[alephnerd]

It's a crisis in the sense that most Westerners don't know how Japan began building defensive mechanisms to alleviate some of the worst aspects of an aging society (eg. Building SWFs, creating strict guestworker programs, automating jobs where possible, disinvesting in lower population regions) years ago.

A lot of the policy conversation and worries about an aging Japan began all the way back in the 1960s and 1970s, and helped inform the Flying Geese paradigm Japan has leveraged.

Personally, I've noticed American newspapers using Japan the same way they would use the Nordics a decade ago - as an idealized image that was leveraged for domestic ideological battles.