Coming late to memory-chip fabrication, they had more recent technology than Japan and South Korea.
But the most humbling re-ranking will be when South Korea becomes richer than Japan.
South Korea is another largely domestic market, although one with more immediate potential than Japan.
And third, America's banks have long been in much healthier shape than Japan's.
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Economically, it has shown much greater willingness than Japan to open up and to tackle obvious problems quickly and pragmatically.
Yet despite its faster growth, America's real bond yields are lower than Japan's and about the same as in the euro area.
Forty years ago the American economy was 20 times bigger than Japan.
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Japan's biggest manufacturers each sell more than Japan's entire farm sector combined.
That makes its failure nearly three times larger than Japan's previous record-holder.
China is the No. 2 oil consumer in the world, using up more oil on a daily basis than Japan and India combined.
And yet America's economy and political system is more resilient, and flexible, than Japan's and this should help it to avoid Japan's fate.
The two titles will release simultaneously worldwide sometime this year, rather than Japan getting an early release as always tends to happen.
Remember that in 1941 the U.S. had a population of more than 130 million and a far more powerful industrial base than Japan had.
But the individual results of the three surveys covering Nicaragua range from 6.1 (which is higher than Japan's average score) to 1.5 (equivalent to Cameroon).
Already, several European nations have fertility rates even more modest than Japan's (though they still have a lower ratio of elderly, due to shorter life spans).
He is seeking venture-capital funding so that he can reap the rewards of his creativity in a manner more in tune with Silicon Valley than Japan.
America's attractions are obvious: its stockmarket has a bigger capitalisation than Japan's, Britain's and Germany's combined, and its corporate-bond market accounts for two-thirds of the world total.
China's economy is now bigger than Japan's, but less noticed is the fact that Asia's so-called newly industrialised economies (NIEs) are, one by one, becoming richer than Japan.
America's monetary policy is much looser than Japan's ever was.
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The next stop was the frozen north of Sapporo, more like a mid-west American town than Japan, with cool temperatures and an air-conditioned stadium with a spectacular Teflon-coated roof.
Earlier this year, Lombard Street Research estimated the U.K.'s total net debt excluding the financial sector at 237% of GDP, slightly higher than Japan's and nearly as high as Spain's.
South Korea's exports continued to grow faster than Japan's.
Given that new systems typically ship with toner supplies, he adds, production of copiers and printers could be affected in the second quarter, even for companies with production facilities located in China rather than Japan.
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This means that almost every country as far from the equator as Japan is near or above the world average GDP per capita, and almost every country closer to the equator than Japan is near or below the world average.
Perhaps predictably, in no overseas country has bass mania taken a greater hold than in Japan.
The free-trade regime and global investment system promoted growth in the rest of Asia more than in Japan.
Mitsubishi Electric already sells more phones in Europe and China (16 million this year) than in Japan (7 million).
Yields elsewhere are also very low, nowhere more so than in Japan, where ten-year government-bond yields are now 1.3%.
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