History Analysis / JapanTakesOverTheWorld

This trend, which currently shows no sign of abating, means a greater and greater portion of the Japanese economy is going to have to be devoted for caring for an aging population with fewer younger people to carry that burden. These economic challenges make Japan less likely to dominate the world economically while also making the notion of military aggression seem like much less of a danger.

## The other Asian nations can hit back against Japan. While Japan ''did'' make considerable advances in China during the 1930s and 1940s, China in this period was divided into several factions that vied for power and run by an incompetent and corrupt Nationalist government. Mainland China was still at a pre-industrial level of development, with little industry and most of the population still being rice farmers. Other Asian states were easy to conquer during this period because they were underdeveloped colonies with weak militaries. Since the 1960s, China and other Asian states have industrialized rapidly and have much stronger armies. If Japan were to launch another invasion, they'd face a more robust and industrialized Asia. Since these nations haven't precisely forgotten Japan's war crimes against them, they'd be all too eager to join together to crush Japan.

The post-war yen was initially fixed to a low value compared to the US dollar. After the Plaza Accord in 1985, the appreciation of the yen started a Japanese buying spree of American properties such as Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., Creator/ColumbiaPictures, and even New York's Rockefeller Center, prompting feelings of insecurity especially in America, where Japan was often still remembered as [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII an old foe]].

This, and the appreciation of the yen by mid-80s started a Japanese buying spree of American properties such as Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., Creator/ColumbiaPictures, and even New York's Rockefeller Center, prompting feelings of insecurity especially in America, where Japan was often still remembered as [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII an old foe]].

## The other Asian nations can hit back against Japan. While Japan ''did'' make considerable advances in China during the 1930s and 1940s, China was divided into several factions that vied for power, run by an incompetent and corrupt Nationalist government. It was still mostly at a pre-industrial level of development. Other Asian states were easy to conquer during this period because they were underdeveloped colonies with weak militaries. Since the 1960s, China and other Asian states have industrialized rapidly and have much stronger armies. If Japan were to launch another invasion, they'd be facing a stronger and more industrialized Asia. Since these nations haven't exactly forgotten Japan's war crimes, they'd be all too eager to join together to crush Japan.

Japan's rise was so rapid, the geopolitical analyst George Friedman wrote a 1991 book titled ''The Coming War With Japan'', where [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin he predicted Japan's growth would lead to a conflict with the United States]] in 20 years. But this didn't come to pass and Japan has declined in recent years.

A major factor in Japan's boom was the necessity of rebuilding all the infrastructure after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. While a burden in the 1950s and '60s (where they were known to manufacture cheap products), by the '70s the Japanese economy was enjoying the benefits of much newer, more modern factories than the United States (a similar situation happened in Europe, particularly in UsefulNotes/WestGermany, but the UsefulNotes/ColdWar was more of a factor there). Also, the West put quite a bit of investment into the reconstruction of post-war Japan, particularly during the Allied occupation and the decades that followed. They also got help from [[http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/w-edwards-deming W. Edwards Deming,]] who had been responsible for researching major means of improving manufacturing efficiency during World War II. The American automakers, comfortable with their own profits and confident in their future, didn't want to have anything to do with him, so Deming went to Japan and taught them how to make cars that were both more reliable and cheaper than the Americans'.

This trend, which currently shows no sign of abating, means a greater and greater portion of the Japanese economy is going to have to be devoted for caring for an aging population with fewer younger people to carry that burden. These economic challenges make Japan less likely to dominate the world economically, while also making the notion of military aggression seem like much less of a danger.

This, and the appreciation of the yen by mid-80s started a Japanese buying spree of American properties such as Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., Columbia Pictures, and the Rockefeller Center, prompting feelings of insecurity especially in America, where Japan was often still remembered as [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII an old foe]].

The idea of Japan becoming a superpower once again didn't seem farfetched if you lived in the 1980s. From its defeat in the 1940s to the 1980s, Japan managed to become by some metrics the second-largest economy on Earth. By the 1980s, Japan seemed to outpace the United States in many ways. Detroit's auto industry was so outpaced by Japanese auto production, GM formed a joint-venture factory with Toyota to learn about Japanese production techniques [[note]]the factory was closed and sold to Tesla Motors[[/note]] and established ''Saturn'' as a way to compete with Japan. Nintendo replaced Atari as the major video game company in the United States. Anime was beginning to trickle into American television. And Japanese investors were buying up American companies and even building factories in the United States.

Japan's rise was so rapid, the geopolitical analyst George Friedman wrote a 1991 book titled ''The Coming War With Japan'', where [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin he predicted Japan's growth would lead to a conflict with the United States]] in 20 years. But this didn't come to pass and Japan has decline in recent years.

