[Zerverus]

Japan is much more complicated than that and apply capitalist measures of success isnt doing it justice

- Demographic crunch, as mentioned. The country not descending into uncontrolled decline may already been a decent achievement

- Focus on quality. This is unique to Japan and runs counter capitalist growth stories. Japanese consumers value quality. a lot. But it’s bad for business in the growth sense, you don’t need to buy a new fridge for 10-15 years because it works and isn’t made obsolete artificially, Japanese consumers are happy, growth : consumption metrics are not.

Quality is just not captured as a variable in the western / American way of looking at economic health. Not having train delays, having great customer service, no forced obsolete products, high reliability in services and products are not reflected / incentivized in that model - they don’t exist but that’s not how Japan works.

Japan has issues, quite a few, but it’s not nearly the hellhole American economic publications love to make it out for decades now. It may be a nightmare scenarios for the get rich quick dudes with US MBAs, but quality of life is pretty decent for a country this far down the demographic curve.

We can only really judge how they fared when America enters that demographic slope.