The increased price pressures have wounded many of Japan’s corporate giants. Last week, Sony — the Apple-like innovator of the 1980s — forecast a $6.4 billion loss amid reports it may cut 10,000 workers, a drastic step in a nation where layoffs are still seen as socially unacceptable. Even Japanese carmakers like Toyota, which last year handed back the title of world’s largest auto company to General Motors after the supply disruptions from the tsunami, fear that they are becoming vulnerable to game-changing competition in electric cars or just lower-cost producers in South Korea and elsewhere.

The reversals have gripped Japan with a sense of national angst over its future, though economists are divided over how much the nation will actually deindustrialize — and whether a shift away from factories is really such a bad thing. Most economists agree that Japan, which rose to economic superpower status in the 1980s by building compact sedans and color televisions, has outgrown the “Asian Miracle” template and needs a new economic strategy. What that approach should be, though, is the subject of intense and growing debate.

“It is time for Japan to find a new model for its economy,” said Masatomo Onishi, a professor of business at Kansai University. “We can follow the United States into a more postindustrial economy, or we can follow Germany into high-end manufacturing, but we shouldn’t be trying to compete with China in mass production.”

These are questions that go to the core of the identity of a nation that has long prided itself on its tradition of craftsmanship known as “monozukuri,” or “making things.” The debate is being watched closely by other Asian nations, which have pursued the same strategy of industrial catch-up that Japan pioneered.

One of the biggest questions, economists say, is whether Japan, and by extension Asia’s newer export-oriented economies, will learn how to foster innovation, nurturing the Apples, Googles, Facebooks and other technology start-ups that sustain growth in the United States.