TOKYO (MarketWatch) -- Japan Inc. got an endorsement from a seemingly unlikely character Monday, when one of the investment world's so-called 'Dr. Dooms' had positive words for the Japanese stock market.

"Here, there is an investment opportunity," said Marc Faber, the publisher of the "Gloom, Boom & Doom" report, who called Japan a "neglected market."

"Valuations are not terribly expensive," Faber said in a speech to the CLSA Japan Forum in Tokyo.

Faber did not elaborate on Japan in his speech, and did not take questions from the media. The slide presentation that accompanied his speech described Japan as "the perfect contrarian play," and simply added, "Banks!"

Faber's own Web site proclaims him as being "well known for his 'contrarian' investment approach," and the rest of his speech was true to the world view for which he is known.

Faber criticized the U.S. Federal Reserve's policy of slashing interest rates to spur the economy, saying that low rates only create new bubbles and boost "consumption at the expense of capital formation."

"It is very difficult to value anything when interest rates are zero," he said.

But in his concluding comments, Faber said that U.S. stocks are now "probably where they should be, given the zero interest rates."

In keeping with his "doom" theme, Faber's presentation also touched upon the possibility of a coming apocalyptic crisis, and how to best prepare for it.

"I'm a believer that the next war will be a dirty war," he said, using strategies such as poisoned water supplies and mobile-phone sabotage.

"If you want to prepare for war times, you have to own physical commodities," such as precious metals, diamonds and houses in the countryside, away from dangerous urban areas, he said.

Faber also recommended that investors buy agricultural commodities, such as wheat.

Investors will need to rethink their global asset allocation, he said in his conclusion on investment themes -- and should have at least half of their assets exposed to emerging economies in the future.

Asian healthcare was one of his specific recommendations, as markets aren't saturated and companies will benefit from growing and aging populations, he said.

'Final crisis'

A clutch of other economists -- including Nouriel Roubini -- have also been called "Dr. Doom," for their contrarian views.

"The original Dr. Doom was Henry Kaufman," Faber said, referring to the former Salomon Brothers Inc. executive, who also served as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Kaufman earned his nickname because of his forecasts for Salomon in the 1980s calling for falling bond prices.

When it comes to his own predictions, Faber seems to revel in his doom-mongering moniker.

Some of the concluding slides in his presentation said he is still recommends long positions in gold and silver, and short positions in U.S. Treasury bonds.

"Sovereign defaults are likely to soar in the next few years," one of his slides said, adding, "The final crisis has yet to come!"