Blaming it to the keiretsu is too simplistic. Here other factors that in my experience (living, studying & working) in Japan contribute:
- Graduates don't apply to a job, but to a company. The company decides where to place then. The first years are generally a rotation between departments until it is decided where to allocate them. This means that they will be often misplaced in positions for which they don't have the necessary background nor motivation to learn or contribute because in 6 months they'll be somewhere else.
- It is not uncommon for developers not to have a CS or coding background. They learn on the job how to "program" but lack best practices, etc. and figure out things as they go.
- Standing out is frown upon
- People who are good at their jobs are generally rewarded with more work. One can know who the manager's favourite is by who busy the person is. At the end, the good ones end up burned out, over-stressed and brain death.
- Looking busy or hard working is more important than the outcome.
- Combine the above, and there is no point to do a good job: There is no reward other than more pressure to deliver but on the other hand, as long as you look busy, not delivering is not "punished". Clear what option most people will take.
- As already commented, decisions are top down and often very conservative replicating old methods digitally.
- Many customer facing products will try to cover as many cases as possible to avoid complains, perceived discrimination or causing trouble, for example. This results in over bloated software, websites, flyers full of information, etc.
From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.
I don’t think anything about Japanese culture or generalizations like that tell you much about this.
Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens.
When Sonos screwed up its app it was a crisis because: people pay for the software not the hardware.
Is this true about cars? EV design is converging. It will be. CarPlay controversy is a great example: people choose cars that support it.
Vanmoofs have a lot of hardware problems but the reason people bought them was software (like location tracking and e-Shifting).
So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products.
“Software is eating the world” was all about like, replacing human labor or whatever, disruption. Marc Andreesen thinks he was saying something forward looking when it was all backward looking.
The story is differentiation and customer choices. Truly forward looking. But are Japanese firms incapable of that? Of course not.
Once there was a guy on here who said he had the brilliant idea of using a web browser to make an airplane UI. Listen brother, everybody knows how to write good software. It’s a business strategy not execution problem.
>> From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.
> Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens.
> ...
> So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products.
You're just plain wrong. Most physical products have no software, so you're not addressing the very real question (which is basically "Why does Japan produce such perfect physical products, but suck so bad at software? Why hasn't the attention to detail transferred?").
As an aside, it's actually really interesting to be how you could so wrong in this particular way. It kind of dovetails with a vague pet theory of mine that (roughly, very roughly) software engineers are sometimes so enamored with computers they can have a weird cognitive distortion where they see computers as everything (so a computer is the solution to every problem, and they're an expert at everything because everything's a computer or should be).
----
As my contribution to answering about physical products. I met a woman once, while I was traveling, who spent a couple months in Japan. She said that Japanese cosmetics are very good and relative cheap because Japanese consumers are very picky and have very high standards. Maybe the reason is Japanese consumers just have higher expectations for physical products, but someone got enured to badly designed software.
> You're just plain wrong... Most physical products have no software
I'm just trying to be thought provoking. I can't generalize about whole cultures, other than to say, no one culture owns excellence.
Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.
Are cosmetics software? Well the people who sell the most cosmetics have to master digital marketing.
"Chinesium" on Amazon is mastering software. It doesn't look that way. But the reason you are choosing things on Amazon is because of fulfillment software, advertising software, logistics software, that specifically the manufacturers of those products have all mastered. They are really smart sellers. The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.
Sure there's this box of, software on hardware means the thing that draws the pictures on an LCD screen. And indeed a lot of things that don't need LCD screens end up with them, and you know what? Consumers choose them. But that inside-the-box thinking aside, anything that reaches an industrial scale where you are able to buy it in many stores in America depends on mastery of some kind of software. The best of those choices happen to master both the logistics and the end-user software, whatever that may mean.
> But the reason you are choosing things on Amazon is because of fulfillment software, advertising software, logistics software, that specifically the manufacturers of those products have all mastered.
Just tacking on the word “software” to other fields does not mean that the program is the selling point.
Give that same software to a mom and pop shop and they will not become Amazon.
Give it to Walmart even, and they won’t become Amazon.
Software is a tool, not a selling point.
Most people buy from Amazon because they deliver addictively fast. That is, in part, because of their logistics, but also because they are very vertically integrated.
The convenience is what makes you buy. Pretty much all their customers wouldn’t care if Amazon switch to old school paper records if their delivery times didn’t change.
Being obviously wrong is probably not the way to do that.
> Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.
