Originally Posted by emg
Originally Posted by PimTac
Japan is very much affected by the aging society demographic. They have less young people due to a declining birth rate. A lot of their current economy is focused on aged care.
Have you seen American demographic predictions lately? Japan is doing well in comparison: at least it will still be a first-world country in twenty years.
On the ageing front, my guess is that rejuvenation tech is one area where Japan will definitely be copying the US in the future; it's one of the few areas where US R&D still leads the world, though China make take over if the FDA doesn't relax its restrictions on testing.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what they would copy? Silicon Valley is now basically an enormous ad agency and spyware factory, Boeing jets have trouble flying, Intel is having trouble building new CPUs. The areas where the US used to lead the world have mostly rotted away over the last twenty years.
Reusable rockets, maybe?
One of the biggest problem with Japan's R&D is always how much risk they are willing to take on an individual level, and the nimbleness of their direction.
2 years ago I went to Taiwan for a business trip, a program manager I worked with told me the Japanese culture is to never break a promise, but also never promise you anything, and sandbag as much as they can so they never break a promise. This is the complete opposite of the Silicon Valley culture, and you can definitely see it in the resulting technological lead each is in. They never broke a promise, but they can never jump in to work things out fast like American or Chinese either.
Japan: high investment and high barrier to entry field like cars, flash memory, lens, semiconductor equipment, cameras, high speed rail, mission critical components
US (at least silicon valley): software, startup that "disrupt" an old industry, uber, airBnB, self driving, fabless semiconductor, virtualization / cloud, pharmaceutical, AI / Machine Learning.
Both need to absorb enough foreign tech expert to jump start / accelerate their tech lead and reduce their manufacturing cost. Yes, you can immigrate to Japan if you are an engineer, or if your ancestor is a Japanese that went to Latin America as a laborer.
South Korea has been taking away a lot of Japanese business because they are cheaper and other geo political reason as well.