"Here’s to the crazy ones," the ads read. "The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes."

Causing trouble, making waves and accepting incremental failure as a vital step on the road to success are attributes that reside deep within the genetic code of Silicon Valley—where risk-taking entrepreneurs and venture capitalists lubricate the world’s single-most important engine for generating new wealth through the pursuit of innovation.

Modern Japan is a society where failure leads to banishment.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we thought Japan was a nation as dynamic and pioneering as our own. But Japan’s astonishing economic decline was due, in large part, to its collective resistance to new thinking, deep hostility to entrepreneurship and cultural values that make truly collaborative global partnerships exceedingly difficult.

Modern Japan is a society where failure leads to banishment and where standing out in a crowd can lead to severe bullying, even among adults, to the point of encouraging suicide. (The country’s male suicide rate is the highest in the industrialized world.) Some of the nation’s most thoughtful and creative young adults, an estimated 1 million social isolates known as hikikomori, choose to seek refuge in their bedrooms rather than enter a society they feel is hostile to their dreams of "thinking different." These hikikomori, the majority of them men, live in their rooms for years at a time, refusing to work or go to school, though they demonstrate no signs of mental disorder. They fear that entering mainstream society will force them to abandon their selfhood for the strict conformity that modern Japan demands.

There are also Japanese women who say no to this rigid system by abandoning marriage and motherhood. They don’t want to raise children in an environment in which husbands take little role in childcare, and in which career options are constricted after they bear a child. One result: Japan’s population is already shrinking and rapidly aging. By 2020, one out of every nine Japanese will be 80 or older, making South Florida look like a youth hostel.

Until the late 1980s, Japan seemed to have figured out how to make industrial society work well. The cars, semiconductor memory chips and precision equipment seemed more powerful, more precise and cheaper every year. By pioneering the "continuous improvement" concept and emphasizing the qualities of monozukuri, or craftsmanship, Japan built a successful, middle-class society.

But in the mid-1990s the world began to pivot on a new axis. Software and services replaced hardware as paradigms of profitability. The Internet rewrote the rules of commerce. Today broadband connections, collaborative wikis and Web 2.0 define our chaotic world. Video stars create themselves overnight on YouTube, while bloggers supplant mainstream news outlets. Toyota may still own the car business, but this new environment rewards the flexible individual who uses technology to grab a global audience. Creative self-expression has become paramount.