on the picket lines and scabs who could wander through without being spat upon and bricked to death. The closest it got to ‘kicking off’ was when one was given a discouraging look by Sharon from accounts but the situation was quickly diffused with some herbal tea and Pilates.

Compared to the Japs however we are positively lackadaisical. After the war their economy grew continuously for 30 years right up until the 90’s when it all went wrong and they plunged into recession from which they have never really recovered. It was made worse by the fact that the country is run on a kind of dictatorial capitalism model, similar to the Chinese. They like the idea of making lots of money out of capitalism but have lots of vested interests based on internal politics and favoured groups. When things were going wrong and they should have been shedding a bit of fat, the government, under pressure from the unions (no scones here, but plenty of bricks), started spending huge sums on completely pointless public works programs; which may sound familiar to us, although we can take comfort in the fact that this is normally born of steadfast commercial incompetence by our civil servants rather than a structured economic policy. This created an artificial bubble that masked the fact that the wheels had come off their economy and made the resulting recession even worse. A bit like ours when we were encouraged to cash in our houses to keep on spending.

They have now had close to 20 years of stagnation without a hint of growth. The funny thing is that the sun still rises every morning, they still go to work, they still have families that they love and enjoy spending time with, the food tastes the same and the sun still sets every evening. They just don’t fret constantly about growth, which seems to be healthier than craving something which we know will ultimately put us right back in the mire.

You don’t encourage a recovering alcoholic to think about beer every day or invite someone who's just had their stomach stapled round for a rack of lamb and a slab of cheesecake. So why do we spend so much time obsessing over growth? Maybe instead, a more balanced diet and a change in lifestyle is better, similar to that which was forced upon the Japanese.

The issue is working out when we are ‘normal’. At what point do you stop the pendulum? Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees and need somebody else to come along and tell you to stop. Many attempts were made to convince Lieutenant Onoda that the war was over and he could stop fighting. As early as 1945 leaflets were dropped explaining that hostilities had ceased yet, fearing an enemy trap, they ignored it.

Further leaflets were dropped ordering them to surrender but Onoda stayed true to his original mission to never surrender or take his own life. In the 1950’s the soldiers families wrote letters including photographs and begged them to stop fighting and come home but again, they feared that this was allied propaganda and continued fighting. Over the years, Onoda’s men died from gun battles or ill health until he was left on his own and had, unknown to him, become a bit of a celebrity in his home country.

So much so that many attempts were made to find him but they all failed. However, in 1974 a college dropout called Norio Suzuki was travelling the world looking for ‘Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the Abominable Snowman, in that order’ and managed to somehow blunder into Onoda’s well-hidden camp. Surprisingly they quickly became friends although Onoda still refused to surrender without a direct order from his superior. Hearing of Suzuki’s find, the Japanese government tracked down Onoda’s commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, who was now a bookseller, and flew him to the island where he officially ordered Onoda to cease hostilities, which he duly did.

Onoda moved to Brazil where he remains today. In his autobiography he mused over the pointlessness of all those years fighting a war that didn’t need to be fought which perhaps should be mandatory reading for all of our so called economic experts.

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