Remember Japan's "lost decade"? The government threw money at every infrastructure project they could find.
Before you get too nostalgic about Japanese internet though, a friend who worked in Tokyo for a couple of months tells me it isn't really that much to write home about. Access to all of the services you care about as an American are slower, and my friend's provider explicitly blocked VoIP. I have no doubt that this isn't fully representative (except the latency/limited intercontinental bandwidth part). Perhaps patio11 could lend some experiences?
But we aren't just talking about upgrades that were made in 90's. The network there is currently significantly faster than it is here. Even if it was primarily jump-started by large government funding, something kept it going, and it has kept growing while our infrastructure (at least as far as an end user is seeing) hasn't seen much of an upgrade. From what I can tell, US citizens have seen an upgrade of 10-30x what speeds were at the end of the 90's. Places like Tokyo have seen increases of 40-100x since then.
Before you get too nostalgic about Japanese internet though, a friend who worked in Tokyo for a couple of months tells me it isn't really that much to write home about. Access to all of the services you care about as an American are slower, and my friend's provider explicitly blocked VoIP. I have no doubt that this isn't fully representative (except the latency/limited intercontinental bandwidth part). Perhaps patio11 could lend some experiences?