The reason why companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google inspire is because they do things with conviction. They are executing on vision. They don't let internal processes become ritualized. Key executives don't stick around long when the fire goes out in their soul, they move on. In Japan, nobody knows what they want to do. Japanese manufacturers feel the heat from Apple AND Samsung, they're scared of China's growing clout yet they can't figure out what they want to do.
They can't race to the bottom with an aging population with an acquired taste for high median salaries. They've lost the drive and intellectual fortitude to innovate in all but very limited areas. They don't want to relinquish the "made in Japan" brand, even though the Chinese have shown that with the right management in place, they can make products better and cheaper.
I don't know where this paralysis comes from. Maybe the Japanese think all their woes stem from some economic missteps from the bubble era and once these are righted they can happily resume their old formula for success. Maybe over two decades of stagnation and slow decline lead to a death by a thousand cuts along with the false security of high savings.
For whatever reason, Japan is simply ill-prepared to compete on any level in the global economy. Perhaps the greatest Achilles heel for Japanese manufacturers is not so much the core hardware technology but their utter disregard for the software that drives so many electronics. If you go to any electronics store in Japan you'd be amazed by the utterly useless features manufacturers try to differentiate themselves with (this camera can take pictures in the dark while shaken vigorously, this one makes your face look pretty, etc.).
When the iPhone came out I was one of the skeptics who thought the lack of things like TV reception, RFID cards (used for train passes), the lack of emoji (back then), or the ability to render ketai/mobile web sites wouldn't go down well with customers. However, in the greater scheme of things it didn't matter. Now all the feature phone manufacturers are scuttling decades worth of in-house code to work on Android.