Greece’s fiscal collapse is still fresh in the mind. For Japan, which is encumbered with debt worth more than twice its GDP, the situation in Greece cannot be shrugged off as being someone’s else’s problem. However, the cases of countries such as Sweden and Canada, which have succeeded in fiscal reconstruction without experiencing a crisis, are less well known. In both these countries, a success factor was that they worked hard to reduce social security spending and built in a mechanism for reducing expenditure. We also needs to be willing to build a mechanism for cutting expenditure into the Japanese government.