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The story
A Newsweek Japan article reporting that South Korea and Taiwan both surpassed Japan in export value in the first half of this year sparked a lively economic debate on 5ch’s News Speed+ board. Opinions flew over the causes — the hollowing-out of the semiconductor industry, the pros and cons of the weak-yen policy, and a corporate culture that has long valued sales staff over engineers. Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom: some argued this is just a temporary blip driven by AI-related demand, and that Japan’s exports will pick up again around 2028.
The news that both South Korea and Taiwan outpaced Japan in export value in the first half of this year felt to me like salt rubbed into a wound. A hundred and forty years ago, Fukuzawa Yukichi called for Japan to “leave Asia” (his famous Datsu-A Ron essay), and Japan went on to dominate the region. Chastened — or rather, forced to repent — by its wartime defeat, Japan then poured capital and technology into its Asian neighbors and led their development. So has Japan now lost its standing in every respect?
But let’s not wallow in self-pity. During its high-growth era, Japan owed much of its growth to exports. Today, South Korea’s exports amount to 44% of its GDP, and Taiwan’s to 65%. Japan’s figure, by contrast, is only 23% — partly because its overall GDP has grown so large. In other words, as long as Japan can maintain its trade balance through exports of the goods where it still holds an edge — machinery, materials, electronic components — and keep the yen’s value stable, it can focus on boosting living standards through domestic demand instead.
In this new era, where not just South Korea and Taiwan but the ASEAN nations too have grown stronger, Japan needs to graduate from its old mindset of obsessing over preserving its ‘family headship’ in Asia. In short: Japan should stop putting on airs in Asia, and instead take on the role of a kind of ‘coordinator’ standing shoulder to shoulder with the region’s increasingly similar, increasingly modern nations.
Source: newsweekjapan.jp / Original article here
What people said
Japan just shifted from exporting to local production because of the super-strong yen from the Plaza Accord and the DPJ government's policies.
Toyota and Sony get mistaken for American companies these days — they're basically reimporting stuff they made overseas.
And with Japan pouring 85 trillion yen into US investments, of course exports aren't going to grow.
Wasn't it the LDP that caused both the super-strong yen and the weak yen?
The strong-yen recession is literally what caused the change of government.
The DPJ just couldn't do much, partly because of the Tohoku disaster too.
That's because Japan turned into a society where even dim-witted people get promoted as long as they're humanities grads or ex-athletes with good people skills.
Enough with the sour grapes already.
Just go get promoted yourself then.
STEM types are basically nerdy, overly logical, soft-spoken, and bad at communicating.
Of course an energetic ex-jock boss is going to be better suited to management.
I'm just worried about the future, that's all.
Rogers:
"Abenomics is nothing but a facade of prosperity. Japanese stocks are only trading higher than before because the Bank of Japan is printing money like crazy and using it to prop up Japanese equities and government bonds."
"Ironically, that's great news for investors like me, but Abenomics will never succeed. Abe's policies will wreck the future of Japan and its children. Someday people will look back and say, 'Abe ruined Japan.'"
And it took exactly ten years for that to come completely true.
Anyone in Japan with half a brain could tell Abenomics was just a stock-price-driven facade of a boom.
There used to be someone who'd hysterically trash-talk Jim Rogers every time his name came up — gone awfully quiet now, haven't they.
This is just an AI-bubble-driven semiconductor boom.
Up until now, semiconductors have basically been a monopoly of Taiwan and South Korea.
But Japan is now pouring massive investment into chips all over the country too — Rapidus, Micron, TSMC, Kioxia, Tower Semiconductor, Sony, Sai Memory, Okuma Diamond Device, and Renesas, among others.
These plants will start coming online one after another, so Japan's exports should surge starting around 2028.
Same here, but the generation that's in elementary school right now is going to grow up in a much poorer Japan.
People in North Korea think the exact same thing lol
'My country is the best,' they say 🤣
Chinese AI is just a distillation of American AI — how's it supposed to win?
