The US was amazingly gifted by geography and natural resources.

Trying to credit America's success on the "US Way" is fallacious - I don't think we'd be much worse off if we were ruled by a monarchy, or even an extremely ethnically homogenous culture, since we're protected by two oceans, have massive oil and mineral and forest reserves, and had the native population decimated by infectious diseases before we moved in.

Because there are huge side effects by copying the "US way". If you want a much smaller scale and a weaker version of the US then adopt it. That is definitely not what the Japanese people want.

Right, and the current situation is one such consequence of that. Of course they could try something else - they've been trying since the 90's from what I understand, with mixed results at best.

We do not live in a one variable world.

You can't ascribe the position of the US solely to its immigration policies. Especially since it's impossible to correlate immigration trends in recent years in the US to economic trends.

japanese culture predates "the US way" by thousands of years.

Modern Japan was founded in 1868 and then destroyed and rebuilt again in WW2. The people have been there that long, but the country and culture haven't.

i dont even know where to begin with how wrong this is. what culture is something like Todai-Ji a part of? since japan was apparently invented in 1868

Modern Japan isn't building Shinto shrines, they're making ugly concrete towers and those houses that seem to be made out of bathroom tile.

>what culture is something like Todai-Ji a part of?

China.

whatever you say

You're not aware that Buddhism isn't native to Japan? And here I thought you were a cultural expert on all things Japanese.

Although I did make an error - it's both Korean and Chinese.

its a japanese buddhist/shinto temple. an american church isn't roman.

and buddhism isn't chinese.

The point, which you seem to be missing, is drawn somewhere on the arbitrary line between "true" Japanese culture, and foreign culture. Buddhism isn't Chinese, but it reached Japan by way of China and Korea.

So, yes, it's a Japanese Buddhist/Shinto temple. But the religion isn't originally Japanese, and neither is the architecture. The only thing native there is the Shinto.

No one considers modern Japan to not be Japanese, despite it being, in some sense, an American reboot of a Prussian remix of Imperial China. If you want to say Japanese culture predates the US by "thousands of years," fine - except you would need to ignore the thousands of years of European culture that America is based on to do so.

And also ignore the fact that, yes, modern Japanese culture is very much a product of the postwar period, making it both older than, and newer than, the US. And the aspects which are newer are likely the more relevant to Japanese people.