[swores]

Another example to my sibling comment's one of debt is the stock market. While most of the world that has advanced technology and industry etc. has seen huge gains over the past decades, Japan is still not quite back at the highs they saw in the late 80s - for various demographic and economic reasons that I'm not remotely knowledgable enough to explain.

But see for example the charts (click on "max" to see as far back as possible) on Yahoo Finance for famous indexes of top X companies in each country:

Japan (Nikkei 225): Up 118% today since 1985, but down 29% from 1989's peak https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EN225/

USA (S&P500): Up ~2000% since 1985, technically down ~12% since December but anyone who invested 15+ months ago is still up it's not like a crazy crash https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC/

UK (FTSE250): Up ~1000% since 1986 https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EFTMC/

Obviously these are limited to the few hundred biggest companies but offer a good snapshot, and it's a similar story if you look at other European countries etc., and a significant problem for Japan (as well as being a metric/indicator caused by significant problems) that their growth has been so far behind.