There is a podcast episode by Dan Carlin which I'm listening to which goes into this issue in depth. Basically according to him the Japanese basically "imported" values of warfare from the Samurai class into the general population and created an expectation of going 'above and beyond' for even ordinary citizens.

It doesn't go into specifics on what Japan did right, but it does make a very good point that there are elements of every culture which can either help or hinder economic growth and that the economy has a much bigger influence on culture than culture has on the economy. People are lazy because they are poor. Not the other way around.

Education. The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling that was accessible by a large majority of it's population.

They beat the Brits by about a decade.

Yep. Mass education (as opposed to high end elite education) can turn a nation of free people into slaves (or, as Japanese call it, 社畜: corporate livestock). After a century of that, they're losing their collective will to live, too [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan

So the lesson you learned is that mass education is bad? ...

Not mass education as in the abstract concept of "educating the masses", but mass education as its actually practiced.

>The Japanese Empire was one of the first, if not first, nation in the world to have mandatory schooling

Are you sure about that? Compulsory education was introduced in Austria in 1774. Apparently Japan introduced it shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. If anything the UK was particularly late to the game.

> that was accessible by a large majority of its population

Austria had major attendance and implementation issues (e.g., only a 50-60% attendance rate) which apparently weren't fixed until the Reich Public School Law of 1869.

That said, I remember that there was a lot of discussion at one point about how individual behavior in countries that overlapped ex-Austrian/Habsburg territory could be mapped against historical (19th century) boundaries.

Getting back to the original point, Japan was successful because it had high levels of urbanization, which made state directed education more accessible and easier to attain. Other countries/territories implemented compulsory education well before Japan (e.g., Massachusetts first required compulsory education in the 1640s), but efforts either had comparatively lower penetration or relied on non-state institutions (e.g., the church or private institutions) to enforce.

I think the larger question, which has haunted me for a long time, is: how do you change culture on mass scale? Singapore is an example where brute force top-down was used. Maybe that’s the only way?

Total war, ending with a couple nukes?

Ask the Russians, they've been illustrating it's pretty easy in the US for years now.

In what way? Organizing protests?

Supposed Russian "bots" were tweeting at Merkel parody accounts?

Wait, what ? What makes you think (and other commentators) that it's the Japaneses who changed and not the view held by post-colonialists ? (Managers complaining about their workers ? How weird)

It wasn't just the Japanese. "Korean time" was a thing back when Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized.

There is correlation between stereotypes and GDP.

The Brits used to be

> passionate, melancholy, romantic, and tearful

https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-dixon/british-stiff-up...

> overly emotional before their country industrialized.

After all some of the most famous Romantic artists came from Germany: Heine, Beethoven, Hölderlin and Goethe himself. The latter's Werther was the most emotional novel until at least Madam de Bovary, which was written about 80 years later.

Like the sterotypes common in (Western) Europe regarding Eastern Europe, like for the Polish people?

>Germans also used to be stereotyped as dishonest, thieving, dull and overly emotional before their country industrialized.

Any links on this?

>Any links on this?

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...

TL;DR (it's a 213 page grad thesis) Old Germany used to be basically Hufflepuff, a simple-minded, loyal, obedient rustic bumbler who's too stupid to really be a threat or even much of a partner. New Germany arose post-German unification and especially post WW1, where the stereotypes shifted to the modern more sinister concept of a nation of amoral mad scientists and clockwork soldiers - largely as an attempt to justify Germany being the great rival of England.

That’s just extending the already existing stereotype of Prussians to all of Germany.