Japan has changed in important and visible ways
I like all the rebuttals but the top still strikes me as mostly unsubstantiated claims<p>&gt; 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.<p>smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft. Japan didn&#x27;t lose here because of anything unique to Japan.<p>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&#x27;s nothing special about Japan here<p>Microprocessors: Is this even market? There&#x27;s 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don&#x27;t get what makes Japan&#x27;s &quot;failure&quot; here special.<p>semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country? Is it just because they&#x27;re in Asia and Taiwan, Malaysia, and China have been the winners?<p>There&#x27;s also this idea that there&#x27;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 &quot;starting up&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lodge.yahoo.co.jp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lodge.yahoo.co.jp&#x2F;</a><p>Amazon and Google both have places (I know, not Japanese companies but they are targeting Japanese entrepreneurs)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.campus.co&#x2F;tokyo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.campus.co&#x2F;tokyo&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws-startup-lofts.com&#x2F;apj&#x2F;loft&#x2F;tokyo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws-startup-lofts.com&#x2F;apj&#x2F;loft&#x2F;tokyo</a><p>And the Mercari meetup<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;ja-JP&#x2F;MercariDev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;ja-JP&#x2F;MercariDev&#x2F;</a><p>Of course it&#x27;s my anecdotes vs someone else&#x27;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.