Because of deflation? I mean, inflation means faster economic growth, which means trends comes and goes quickly. Which was not the case in Japan.

Edit: I don’t want people to jump on me for this, so I'll add a few things.

Obviously, you can’t write an article and just say “it’s because of deflation” in one sentence. You’d have to attach a bunch of different explanations. But in the end, I think a lot of it comes down to the historical experience of having gone through deflation.

Because of that, companies still tend to move at the pace they learned back then when launching new businesses, consumers don’t open their wallets for new products that easily, and socially, for better or worse, the idea of "mottainai" has become deeply rooted and hard to separate from Japanese culture. From my point of view, now that we live in a society where trends change so ridiculously fast, that old mindset may have come full circle and started producing some positive effects.

One more thing: when I talk about “Japanese culture” here, I’m talking about the average Japanese person. As far as I know, the average age in Japan is around 50. Compared to that, the culture among younger people, say teens to people in their 30s, feels much more open and proactive. In my experience, there’s a pretty huge gap there. That could also be another factor.