Japan is one of the older civilisations with a recorded history, but "thousands of years old" businesses is stretching it more than a little.

Japan (population 125 million) is third in the world in GDP, with China (population over 1 billion) and the US (population 330 million) ahead of it. More remarkably this is from a tectonically unstable, volcanic island chain with limited natural resources, which is in stark contrast to either the US or China. This is probably an underestimate as they have a considerable secondary investment/production effort going on across Asia.

Japan's priorities are the same as everybody else's, they're just rather good at disguising that.