The Decline of Japan in the 1990s

While reading T. J. Pempel's account of the decline of Japan in the 1990s, I wonder if the bigger problem lies in the purported structural flaws of the Japanese system, or in the *oversight* of such flaws during the decades prior to that.

After all, financial scandals, bureaucratic ineptitude, corruption etc are nothing new in most societies, let alone occasional and one-off incidents like the sale of HIV-tainted blood and the Aum Shinrikyo poison gas subway attack. (T. J. Pempel, Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy, Cornell University Press 1998)

As a Chinese saying goes, ice that is three-feet thick is not the result of one day's freezing (冰结三尺, 非一日之寒). Hence, shouldn't the blame then be directed at those who had overlooked the country's structural flaws, and not the actual flaws themselves? And wasn't this oversight a case of being "bedazzled" by the "glitter" of the country's earlier phenomenal economic growth?