What metrics exactly? Certainly not GDP per capita. It also has the lowest productivity per hour of the OECD countries.
Japan has been almost stagnant for nearly 30 years now, mainly because of demographics (and other reasons, but with such an aging population it's pretty much game over no matter what), but by 1990 Japan has a better GDP per capita than any of the biggest economies in the world at this point, by far (more than 20% over some most western countries). Obviously, when your GDP stay flat for 3 decades, other end up catching up…
> It also has the lowest productivity per hour of the OECD countries.
Productivity is a poor metric, because there is little correlation between time spent working and GDP, so culturally workaholic (Japan) countries ends up with poor results, while hedonistic countries (France) score super well, but that doesn't reflect much.
Not really. I think people wastly exaturate the amount of central control because that is what they want to focus on. People love to say things like 'look the government invested in X industry and that insutry is now successful'. Ignoring the tons and tons of wasted investment and industries that didn't go anywere. It also ignored the massive amount of success private companies had that didn't explicity been pushed by specific government planning.
The believe that Japan only has problems because of an aging population is also pretty false and was even more so in the early 1990s. I disagree that Japan blew past the West in most metrics, in some maybe but in others they are worse.
While I agree with you that it definitely shouldn't (mankind already had one too many cultural revolution last century), I think you vastly underestimate the destructive power of totalitarian states…
> The same thing happened with the Asian Tigers. China is now starting to pull ahead in some technologies, but it has yet to be seen if how far that is possible. People also thought Japan would blow past US and the West.
The Asian tiger are also a good example of sucessful central planning though… And Japan did indeed blow past the west by most metrics… including population aging, which has since then crippled the country.