At best it's always going to be a step behind.
Four of the current top 5 in the rankings are now Chinese.
Everyone thought it was just copying the US, but it's breaking through that ceiling.
Most Americans are skeptical of AI, and opposition to data centers keeps growing.
China, on the other hand, is largely in favor and is building data centers like crazy.
China's power generation is also a national priority, at several times the scale of the US.
Over half of what the US plans to build by 2027 hasn't even broken ground yet.
Meanwhile, China is already aggressively developing and expanding across many sectors under government leadership, with subsidies 3 to 8 times bigger than other countries.
So here's the question:
When the bubble bursts next year or the year after, which one gets hit harder?
And if it doesn't burst, that gap just plays out as-is.
China has already confirmed over 3,000 trillion yuan (roughly 60 quadrillion yen) in unpaid, unrepayable debt — normally that would turn the yuan into another Zimbabwe dollar, but because Beijing refuses to admit it, the resulting distortion is accelerating inflation both inside and outside China, and Japan is starting to feel the effects too. (´･ω･｀)ゝ
Japan really is nothing but armchair critics these days.
As the old saying goes, 'there's no such thing as a mysterious loss' (a famous baseball proverb meaning every defeat has a clear cause, even if wins can be a fluke).
That's because nobody wants to do the actual making anymore.
Everyone just wants to run their mouth and get paid for it.
Everyone wants to be the strategist barking orders from a safe distance, not the soldier actually on the front line.
Semiconductors, the biggest moneymaker in today's global economy, lost their international competitiveness once the industry hollowed out.
So cars and industrial machinery — the stuff that still sells — are picking up the slack and driving the Japanese economy instead.
Wasn't it Osaka under Ishin that had a company with a foreign parent company managing its water utility lol
Even the tap water's run by a foreign-owned company now…
For reference, the other countries on the list include Vietnam, South Africa, India, Jamaica, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Kenya…
TV keeps churning out those "Japan is amazing" shows, but this is the reality.
Just Cheap Japan.
* Paper
* Hanko stamps
* Excel
* Fax machines
* Manual data entry
* Phone calls
* Human double-checking
* Double- and triple-checking everything
* Ancient legacy core systems
So many idiot companies are still doing this stuff.
Executives and managers are, across the board, complete morons.
Stop it! Automate! Mechanize!
Barely any higher-ups are willing to say that.
Too many fools just want to keep doing things the way they've always been done.
So it's fine as long as it's Google Sheets instead of Excel?
What's funny is China's the exact opposite — they've got a labor surplus, yet they're going all-in on robots, AI, and self-driving tech.
They must be ready to write off a few hundred million people.
It means Japan doesn't have anything people actually want to buy anymore.
If anything, it's precisely because of the weak yen.
Last year Japan's export value hit an all-time high — but that's in yen terms.
Looked at in dollar terms, though, Japan's export value has actually declined, not grown, ever since the Abe government's weak-yen policy began. That's the weak-yen magic trick.
The idea that a weak yen alone boosts the international competitiveness of Japanese products is just an illusion.
The turning point of Japan's decline
Stuck faithfully to the doctrine, huh.
Background and key points of this debate
The article’s premise rests on a structural difference: Japan’s exports amount to only about 23% of GDP, compared with South Korea’s 44% and Taiwan’s 65% — both far more export-dependent economies. In the thread, an optimistic view that exports will recover once new plants like Rapidus’s come online from 2028 onward stood alongside a more pessimistic take that treats the corporate culture’s neglect of engineers and slow policy decisions as structural problems. On the question of “why is Japan losing on exports despite a weak yen,” some pointed out that while yen-denominated export value hit a record high, it hasn’t grown in dollar terms — a reminder that a weak yen doesn’t automatically translate into stronger export competitiveness, a nuance that’s easy to overlook.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Japan Overtaken by South Korea and Taiwan in Export Value… Japan Is No Longer Asia’s Leader“.
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