It's all kinds of products. I have a Zojirushi travel mug and coffee maker that are both ridiculously well made and designed. The travel mug keeps things hot, never leaks and has a spring tensioned juuust right to fling the lid open and lock it behind a stop without bouncing back. The coffee maker has an unusual design that makes it very easy to clean. I've been using both daily for going on ten years. Japanese stationary is very good. Until recently, a Japanese company made the best chalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagoromo_Fulltouch_Chalk). Back in the day, Sony CRT TVs were the best you could get. That's just the stuff I have personal experience to rattle on about without doing any research.
Japan has a longstanding reputation for producing very high quality products, which you don't seem to be very aware of. I'm kind of wondering if you're trying to make a point when you don't actually know anything about the topic.
> The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.
Like you're trying really, unusually hard to miss the point and reach to pull the discussion back to software. Again, I find that really interesting. At this point, are you just digging in your heels or is something else going on?
And the woman I met wasn't seeking out Japanese cosmetics because of marketing software, for the obvious reason that she was visitor buying things marketed to a domestic audience.
I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.
I might sound unbelievable for our fast-paced world of the west but there are centuries old shops in japan that still manufacture the same products with the same methods, not only in Japan but in various parts of the world, excellence wasn’t born after computers.
ISTM that both sides are right here, but both are deep in the woods and missing the trees.
"This product does not contain machines!"
"No, but it is made using machines!"
(Remember the 6 classical machines: screw, inclined plane, wedge, lever, wheel and axle, and pulley.)
Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk, and you can't make junk into something good?
You can use junk to make good things, but you can't make good things out of junk.
Maybe the problem isn't Japan. Maybe the problem is that all modern software is junk, and even Japan can't make that good.
>Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk
I believe most of the world has become complacent with “good enough” and a factory (be it hard or soft ware) that does not churn producs out of the door quickly enough is seen as “unproductive” Probably Japan software industry is trapped between being productive and excellent being neither after all.
> I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.
No. For a physical non-software-driven product, those things are pretty much orthogonal.
If a product is good, it's due to the attributes of the product itself, and those are mainly due to the design decisions and priorities of the manufacturer.
All the things you list may make the business more efficient and more successful, but they have little to do with the kinds of products I'm talking about.
Yeah listen, I own the same Zojirushi crap you do, a lot of it, and it has its own problems. The mugs leak occasionally, the rubber and silicone goods are cumbersome for many people to deal with, there are voids in the lids and interior corners in the rubber goods that are hard to clean, they mold all the same as anything else exposed to water. The boilers develop a lot of scaling issues, they are not easy to clean, the replacement parts are expensive, and you talk to their CS, they will tell you the wrong dimensions for things like screws. And they don’t replace anything for free.
I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk. But I’ll just say that you are buying these things because you can buy it on Amazon, and Amazon wrote all this software to fill in the blanks like returns which Zojirushi would never do, and because Wirecutter told you to, and their affiliate marketing machine is very software enabled. It is actually a good example of my point: can you think of a Japanese brand that in your opinion has great purely mechanical products like mugs but advertises as aggressively as Apple does? What about a brand that can reach people with ad blockers, so therefore it must innovate, like by managing fleets of influencers, digital product catalogs / product syndication, affiliate schemes, etc.?
> I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk.
I'm not being hostile, but I think you're being very non-responsive. At various points I've been trying to figure out why, because it's so baffling. I mean, the question is "Why is Japanese software crap when their physical products are well designed," and you're going on and on about Amazon's logistics software, which is pretty much a non-sequitur.
The simple answer is that Japanese software isn’t crap. It’s good in a ton of places that matter but might be invisible to consumers. Also in places that are visible: We play tons of video games developed in Japan, Nintendo might be the very best game studio on Earth. LINE was way ahead of its time too, it was a very innovative chat app that was synergistic with cell phone hardware in many ways that mattered like payments security, but maybe there isn’t enough space for chat apps to differentiate themselves and their success is driven by chance.
To me, one reason is that in some markets inside Japan, people do not yet pay for software. For example hardly anyone in Japan pays for Spotify subscriptions. However they do spend in gacha games. So it’s not as black and white as, tangible versus intangible goods. There’s no broad strokes generalization about a cultural difference that is persuasive to me. The article talks about stuff that is basically ancient history or industrial policy, which is also interesting but unpersuasive. I bring up the Amazon logistics software as an example of the possibility that even stoic hardware companies are software companies, and people like Zojirushi, so then it is sequiter to say, we’ll actually Zojirushi is good at software. So really we mean “bad at making globally important social media apps” which is a totally different thing than “bad at software.”
