Yes, things are changing (slowly). My accountant left a salaryman gig (!) at 25 (!!) to open his own business (!!!) in accounting (!!!!) which successfully convinced Japanese businesses to use a 25 year old washout as their accountant (!!!!!). I happen to know a ~60ish year old Japanese software entrepreneur. This entrepreneur recently raised a venture round (!) from a US VC (!!!). She's a woman with approximately ~40 years of experience operating a software company. (This is so outside the norm that exclamation points do not do it justice. If instead of meeting her I had heard about her second-hand from the Pope, I would have called him a liar.)

My view on Japanese corporate efficiency is essentially that Japan had a few things going right for it, including a de-facto world monopoly on applied mathematics ("which is useful"), which lasted for a few decades. Those were very, very good decades, and no amount of other inefficiency in Japanese companies/government/etc could make a monopoly on math lose. ("Monopoly" is a slight exaggeration for effect.)

Japan no longer has a monopoly on math. It took ~30 years, but Ford and GM spent enough time looking at Toyota such that they can make a car which is, if not a Toyota, at least not a death trap. Korea and China skipped directly from dirt-poor nations to industrial-powerhouses-who-can-math without taking the US' 200 year detour through "Let's try running factories like they are public schools and public schools like they are factories." Meanwhile, the US becomes the global center for software (which works out swimmingly) and Japan becomes the global center for robots (which works out swimmingly if one owns robots but not so much if one competes with them) while cranking up industrial output and industrial efficiency but concentrating the gains of it rather than passing them around many folks as previously happened.