>>The other, despite the article's unqualified praise of "open up your economy to foreign investment and trade", is trade restrictions and various forms of state meddling to support local industries
A couple counter-arguments to that:
According to Milton Friedman, after Japan was forced by Western powers to remove trade restrictions and drastically lower tariffs in the late 1800s, it prospered, contrary to what the mercantilist theories of the time predicted:
https://youtu.be/CWgNe8v6KFc?t=322
Also, there is much evidence dispelling the mythologized account of MITI's role in the expansion of the Japanese economy specifically:
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/JapanandtheMythofMITI.h...
The article notes much more foundational properties of the 50s/60s Japanese economy, like a smaller portion of private sector output being taxed to support the public sector, as more likely causes of its growth:
>>"The fact that the tax burden is unusually low by the standards of other developed countries may alone be a significant factor in the explanation of the high rate of private saving and investment in Japan." From 1951 to 1970, while Japan's real GNP was growing at an average of 9 percent per year, total national and local taxes (excluding social security) fell from 22.4 percent of national income to 18.9 percent. This left more money for people to save and invest. Compare Japan's situation with the United States, where the proportion rose from 28.5 percent to 31.3 percent. Interestingly, Japan's two decades of greatest postwar growth were also its decades of lowest taxes. During the seventies, as Japan's taxes rose to 22.8 percent of national income in 1980, real GNP growth declined to only 4.8 percent. Higher taxes weren't the only reason for this deteriorating performance, of course; oil price increases also contributed.
This graph demonstrates how much lower social welfare spending used to be in Japan:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...