[irthomasthomas]

You may be right, but I don't think we should compare ourselves to Japan, or cite them as an example in discussions about economics. Japan's priorities are totally different to most countries. They prefer to work hard at preserving the status quo, than chasing growth and change. Japan has many businesses that are hundreds, even thousands of years old, and still selling the same stuff. Many of these businesses have the same goal; to survive the next 50 years with 2% growth p.a.

[neffy]

Japan is one of the older civilisations with a recorded history, but "thousands of years old" businesses is stretching it more than a little.

Japan (population 125 million) is third in the world in GDP, with China (population over 1 billion) and the US (population 330 million) ahead of it. More remarkably this is from a tectonically unstable, volcanic island chain with limited natural resources, which is in stark contrast to either the US or China. This is probably an underestimate as they have a considerable secondary investment/production effort going on across Asia.

Japan's priorities are the same as everybody else's, they're just rather good at disguising that.

[rntksi]

From the years living in Japan I think the previous poster is right on a cultural level.

I mean if you think about it, 6 of the top 10 oldest companies are Japanese [1]. That says something about the value of continuity and stability in Japan's mindset. I don't see that changing any time soon tbh. (And yes, some of them are a "thousand" year old, though of course not thousand"s")

[1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

[scawf]

Construction company founded 1443 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi