Strong consumer spending helped generate robust expansion in Japan during the January-March quarter, indicating that future growth could be driven mainly by consumers instead of corporate investment, which has fueled the economy in the past few years, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Japan’s gross domestic product expanded a healthy 0.6 percent in the January-March period from the fourth quarter, which translates into an annualized growth rate of 2.4 percent. The expansion was, however, slower than in the previous quarter, when growth was particularly strong following unusually weak figures in the July-September quarter. The growth rate for the October-December quarter was revised down slightly to an annualized pace of 5 percent from a previous estimate of 5.5 percent. A key contributor to growth during the January-March quarter was private consumption, which expanded by 0.9 percent from the previous quarter.