Why Japan is the most overrated Civ in the game

I've seen a lot of players think quite highly of Japan in Civ 5, some even going as far as to call it overpowered. But they are simply wrong. Japan is a very weak Civ and here's why:

Sounds good right? No. This is actually really bad and in game play isn't really applicable.

If a unit was on 1 health, its fighting strength would only suffer from a 50% penalty, meaning Japans ability isn't as strong as it seems.

But if the unit had only 1 health left what the hell is it doing on the battlefield? Any competent player does not use damaged units on the battle since the risk of them being destroyed is too high. The player should retreat them and let them regain their health and only in the most desperate scenario do players suicide their troops.

This nullifies Japans ability completely, damaged units don't suffer from a big penalty when they're wounded and heavily damaged units shouldn't even be in the fight.

Again, sounds good right? No.

Firstly Atolls are rare, even on an archipelago type map, meaning the likely hood of a city being able to work an atoll is quite low.

And with Fishing boats you would need several coastal resources to make it viable, but even still, by the time you have set up the fishing boats the culture you gain from it will be less influential, since you would be around the medieval era where a small bonus of culture does very little.

The Samurai have the ability to make fishing boats which might seem cool but in practice is useless.

The player has a choice of either mass producing fishing boats early game in order to make use of the culture bonus or use Samurai mid game and get the culture bonus then. Yet by mid game the culture bonus will be essentially useless - if the player was able to work 6 fishing boats 6 culture in the late medieval period is useless.

But mass producing fishing boats in the early game isn't efficient either, since the player has other more important buildings, units and settlers to produce making the fishing boat bonus exceptionally hard and awkward to utilise its full potential.

The Samurai have several giant flaws.

Firstly they have the same combat strength as the Longswordsman that they replace, meaning they're not that powerful. But more than that, you need have researched steel to to unlock Samurai, which is a very awkward tech, since it is one of the last techs in the medieval era any player should research and the only real benefit is the armoury because the muskets are available 4-5 turns after after and are better than the Samurai in every way.

They are better at producing generals, but the player has a very limited time to use them before they get replaced, unless they are fighting a drawn out medieval war, but even still the player should be focusing on getting gunpowder over steel. This means the general producing bonus is essential useless.

The only good part about them is that they need no oil but that's about it. Outside of that its just a normal fighter. This is the best part about playing a Japan, yet they are not powerful enough to make Japan worth your time.

Japan isn't the worst Civ in the game yet it is definitely low tier.

Samurai aren't useful, unique ability not useful, culture bonuses not useful all make Japan into weak Civ.

China is better at producing generals, Denmark has better unique units, Persia has better combat bonuses. There is no real reason to choose Japan over any other Civ in the game. Unless you are a weeb. ew.