The dropbox link eventually worked, it showed me an error message the first few times I clicked on it. I would love to hear more about it too. I wish the author had included more of their personal context in terms of why and how they decided to leave.

I'm in Tokyo, and I have lived here for 12 years. The paper is quite interesting, and I have no major disagreement, but of course it is not the full picture. As I see it, the main problem Japan has is that the education and work culture is good at iterative learning and refinement, but bad at picking up and acting upon ideas that are far from how things are currently done. This is a consensus society, and things have to be broadly agreed upon in the group/company to have a chance. If there is a risk of disagreement the idea will either be buried in endless meetings, or simply dropped without discussion. This makes decision making slow and unimaginative.

Software is a good example. Most software and home pages in Japan look like they have been designed by committee, where every person in the room has a pet feature that has to be on the front page. This leads to software that is cluttered and hard to use. There is also little innovation; most new software seems based on designs already in use.

However, there is one aspect where Japan shines. People care about visuals, and graphics and icons are often pleasing. This at least is an advantage in game software, where Japan is not lagging as badly as in business software.

I would recommend Alex Kerr's 'Dogs and Demons' book about Japan. It is kind of old (2001) but it is still a great read about what have been some of the specific problems from Japan these past decades.