The Japanese hypergrowth of the 1970s and '80s was built on a system of buddy-buddy relationships between various corporations and the government. At the time, this system appeared to be a triumph of modern corporations and state-directed capitalism, [[ValuesDissonance but nowadays, we just call it "crony capitalism"]]. Predictably, this created an unsustainable economy based on -- ''ahem'' -- [[HistoryRepeats loose credit, a housing bubble, selling below profit, and toxic loans]]. Property values became massively overinflated, to the point where prime real-estate in Tokyo could sell for more than the entire [=GDP=] of smaller countries. At the height of the property bubble, office space in Tokyo's main business district went for ''a million dollars'' per square meter[[labelnote:∞]] (that's $92,903.13 per square foot!)[[/labelnote]]; land in the Ginza shopping district cost ¥30,000,000 per square meter[[note]] ($218,978 at about the 1988 dollar-yen exchange rate, or $20,343.74 per square foot)[[/note]]; and the value of the Imperial Palace was greater than ''all the real estate in UsefulNotes/{{California}}''.

This, and the appreciation of the yen by mid-80s started a Japanese buying spree of American properties such as Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., Columbia Pictures, and the Rockefeller Center, prompting feelings of insecurity especially in America, where Japan was often still remembered as [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII an old foe]].

But once the bubble popped, the economy stagnated, and Japan entered a "lost decade," and some say it still hasn't completely recovered almost 30 years later. Banks became zombie institutions, the central bank got stuck in a liquidity trap, and Japanese twenty-somethings faced a fate worse than death – while their fathers had enjoyed lifetime employment at one company, they moved from temp job to temp job, failing to build much in the way of careers. In short, they weren't half as inhuman as the mythos. Also, many Japanese electronics companies had been leaders in the CassetteFuturism (Everything Is a Walkman in the Future) era, but had [[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-21992700 not adapted]] to the digital/software revolution, and have thus lost competitiveness in the era where [[EverythingIsAnIPodInTheFuture Everything Is an [=iPod=] in the Future]]. This was because Japanese industry became [[CripplingOverspecialization extremely adept at designing and manufacturing mechanical components]] which works well for cars, appliances, consumer devices and such and translates well to manufacturing analog electronics (particularly those based of vacuum tubes and discrete transistors) but didn’t port over to digital electronics and integrated circuits [[note]] Most IC chips are designed in the US and manufactured elsewhere in South East Asia[[/note]].

A longer term issue for Japan which was overlooked by the people who believed Japan would take over the world is an aging and declining population. While most wealthy countries have declining birthrates, Japan is a specifically pronounced case, having reached below-replacement fertility in [[TheFifties the 1950's]], and currently having one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. This has brought the country's population into active decline, starting in 2010. These low fertility rates, coupled with the world's highest life expectancy, has resulted in the highest median age of any country. Other wealthy countries often compensate for low birth rates with immigration, but Japan has long maintained very low immigration levels. In 2015 there were 9,469 applications for Japanese citizenship approved in a population of 127 million. Canada, with a population of about 35 million, averaged almost 11,000 immigrant citizens ''per month'' in 2013 (total of 129,000), the United Kingdom--with a population half that of Japan--had 118,000 new citizens in 2015, and the United States naturalized 653,416 new citizens in 2014. Japan's annual number of new citizens was therefore about 33% less than an average ''week'' in the United States.

A longer term issue for Japan which was overlooked by the people who believed Japan would take over the world is an aging and declining population. While other first-world nations also feature declining birth rates among their native populations, immigration is keeping populations levels slightly rising or steady which countries such as Canada, the United States, and Great Britain can handle relatively easily as they have a history of multiculturalism and multiethnic population. Japan, for assorted reasons, has essentially no immigration in comparison: in 2015 there were 9,469 applications for Japanese citizenship approved compared to a population of 127 million. Canada, with a population of about 35 million, averaged almost 11,000 immigrant citizens ''per month'' in 2013 (total of 129,000), the United Kingdom--with a population half that of Japan--had 118,000 new citizens in 2015, and the United States naturalized 653,416 new citizens in 2014. Japan's annual number of new citizens was therefore about 33% less than an average ''week'' in the United States.

This trend, which currently shows no sign of abating, means a greater and greater portion of the Japanese economy is going to have to be devoted for caring for an aging population with fewer younger people to carry that burden, which both reduces the amount of resources Japan could direct to other countries and the population to do it.

This, and the appreciation of the yen by mid-80s started a Japanese buying spree of American properties such as Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., Columbia Pictures, and the Rockefeller Center, prompting feelings of insecurity especially in America, where Japan was often still remembered as an old foe.