Banzai! To the relief of taxpayers from Okinawa to Hokkaido, the incoming administration has decided it can live without a new museum devoted to manga cartoons. Japan’s scrapping of “wasteful” government projects should knock a few trillion from total borrowings this year.

Not that it makes much difference. Japan has created a monster of a government bond market that needs to be fed. Since the early 1990s, the spread between tax revenues and government spending has been widening, funded by debt. This year’s budgeted increase in JGB issuance is a whopper: Y130,000bn, on top of Y846,000bn outstanding.