The golf courses of Japan are a useful financial indicator. As members succumb either to straitened circumstances in a struggling economy or to old age, these lush expanses of manicured grass - symbolic of the excesses of the bubble years - are falling out of favour.
A foreign-owned property company in Tokyo has begun buying them up and, reflecting the popular anxiety following Fukushima, is converting them into solar farms.
The Bank of Japan’s decision to embrace negative interest rates, the latest attempt to reinvigorate the ossified economy, does not apply to retail deposits . . . at least, not yet.
That, however, is small comfort to the salarymen and their retired counterparts who have seen the return on their savings decimated by years of zero interest rates.
Despite Shinzo Abe’s boasts about the “three arrows” of his Abenomics programme, there has been only ever one missile in the prime minister’s quiver: yen depreciation (albeit indirectly), through ever-lower interest rates, to support Japanese exporters as they try to fend off rivals such as China and Vietnam.
The other two arrows - fiscal and structural reform - are but pinpricks.
The BoJ’s support of Abenomics through this kind of unconventional monetary policy has never been about real economic growth.
Like the policies of the US Federal Reserve, it has led to asset price inflation and distorted incentives rather than a rejuvenated economy built on a world-class service sector and leading-edge technology companies.
So far Abenomics has not led to a growth spurt. Output in the fourth quarter of 2015 contracted by 1.4 per cent, which was worse than expected. Indeed, for the whole of last year, growth was below the average 0.6 per cent of the previous two years. If zero rates failed to ignite the spirits of either companies or consumers, it is hard to see why negative rates would have that effect.
By contrast, corporate profits reached record levels in the first half of 2015 but that was almost entirely a benefit of the cheap yen combined with lower global energy prices - important for a big importer such as Japan.
This brings us to another “arrow”: structural and corporate reform. That cheap yen, like so many other gifts from the central banks, has the unintended consequence of making companies less likely to reform - raising salaries, for example, or increasing diversity at senior levels - because they rely on a cheap currency rather than innovation to make them competitive.
It is a sign of the times that the market for drones, the current must-have consumer electronic product , is dominated by DJI, a Chinese company, rather than a Japanese group.
The average worker has been less fortunate. Total earnings are expected to have declined in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile economists expect consumption to fall by 2 per cent on the back of weaker-than-expected retail sales and household spending.
In other words, while the government and the central bank are trying to engineer a rise in inflation, it appears that they have not yet managed to extend it to the sort of wage and income growth that could lift economic prospects in a sustainable way.
As for fiscal policy, that, disappointingly, remains more of the same: largely resource transfers to the construction sector, traditionally a big donor to the ruling Liberal Democratic party.
Even the commissions from the politically privileged builders are of the wrong sort, though. Japan should be building nursing homes for its ageing population rather than Olympic stadiums, which will have negligible multiplier effects on the economy.
They will, however, put the government deeper into debt - and its sovereign bonds will not always be able to be sold at negative yields.
The latest measures from the BoJ have ceased to reliably lead to a rise in the price of more risky assets such as equities.
The Nikkei stock index dropped 15 per cent in the wake of the policy shift, with bank shares especially hard hit. That is because negative rates crush net interest margins on what little lending banks undertake, since their corporate customers cannot see the point of expanding capital investment while their customer base shrinks.
Meanwhile, despite Tokyo’s intentions, the yen has risen against the dollar, damaging exporters’ prospects.
It used to be that it was the private sector that engaged in financial engineering while central banks condemned such money games. Now the central banks themselves have turned into financial engineers. Their success, like that of Japan’s golf courses, is bound to be fleeting.
