Your criteria for what constitutes 'something right' hold far truer for countries like Saudi Arabia than Japan, which leads you to a strange conclusion.

If I could choose where to have been born but with the caveat that it could not be in any country founded by Whites or as part of a White racial minority anywhere else, then I would clearly choose Brunei or Saudi Arabia before Japan. If we account for the fact that both countries are much smaller than Japan population-wise, and think of terms of a sort of 'goodness per capita' which, being immeasurable, we can only approximate, then both countries strike me as being vastly superior to Japan either by your criteria or by my own.

I omit Qatar and the Emirates only because they are both demographically screwed by foreign workers and have unimpressive birth rates, but both countries are vastly more 'patriarchal' and 'free'. 'Free', by which I do not mean licentious or permissive in the sense that the baizuo, in particular, mean it, but for people like me to openly moralize, or in modern parlance, simply 'be based', &c. For degenerates, Western societies are indubitably freer than any others are or ever have been—indeed, Western societies, ruled by them, are incredibly unfree for intelligent and moral people, who cannot condemn nor criticize much of anything. I assume you mean 'free' in the sense that I mean it, or else Japan is also more 'unfree' than the West.

The times in which Japan degenerates (e.g. 1860s, 1920s [that of 'Taisho democracy'], 1940s [liberalism and Marxism return in full force]) are clearly more numerous than the eras in which it regenerates, of which the last was probably the 1930s (liberals, and Marxists even more so, had to operate underground during that decade).