There's a village in Japan where the dead outnumber the living, and I don't mean the ancestors in the cemetery. The bodies are dispersed around the small town of Nagoro.

It's a small community of some 35 people, most in their 60s or older. The place is so sparsely populated that the locals consider their 150-plus dead a part of their community.

OK, so they aren't literal dead bodies. Instead, the locals erected scarecrow-like figures in their likeness. Scarecrows fill the schoolhouse whose students long since graduated. They wait by an old bus stop, even though there's no bus to pick them up.

For the residents remaining, they replace the memories of those that have either passed away or simply moved away.

This is a stark example of Japan's most systemic issues.

With all of the problems in Europe and China, the troubles in Japan have been forgotten for the moment. However, their issues are far greater and there are no obvious no solutions.

Among Japan's biggest problems is a disproportionately large elderly population. That's not going away anytime soon.

The country is in desperate need of an economic upheaval. Yet no matter what Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe does to reform their economy, they only amount to small changes.

The first arrow he fired in his three-arrow approach to revitalize the economy involved printing new yen with abandon. He was trying to push down the value of the currency, and it worked like a charm – it drove the currency down by 40%. Japanese companies selling cheaper exports raked in profits.

So far so good – but little of it flowed down to workers.

The second arrow involved a lot of government stimulus spending, like building bridges, tunnels, and earthquake-resistant roads – but the effects on the economy have been modest. Government spending did not lead to a buildup in private investment.

The third and final arrow calls for structural reforms. Those won't happen until Japan stands at the edge of ruin. Changing the way business is done, particularly how companies hire, fire, and interact with workers, seems close to impossible. Total dedication to the company might not be how young Japanese view the system today, but it is certainly how all of the aging professionals who still have jobs see things. It won't matter though. The structural changes won't fix their bigger issues.