Let me add a little bit more about the Galapagos mentality.
I am happy to see the boom of the term recently faded away, because the Japanese people do not have it more than some other cultural groups or some trade groups. The Japanese people have willingly absorbed abundant products of other cultures. They are not like the creatures of the Galapagos Islands. I think that the unique point of the Japanese culture, in the structure of the relationship with others’, may be that the Japanese people are not willing to emit it to the outside by themselves.
The Japanese have had their own “evolution” according to the global environment. As a movie buff, the term, Galapagos mentality, reminds me of the movie, Witness, with Harrison Ford in it. It appears to me that the Amish people do have more of the Galapagos mentality than the Japanese do, although they fluently speak English. According to the Wiki article in Japanese, they let all the folks to choose if they remain in the Amish group at the age of 16. And many are reported to decide to remain in the group. It appears totally okay for me to choose to be culturally Galapagos-like.
As far as I know, the Japanese market share, as a whole, did not seem to be lost drastically in the world. The ratio of Japanese food self-sufficiency has reportedly been low recently. The ratio takes account of the origin of the feed for the cattle when it calculates that ratio for the meat. If the foods are measured so, the market share of other products might be calculated like it. The worldwide market shares of Japan in the some of the final products have obviously plummeted. The exports of Japan mainly have consisted of materials and equipment for others’ production in the last one or two decades, which have not reduced its dollar value, as far as I heard.
The many Japanese companies prioritize the balance of CS and ES more than the growth in the market share and more than the final profit. According to the priority, business with the mass production sometimes materialized with inexpensive foreign labor does not looks like something to pursue for most of the Japanese companies. The Japanese SMEs have tendency to pursue a profitable business with high quality that naturally attract its customers.
The term, “hubris” that you used to refer to the non English speaking Japanese people, is enlightening to me to encounter for the first time. Thank you, M==, for giving me a brand new piece of vocabulary. I now have the term to refer to the behaviors of the Gaishikei expats I often see at Gaijin pubs who can not speak Japanese at all even after their several years of stay in Japan.
I wonder if I’m closer to the main stream of this discussion now at the end of this post than the beginning.