TOKYO: Japan's record trade deficit adds to sinking consumer confidence and an April sales-tax increase, threatening to undermine Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's bid to engineer a sustained recovery.

The January shortfall jumped 71 percent to 2.79 trillion yen ($27.3 billion), data from the Ministry of Finance showed Thursday, adding to an unprecedented deficit of 11.5 trillion yen in 2013. Imports of crude oil surged 28 percent last month as nuclear power plants remain shuttered for safety checks.

While the yen's 18 percent decline against the dollar last year has led Toyota and Mitsubishi to forecast record profits, inflation driven by higher import costs is squeezing households. Abe risks choking off consumption by raising the sales tax this year and next as he tries to fix the nation's finances.

"Risks are mounting for Abenomics," said Takahiro Sekido, a strategist in Tokyo at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, who formerly worked at the Bank of Japan. "The next six months are very important for Abe because he will have to make a decision this autumn on the second sales-tax hike."

The Topix index fell 2 percent Thursday, taking this year's decline to 8.3 percent, after weaker-than-forecast Chinese manufacturing data damped sentiment across Asia. The gauge rose 51 percent in 2013.

Elected in December 2012, Abe jump-started a four-quarter expansion with fiscal stimulus and his prompting of the Bank of Japan to unleash unprecedented easing aimed at ending 15 years of deflation.

The boost from Abenomics lifted consumer confidence to a six-year high in May before it began to slide. Sentiment fell last month to the lowest level since Abe came to power, with perceptions of income growth, willingness to buy durable goods, and asset-price growth all declining.

The trade deficit trimmed the nation's fourth-quarter growth to an annualized pace of 1 percent, less than half the median forecast of 2.8 percent in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. Base wages excluding overtime and bonuses fell in December for the 19th month, dropping 0.6 percent from a year earlier.

In another restraint on growth, all of Japan's 48 operable nuclear reactors are shut for inspections after the 2011 Fukushima crisis, with no set date for restarting them.

Thursday's data follow a record annual trade deficit last year after gains in exports failed to match the surge in imports because of the weaker yen and the extra fossil fuel that the nation needs.

"The effect of the yen's depreciation on exports has been so slow," former BoJ Deputy Gov. Kazumasa Iwata told reporters in Tokyo on Feb. 19. Iwata also highlighted declines in the competitiveness of Japanese industries and production shifting overseas.

At the same time as he's trying to fuel growth, Abe is wrestling with reining in the world's heaviest debt burden. After gauging the strength of the economy in the third quarter, the government will decide whether to raise the sales tax to 10 percent in October 2015 following an increase to 8 percent in April from 5 percent.

"The sales-tax hike could be the straw that breaks the back of Abenomics," said Takuji Okubo, chief economist at Japan Macro Advisors in Tokyo.

At the same time, some investors and analysts expect the BOJ to pick up the slack should Abenomics show signs of running out of steam.

On Feb. 18, the BoJ doubled a funding tool to 7 trillion yen and said individual banks can borrow twice as much low- interest money as previously under a second facility. It left unchanged a pledge to expand the monetary base by 60 trillion to 70 trillion yen per year.

Central bank Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda says he's prepared to do whatever is needed to support Japan's recovery and drag the nation out of deflation. He's making progress: core consumer prices, the BoJ's benchmark gauge, rose 1.3 percent in December from a year earlier, the most since 2008 and more than halfway to a 2 percent target.

Twenty-five of 34 economists forecast the BoJ will add to stimulus by the end of September, with 13 of those projecting action by the end of June, according to a Bloomberg News survey conducted Feb. 6-12.

"The trade picture is worse than policy makers anticipated, and may prompt the BOJ to act earlier than expected," the strategist Sekido said.