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Notes -
It seems like you're talking more about the humanities side of things than the STEM side of things.
I don't think someone could have written Umineko or End of Evangelion or Angel's Egg unless they were a distinctly intelligent and sensitive person. Or any of Basho's poetry, which is quite remarkable:
But perhaps all that is still swill for the masses. To each their own.
I do believe that there was a certain hypertrophy in the development of art and philosophy that occurred in the West that didn't occur anywhere else, although the Japanese are arguably in second place. Maybe that's because Europeans are just more creative than everyone else. Or maybe it's because the idea of "heavy intellectual content" outside the domain of STEM is an ill-defined and arbitrary social construct, and we can't expect other civilizations to have adopted the same arbitrary social constructs that we did. It's worth thinking about.
As for Japanese achievements in STEM, I dunno. Seems like the Mochizuki stuff didn't go anywhere. I would just refer you to the relevant publication metrics for whatever field you're interested in.
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