If you want a full comprehensive understanding of what is going on I highly recommend :
- https://www.amazon.com/Princes-Yen-Central-Bankers-Transform...
There is a huge overlap here with MMT ( Modern Monetary Theory ), but the book was published way before MMT become more widely read. Richard studies what happened in Japan from an economic history prespective. ( I will do a dis-service to the whole topic trying to explain everything in a few sentences, but I will try to answer specific point raised ).
> I just don't understand, because what you seem to be saying is that for a primarily export based economy, you should just print money always.
As an exporter you cant help but accumulate FOREX. so the value of the yen would always head north, if you want to stay a top exporter you have to constantly print money to balance out your FOREX accumulation.
> Surely there must be downside?
Nope, no downside when you build capital goods that everybody else wants.
> Normally I'd say this maps to inflation and squeezed living standards- but are we just no longer seeing those effects?
inflation happens when aggregate demand > aggregate supply. If you are not supply constrained then inflation wont happen regardless of how much money you print.
Japan specifically could print unimaginable amount of money and use it to create whatever technology they want.
Technology acts as an accelerator to this deflation doom loops, since these technology products further increase supply or reduce cost.
You might have hard limits due to physical commodities like oil. But technology has been able to squeeze even more value out each unit.
> Where I'm not understanding is you're saying when they fail, the money they've lost has gone into stimulating demand for Japanese goods and kept the currency low. But firstly, that's still them failing - the company will fail, ROI will be low. It might help the domestic Japanese manufacturing industry, but it's not going to help softbank.
Japanese banks are very much interwoven with their state, softbank might get certain lending quota from BOJ that they must lend out. Remember if Japan doen't print yen and spread it around then their deflation problem gets worse. My personal opinion is Japan should pay attention to their domestic proverty problem, they could just implement UBI, but having too much Yen domestically wont solve their deflation problem. The last time they tried helicopter money, everybody just bought
government bonds, making the problem worse ! So they might prefer to figure out to create demand in foreign markets.
> It's probably not even 5% - the vast majority of the money will be going to stimulate the Indian economy.
I do not think Japan really cares if the Indian economy is stimulated or not, they just want there to be healthy demand for Japanese products, printing money and lending it out and then suffering some loss might even be preferable to having a large marketing and advertisement industry like we do in the West.