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They haven't been mimicking American corporatism, they were set up that way after the war. You could almost call them a commonwealth since we have military bases there and protect them.

Edit: Compare them to Puerto Rico except the part about being an American citizen that can't vote, and you'll see that they're very similar.

Yeah their whole shtick has been mimicking American corporatism et al since before the 80s. Aint working out for them.

There absolutely was an effort in Japanese businesses to imitate American businesses in the 1980s, but it was also very much a two-way street and it's important to keep this in mind. Some of the toxic work culture elements that exist in the US corporate world today were imported. Also keep in mind that learning about other businesses was more difficult at the time because the Internet wasn't a thing yet. Computers were barely getting local proprietary networks in very few, leading-edge businesses. If you wanted to learn about business operarions in another country you'd have to buy physical media (newspapers, industry journals, commentary books) or visit in person. It was slow and expensive.

Ultimately a lot of what you're referring to tracks back to Theory Z which was also called "Japanese Management".

In fact there has been a lot of cultural crosstalk between Japan and the US, going back a long time. For instance, baseball

Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1859 and is Japan's most popular participatory and spectator sport. [...]

The Japanese government appointed American oyatoi in order to start a state-inspired modernization process. This involved the education ministry, who made baseball accessible to children by integrating the sport into the physical education curriculum. Japanese students, who returned from studying in the United States captivated by the sport, took government positions. Clubs and private teams such as the Shinbashi Athletic Club, along with high school and college teams, commenced the baseball infrastructure.

When the digital electronics revolution came in the 1970s, Japan was both a competitor and a partner for the US. In the 1980s Japan's economy rivaled the US. Frankly, a lot of it did in fact "work out" for them, though it's difficult to separate the economic success from the electronics industry boom (how much of the rapid development of electronics was dependent on the corporate culture that had developed during the previous decade? how much of the business success was a result of the demand for the electronics products? how much of the demand was created internally by the businesses themselves? how would you even go about drawing lines between them?). The exploding popularity of video games (a side effect of the electronics revolution) resulted in a massive cultural export from Japan to the rest of the world, including the US.

And really the rabit hole goes way deeper. I highly recommend this video: Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics. by Moon Channel

So what you said is true, technically, but it is really a half-truth which projects the idea that the relationship was somehow one-sided, when in reality it was very much not.

Not working out: Going from being completely flattened to the 4th largest economy in the world. Fucking failures.

1.15 in Japan 0.72 in Korea. so yeah.

Both countries have high cost of living and expect women to drop everything and become full time moms and care for their parents and inlaws.

Women for some reason don't find that appealing and decide to not have kids. Many refuse to get married if there partner wants kids.

Even men often don't want children as they are expected to work long hours to support the family.

I think there is something they can do, or more to the point, there's a reason the birthrate is so low there. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the most overworked countries on the planet have such low birthrates. Taking care of children is labor, unpaid labor at that, that has a lot of other expenses associated with it. What I think they could do, is compensate people for it, not some pittance that doesn't cover a fraction of the costs of raising a child, but an amount that would actually be sufficient to make having a kid or not, with a parent (either parent) home at any given point for them, a financially neutral decision for a family (to include the opportunity costs of not working) rather than a very expensive one.

Evolution being what it is, it would seem implausible for the average number of kids people actually would want to have, if it wasn't a burden on them, to be lower than replacement, else the human species wouldn't have come to exist in the first place. For individual people, sure, everyone has their own feelings on the matter, but averaged across society, one would expect most people to desire kids enough if they could manage it to keep the population at least stable.

It would be incredibly expensive, yes, and so the tax burden it would create would probably be unpopular, especially among people that didn't personally gain from it, but continuing the status quo is nothing less than extracting the abstract resource that human labor can be thought of as, at an unsustainable rate. That situation will either end willingly or it will end in collapse.