If I had to guess, American investments took over as #1 in FDI in 1992. Japan was still 4th in 1991. You can thank wall street, republican congress, and bill clinton for that.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/15/business/foreign-investor... "Last year (1991), the United States dropped to fifth, with less than a 5 percent share of foreign investment in China, behind Hong Kong, Germany, Taiwan and Japan." then the article talks about massive US investments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_direct_investment_in_C... FDI spiked in 1992

You need to keep in mind that Hong Kong is there mostly as a proxy, and mostly for China's neighbours.

>US royally f..king up its ally Japan is the biggest reason why Japan did not become a counterweight to China.

Can you elaborate on what the United States did?

If you did not read the books, Japan was for America a bigger boogeyman than the Union, and Ben Ladin combined by late eighties.

It lead to an incredible economic, and political pressure US put on Japan, which culminated in US forcing Japan into Plaza accords, and the three Japanese lost decades which followed.

The Plaza Accords were a complete failure at their twin objectives of increasing US exports to Japan and decreasing Japanese exports to the US, neither of which happened.

They did trigger a wave of Japanese overseas investment and Japan's own asset bubble, leading to the Lost Decade when it burst, but these were hardly planned effects.

Yeah the current issues with Japan are more intrinsic than anything else (inability to innovate, etc)