Is this true? I may be remembering this wrong, but i think some source claimed that one of the Asian countries had a lower iq than whites in the past, but ended up higher?

Richard Lynn went to Japan and in the 1950s they had an average of IQ of 102 followed by 112 in the 1960s. And this was right after we dropped two atom bombs on them so none of this "systematic racism/poor nutrition" stuff can explain why they've always been smart.

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/lynn1986.pdf

Kaneko’s investigation of a possible rise in the scores on this test was carried out in 1963. His 1963 sample consisted of 50 boys and 50 girls aged 10 and 11 randomly selected from three schools in the city of Kyoto. The three schools had been used in the original 1954 standardization sample and were chosen because their catchment areas were representative of the city and because there had been little change in the catchment populations and environment over the 9-yr period. The 1954 children from these three schools obtained a mean IQ of 102.52. Thus they scored slightly higher than the national mean of 100. This is almost certainly because they were an urban sample and urban children obtain slightly higher means than rural children in Japan, as has generally been found elsewhere. The mean IQ of the 1963 sample was 112.90. Hence the mean IQ in these schools had risen 10.38 IQ points over the 9-yr period (the difference between the two mean IQs is statistically significant: f = 5.66, P < O.Ol), representing an IQ gain of 11.4 IQ points per decade. This figure is evidently broadly similar to the rise of 14.1 IQ points per decade for 1953-I 960 found by Ushijima and confirms a very considerable rate of IQ gain in Japan in these early post World War II years.