Life and logos in the land of the rising debt

Radio review: It's a country where consumerism has run riot, where credit cards are groaning under the weight of lifestyle purchases and where the most important thing for people is that they look like they come from a middle-class family.

And, amazingly, the programme wasn't about Ireland. The Psychology of Consumerism (BBC World Service, Monday) explored, in the first of a two-part series, how rampant consumerism in Japan is fundamentally changing that society.

The birth rate there is now so low that the population is not being replaced and much of the blame is being laid at the feet of a new generation of women called - and let's hope this is one of those not-quite right-Japenglish translations - "parasite single women". These are women in their 20s and 30s whose love of shopping is such that they'd prefer to maintain their spending power by living with their parents rather than throw in their lot with a husband who might not be able to keep them in the logos they've become accustomed to.

In common with other top global luxury brands, 41 per cent of Louis Vuitton sales are in Japan and the new generation of independent young women just don't fancy the idea of swapping their million-yen totes for nappy bags. There's a dog craze in Tokyo at the moment - there's even a range of make-up for pampered pooches - and there are more pets than children under 15. It's all presenting economists with a new puzzle - they're having to make a value judgment on whether all that spending on fashion and fripperies is better for the economy than spending on sensible home-making purchases such as fridges.

Quite nice for a change to hear that another country is going to hell in a high-priced hand cart - there was enough of that sort of home-grown talk on radio this week with the Groundhog Day-type warnings about the Irish property market and our enormous collective credit card debt.

By contrast, Derek Mooney's Mooney Goes Wild: Wonderful Waders (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) was a bracing breath of fresh air. I missed half of the two-hour programme, forgetting to tune into MW or LW to catch it - but it didn't matter. Even an hour was enough for an armchair listener to feel inspired to actually get out and have a look at the birds wading around the sea shore. The live broadcast from Cobh in Cork and Dublin's Bull Island was an excellent and uplifting example of public service broadcasting. Mooney is the headline act, but it's a real team effort with Éanna Ní Lamhna, Richard Collins and Terry Flanagan communicating, with deceptive ease, their passion for and knowledge of nature.

If your only point of reference for a face transplant is the John Travolta thriller Face/Off in which he swapped faces, smirk and all, with Nicolas Cage, the very idea that the procedure is now firmly in the sights of the medical profession sounds downright ghoulish. That's until you hear Dubliner Dr Peter Butler (Case Notes, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday), one of the surgeons pioneering face transplants in the UK, explain that the procedure takes up where reconstructive surgery stops, offering hope to people whose faces have been severely disfigured through accident or disease. The transplanted face, he said, "takes on the architecture of the recipient's face, so it isn't a question of making a mask".

Butler was heard in an extensive interview on Marian Finucane's Saturday programme (RTÉ Radio 1) in January, an interview slot that's proving to be the best part of her weekend shows because it gives her time to tease out all sorts of questions with her guests. Finucane can shift gears like few other broadcasters; with Butler she was able to range from the homely - meeting his wife on a blind date - to the dark corners of the moral maze that surrounds such a transplant. For the purely medical Case Notes programme, the interview was all about the operation - or as it's been called in the competitive medical research world, the "face race".

The procedure has been carried out successfully on a French woman and Butler has now been given permission by the ethics committee of the Royal Free Hospital in London to identify a suitable patient in Britain.

Aside from the medical criteria, he'll have to assess whether the person will be able to cope with the psychological challenges of living with someone else's face. And then there's the tricky issue of actually getting a suitable face. It's one thing trying to persuade a potential donor's bereaved family to part with their kidneys after death, but as one woman put it in the vox pop, you wouldn't like to think that a couple of days after burying your dad you'd see his face coming down the street on someone else's body. The face race looks like it's got a little while to go yet.