I can almost see it that way when looking at single plates like that one in isolation, but when viewed as a whole I just can’t see them all that way.
Viewing it as convex puts it at a weird, almost floating angle relative to the other plates, which my mind tells me cannot be the case if they’re all supposed to be laying flat on a table. The camera angle being what it is, I’d expect to be seeing more of the illuminated left half than the shaded right half if it was truly upside down and laying flat. Not to mention the shadow basically touching the embossed oval shape on the right, while the left has a bit of a gap between the oval and the start of the bevel of the plate edge, indicates that the light would be coming from the right rather than the left (because shadows can extend), unless the plate is supposed to be oddly asymmetrical or something.
I listened to a podcast recently about a book called Abundance, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of the author’s points, it was accurate in describing the bureaucracy of the United States and why the situation you describe happens.
The US is a very litigation-happy country, where any given public works project of significance either needs to proceed at a crawl to make sure it is utterly unimpeachable, or spend years fighting lawsuits to begin work. Cost in time results in a cost in capital, budgets balloon, and a lot of projects that are needed for the public good simply become non-starters.
Emergency powers gets around that to an extent, which is where that scenario from Japan would come into play. And when emergency powers are invoked in the US, you see similar results (another example mentioned by the author of that book), but you can’t let “emergency” be the only standard by which anything actually gets done in a reasonable amount of time.
In my home state, there has been a long ongoing project for east-west high speed rail which would make it feasible for people to work in Boston while living further away from it. It would theoretically help alleviate ballooning costs of living here around the city and provide more economic opportunity to people in the western part of the state. But everyone accepts that the project will basically never happen, because the Big Dig is still a lingering collective memory for everyone here and no one wants to go through that again. So no matter how much potential good it could do for people, it will likely never happen as long as anyone is negatively affected by it.