This comment will strike some readers as peculiar, but I will say that although the received American wisdom on Japan, for decades after WWII, was that it was a 'medieval' state, at the time of the arrival of
Adm. Perry's 'black ships',
they were actually, politically, more advanced, and internationally more dangerous, say by 1868, than the United States at that time, which was still struggling not only with Jacksonian ultra-democratic fragmentation, but also with the aftermath of the very question of a political union, in the Civil War.
The deeper, lurking, weakness of the US, vis a vis states like Japan, France, and others, has been its crippling, complex, federalism.
They don't have such a political framework, and obviously don't need or want it.
Judge a system by its fruits.
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