Japan has changed in important and visible ways

Japan has changed in important and visible ways
noahpinion.substack.com

> Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.

I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try. Everything I've read about Japan has stated that the overall culture is extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people, even to many mixed-race people of Japanese descent (e.g. from Brazil).

Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.

> That (gerontocracy) in turn has caused Japanese companies to fall behind foreign rivals as they miss technological revolution after revolution — microprocessors, smartphones, semiconductor foundries, battery-powered cars, etc.

smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft. Japan didn't lose here because of anything unique to Japan.

Battery-powered cars: Same as above. Tesla won (for a while) and everyone else Ford, Chevy, BMW, Mercedes, etc all lost. Japan arguably led for years with the Prius. But again, looking at the all car companies there's nothing special about Japan here

Microprocessors: Is this even market? There's 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don't get what makes Japan's "failure" here special.

semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country? Is it just because they're in Asia and Taiwan, Malaysia, and China have been the winners?

There's also this idea that there's a lack of startups. I have no idea about the numbers but living in Tokyo before the pandemic there was no shortage of startup meetup and incubators. Yahoo Japan has an open cafe with lots of people "starting up"

https://lodge.yahoo.co.jp/

Amazon and Google both have places (I know, not Japanese companies but they are targeting Japanese entrepreneurs)

https://www.campus.co/tokyo/

https://aws-startup-lofts.com/apj/loft/tokyo

And the Mercari meetup

https://www.meetup.com/ja-JP/MercariDev/

Of course it's my anecdotes vs someone else's, I have no numbers but I went to tons of startup meetings, trade show like events, etc.... I watched several large bitcoin startups um, startup. I saw what must have been 11 different payment system appear (PayPay, D-Pay, ...), as just 2 categories.

30 years ago Japan was world-beating, today it isn't. You could say that to not be excelling is the norm, and the causes of success 30 years ago are the things to be investigated; nevertheless, this feels like a decline.

> I watched several large bitcoin startups um, startup. I saw what must have been 11 different payment system appear (PayPay, D-Pay, ...), just as 2 categories.

Japan has dozens of payment systems but how many of them are competing outside Japan? How many are even trying? NFC-F is still technologically better than Visa/Mastercard contactless, but I bet the latter is going to win out, because it's the international standard; even in Japan new cards come with that.