Japan is a unique mix of factors that used to be it's pillar of support, but now are quickly becoming it's downfall.
The Japanese like to
-be extremely patient/ignore the elephant in the room/avoid rocking the boat. This is a nice quality but it leads to festering, unresolved problems and in many individual cases, suicide.
-keep things on the 'inside', which doesn't just mean Japan vs. the world, it's also the reason things are so politically corrupt and confusing. Lots of internal cronies and old boys with little public transparency or accountability. Most big political decisions or decisions at company are done behind closed doors in small numbers so that there is no disagreement in public settings. The so called 根回し
-avoid person to person contact/give others their 'privacy'. This is nice but tatemae and superficiality lead to a lack of communication and a feeling of isolation especially among aging people and young people, both are disconnected/disillusioned by an increasingly cold, overworked and withdrawn working class.
-avoid conflict/事勿れ主義 which ironically leads to more conflict because in so doing they fail to deal with problems head-on. If you want to wrestle a bull to the ground, well, you've gotta get your hands on it and actually wrestle it to the ground!
Japan is basically just extremely ill-equipped to function in a global society and their tradition of only taking what they need from other cultures and essentially remaining closed-off and private and inward looking is preventing them from moving forward in this day and age of globalization. They are the only 1st world nation in the world to maintain such 3rd world ideas about nationality, ethnicity, foreigners, etc to such an extreme degree that it's harming the nation.
But it's not like the government is preventing people from learning English or working abroad, it's the people themselves, they are basically SCARED to go global, don't want to learn English, don't want to work abroad, don't want to allow foreigners in to the country despite their low birth rate, don't want to change their ways, etc. It's a grass-roots problem isn't it?
Something has to give at some point, and right now it seems that progress and economic growth are suffering in order to avoid trends which other industrialized nations have already openly accepted.
Great article and great find, by the way.
Toronto has such crappy newspapers (right-wing 'Sun', left-wing 'Star', far right 'The National'), but the Globe is usually a decent read.