We've seen that with Japan's growth strategy, based on what we see from its current account, that the currency is a key piece. In fact, it may be in some sense as a centerpiece of their growth strategy, because if Japan depends on foreign demand in order to grow, it's important what the value of its currency is. Now, you remember when we talked about currencies in the globalization course, and then our theory review that when a currency is weak, that means you can export more and import less. So that raises GDP and this is what Japan wants. If a currency gets strong, then you can export less and you tend to import more, and Japan doesn't want that. But we also saw, as we were thinking about current accounts, we saw that if you are a surplus country, there's a certain tendency for your currency to want to rise over time. So the governments of countries that are trying to grow based on foreign demand, sometimes will intervene to try to keep their currencies weak so they can get more growth from foreign markets. Well, this is what Japan did in the early years of its growth experience. In those very fast growth years that we talked about in an earlier section. You can see on this chart, at the very left, you see the value of the yen at the starting in the period, which is in the 70's, and high numbers mean a weak yen because it took more yen to buy a US dollar. So you can see on this chart, that the yen was very weak at the beginning of this period, and there's a drastic change around 1985. The reason that happened was that developed countries, especially the United States, pressured Japan to stop intervening to keep their currency so weak. Because Japanese goods were entering the US market and were taking over. The US companies could not compete with them. So the US government said, "You've got to let that currency float," and some other Western governments as well. And in some they call the Plaza Accords in 1985, Japan agreed to let its currency float to stop intervening to keep it so low. And in this chart, you see that moment. You see that moment when suddenly the currency rises in value. They can buy more dollars with the yen is the idea. And the currency rises in value and therefore Japan would find itself with less capability to export as much as it did before because its goods would become more expensive in foreign markets. And if you go across on the chart, and it takes it up fairly to a fairly recent times, you see that the yen has never been as weak as it was in that early period. Now, we can obviously see the relationship between this chart and that earlier chart where we saw Japan growing very, very fast and then suddenly coming down and settling at low growth rates. In fact, we could argue that the end of the Japanese miracle in the beginning of the last decade, as they used to call it in Japan with a banking crisis, financial crisis, the breaking point between the two could have been the moment when they had to let the yen float, and it moved to a much stronger level. So what do you do if you're a country that wants to export a lot and your currency is strong? Well, somehow you got to get your costs down. And so this is what Japan has done over time. And if we were to explore the wages in the country, we would find that Japan is restraining wages trying to push down labour costs, raise productivity, whatever it takes, to try to stay competitive, and continue to export its goods in order to grow.