I feel most of these 'cultural prognosis' are generally just old racial prejudices being justified to fit whatever one sees.

You can see how the author extricates Japan from his 'analysis', but not so for other Asian nations; in fact much of this can be said to be true of China and India (amongst others), but many here and elsewhere will somehow extricate China, but not India for obvious fiscal reasons. This trend is striking if you're old enough to have followed the reporting on a topic for many years.

Yet, little of the culture and the way of doing things have 'changed' in a significant way.

It's kind of like ML, you have some terribly useless set of features, and you use it to fit some dataset. The thing with ML is that you know this is stupid, and you have a test set to tell you it's stupid.

Not so, sadly, with our 'intellectuals'.