Japan Is in a Recession, Reports Show

Japan’s economic slowdown has reached the status of a full-blown recession, government figures showed Thursday, signaling the spread of economic doldrums from the United States to Europe and, now, to Asia.

Japan’s gross domestic product shrank for two quarters in a row for the first time in nearly two decades, its Economic Planning Agency said. Although the downturn has not been officially classified as a recession, one senior Japanese official said he had no doubt where his nation’s economy stood.

“We are in a recession,” Noboru Hatakeyama, vice minister of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, told Washington Post reporters and editors in Washington.

Japan’s gross domestic product shrank by 0.4% in the three months ending Sept. 30, and revised figures showed that GDP contracted in the previous quarter by 0.2%, the Economic Planning Agency said. GDP measures the economy’s total goods and services, excluding exports and imports. The figures are adjusted for inflation.

Until now, the Japanese economy has been most accurately described as being in a pronounced slowdown, decelerating from the supercharged 5% annual growth rate of the late 1980s to a pace that is less than half as fast but still positive.

The last time Japan suffered two consecutive quarters of negative growth was during the 1973-74 oil shock.