The Japanese economy is steadily growing and may have finally “decoupled” from the US, according to a report in The Guardian:

Senior officials say the economy has become much more stable as it has plugged into the booming economies of Asia, exporting everything from consumer goods to machine tools. But not everyone is convinced, with some worried that as Asia slows in response to lower exports to a recession-hit US, Japan’s exports will suffer, as will its consumers, whose spending will be hit by higher fuel prices.

“Japan is cheap in a way that no other developed markets are,” says Merryn Somerset Webb in Money Week.

“A good 50% of Japanese stocks trade at less than their book value (the accounting value of their assets), for example. Dividend payouts are also rising. They have always been stingy, when they have existed at all, but over the past three years, the dividends offered by the biggest companies have been rising at double-digit rates.

“And the economy isn’t doing badly at all. In the fourth quarter of last year, Japan grew at an annualised rate of 3.5% and in the first quarter of this year the numbers are expected to show that it grew at around 2.5%. Given that the best the US can do is 0.6% (and that number is bound to be revised down over the next few months), that looks pretty good.

“Japan is currently the world’s fastest growing developed economy and given its links to Asia (twice as many Japanese exports go to Asia than to the US), it is likely to stay so.”