Published Aug 14, 2009 at 8:00 PM EDT Updated Mar 13, 2010 at 5:04 PM EST Japan is heading into a landmark election in a state of freefall. Stagnant since the early 1990s, Japan's economy fell off a cliff in the last quarter, dropping 15.2 percent in the worst collapse of any industrial nation in decades. Automakers—Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, once the heart of the Japanese industrial miracle—saw e
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