dingosatemybaby wrote:At first, Dingo thought this article was about him. Sclerotic? Check. Atavistic? But of course....
(By the way, the link only seems to go to the illustration, not the article).

Although there are some signs that Japan may be coming out of a long stagnation, it is still held back by its isolation, neomercantilist policies and lack of foreign investment
By Jean-Pierre Lehmann

Japan's crisis is systemic, not cyclical. Debt, deflation and other maladies are purely symptoms of Japan's disease. The causes are a combination of institutional sclerosis, social anomie and gerontocratic governance.

He was (from 1992) the founding director of the European Institute of Japanese Studies (EIJS) at the Stockholm School of Economics and Professor of East Asian Political Economy and Business. From 1986 to 1992 he established and directed the East Asian operations of InterMatrix, a London based business strategy research and consulting organisation. During that time he was operating primarily from Tokyo
...Other previous positions include: twice in the 70s Visiting Professor and Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of Tohoku, Sendai (Japan), and Founding Director of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Stirling (Scotland)

The Japanese, as is well known, are among the world's least globalised people. They also, however, fail the test of being good regionalists. They are mercantilist nationalists. In the era of globalisation, with English as the universal lingua franca and the internet, Japan was bound to fail. And so it has.