I think Japan's problem wasn't population, it was credit. The banks got government license to grow the economy, so they threw it at their well-connected keiret

I think Japan's problem wasn't population, it was credit. The banks got government license to grow the economy, so they threw it at their well-connected keiretsu friends who wasted it on bad business ideas. After the crash, everyone got "cautious" and money was funneled to big pointless public-works projects. On top of that, the VC's are famously conservative. The end result is that innovative people without business connections never got seed funding. So they come to the US. It's the same story everywhere, and China will probably repeat it.