I was expecting Japan to figure out how to become a successful post-industrial society. But no. Government attempts to fix the economy have mostly involved heavy spending on infrastructure, which beats the US approach of pumping money into the banking system. At least the infrastructure is in good shape. But Japan hasn't returned to being the industrial powerhouse it once was.
[1] http://www.forecast-chart.com/historical-nikkei-225.html
A good thing that Japanese people care very little about what the "Gaijin" thinks.
Sometimes civilizations, countries and even whole empires just wither and die.
Japan as a unified nation in the modern sense is newer than the United States of America. Prior to the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s Japan was a feudal society lead by warlords. The rule under the Tokugawa shogunate was relatively stable, but it was still a feudal society.
I don't think anyone is claiming Japan will cease to exist as a country and that the Japanese people would die out, but something with as radical a change as the Restoration (Which included multiple civil wars...) would probably not count as the nation just correcting itself. It is the effective death of one form of the nation and the birth of the other.
When the shogunate emerged in Japan to govern in place of the abdicating, distracted Heian imperial court, USA was populated by various neolithic tribes. Akihito is a direct descendant of the emperors who ruled then, and speaks the same language in his court that they did. I haven't heard much pre-Columbian Algonquin spoken in the White House.
Civil wars don't switch to a different "civilization". (The one in USA didn't, did it?) Japan's remarkable post-WWII recovery from the devastation of war and poor governance in the 1940s to economic success in the 1960s-80s (which IMHO is more impressive than the Meiji restoration to which you refer) is compared by Japanese themselves to earlier recoveries such as that during the early Edo period. The culture, language, and society that exists in Japan today descends directly from those that accomplished previous impressive transitions.
It's hardly jealousy. And you're arguing against claims I didn't make - I never said a civil war changes civilization in and of itself. But we're talking about a period where the way the country had been ruled for hundred of years completely changed, with huge amounts of turmoil, lots of bloodshed, and came out on the other site vastly changed. To try to compare it to the US Civil War, where in comparison things were static (As far as the governance of any nation remains static) when it comes government reform, is silly. The US punished the South, but the federal government behaved much as it had before.
In comparison, the Meiji restoration ended centuries of feudal society.