Hegemonic powers historically last around two centuries.
Japan’s stagnation is not decline but self-inflicted paralysis caused by contempt for capital markets.
Japan still holds the foundations of a global financial superpower.

2016-04-08
The following continues from the previous chapter.
Hegemonic powers traditionally last two hundred years.
The claim that Japan’s era is over is absurd.
Japan must continue to prosper for another 170 years as a super–economic power standing alongside, or complementing, the United States.
Why did Japan stagnate for the past twenty years.
Put bluntly, the media and politics remained at the mental age of twelve.
Japanese corporations, constantly exposed to innovation and competition, refined world-class technologies and captured global market share.
Diligence, attention to detail, and high educational standards enabled Japan to build the world’s largest pool of personal assets, totaling 1,500 trillion yen.
Yet the money generated by this society was never returned to the market.
Driven by petty egoism chasing marginally higher compound interest, more than 500 trillion yen stagnated in postal savings.
There may have been some economic effect, but almost none of it returned to the market.
Japan mocks itself for its overly advanced mobile technology as a “Galápagos syndrome.”
China, by contrast, is a national Galápagos, yet exploits its population of 1.3 billion to sustain currency devaluation policies.
What Japan must do remains unchanged.
It must activate its 1,500 trillion yen in personal assets.
It must return to society the wealth created by diligent and capable workers who supported an industrial nation.
A capitalist nation that despises its own stock market inevitably stagnates.
That is the true cause of Japan’s twenty-year paralysis.
None of my classmates joined securities firms.
Stocks were scorned as something beneath dignity.
Meanwhile, America’s top Harvard graduates join Goldman Sachs and become Treasury Secretaries.
The yen functions as a safe-haven currency because over 95 percent of Japanese government bonds are funded domestically by personal assets.
If just one percent of those assets, ten trillion yen, were directed into equities, Japan would instantly become a financial superpower rivaling the United States.
To be continued.