> software engineers are sometimes so enamored with computers they can have a weird cognitive distortion where they see computers as everything (so a computer is the solution to every problem
Does your pet theory extend beyond the adage “to a child with a hammer, everything is a nail?”
I think it’s self evident that anyone who works in a specific field will see the world through the lens of someone who works in that field…
We shall see. Cars with better software are a really important differentiator. Toyotas may be reliable, they may be the most popular today, but then why doesn't everyone choose a Toyota?
And anyway, Toyota's most innovative and market-making vehicles, like the Prius: software plays a pretty big role no? I don't think you can reduce a complex product like this, but I'm not wrong: a car with great user-facing software is pretty exciting to consumers. The Apple Car would probably be pretty successful, the Tesla has pretty innovative software that differentiates it from other EVs, the deployment and preferences for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto enabled cars... it can be true that someone buys something despite the software being bad, but that's not where the trend is going.
A lot of Americans buy American cars simply because they're loyal to American brands, or European cars because they want their neighbors to be jealous of their ability to buy such overpriced transportation. I think software is low on the list.
People buy Teslas because they go fast, get 300 miles to a charge and have five star safety ratings. "Software" is thing main thing capable of rivaling build quality and repair costs as the thing people most complain about. They're leaving a major untapped market for competitors to fill with electric cars that have tactile HVAC controls etc.
There was a meme a while ago where thing thing people used to want out of their car's entertainment system was satellite navigation and fancy everything, whereas the thing people want now is a dumb standard plug to connect their phone to the car's speakers.
It's the customer-facing software that looks sub-par. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of embedded code in almost each ECU. Those cannot be crap in a prius without having an effect on the car's (the hardware) performance.
The software in my Skoda Scala and my Vauxhall/Opel Corsa is terrible as well, but like most new-ish Toyota's, all of them support Apple Play so it doesn't matter.
The Honda software is mediocre as well but I suspect any sensible automaker realizes that most consumers are using Car Play or Google Play so they put some junior engineers on a checklist item and call it a day.
People had paper maps and often precise directions that they had on their laps or a human navigator using those maps or directions. They stopped at gas stations to ask for directions (or didn't--guys refusing to stop to ask for directions was something of a trope). So obviously they managed but probably in ways a lot of people today wouldn't find satisfactory.
How did you manage before smartphones and even email/text for meeting people and generally coordinating activities generally? People managed.
Sure. You may just not have a navigation system or be able to park in some places. I don't need a smartphone to drive in general and don't always plug it in locally. (I may more or less need a transponder on some roads or have a bit of hassle.)
I guess that could change at some point but would guess that there would be a lot of pushback to Operating this vehicle requires a working smartphone especially given there's no cellular access in a lot of places.
At a minimum, connectivity would have to be much more universal than today. Certainly, cellular is very far from pervasive and even satellite isn't 100%.
The reason you are choosing a particular hammer, comic book or umbrella on Amazon is because of mastery of marketing, logistics, and design software.
It sounds ridiculous but what is a software-enabled hammer? A construction robot could be a pretty big deal no? That might not exist today. You might still be buying hammers but everyone will want construction robots.
Some things go obsolete, some remain useful even when they are mostly replaced. All carpenters carry a hammer even though nail guns are used for almost all nails. By contrast I know a professional photography who uses film cameras as decoration - they still work but he doesn't own film for them (he also has a second job because professional photographer isn't nearly the job it used to be before everyone had a camera on them)
Even some electronics, I don't expect anything beyond a basic BMS (which has the logic baked into the IC) is inside my battery powered drill. All it has is a direction selector switch and a trigger.
even with electronics. Apple didn't achieve their dominance because of their software - any of the times. The physical products were continually refined and the software used as a lever to help them perfect the experience. When they focused on making the software "perfect" it almost destroyed the company.
Yeah dude. The iPhone continues to be chosen for its superior software. It absolutely became dominant because of the software. I mean they’re all black rectangles. Black rectangles with capacitive screens existed before the iPhone. A good mobile browser didn’t. This is coming from someone who owned a Zaurus, which had the closest thing to a decent browser, NetAccess, and a grid of icons touchable Home Screen all the same. You are underplaying how groundbreaking the software was.
This is one set of facts, totally correct, that you are talking about:
iPhones are made in China.
They cost $770 or so with tax.
They make a 55% margin (or whatever) per phone.
Consumers prefer premium materials like titanium, and they don’t prefer things like replaceable batteries.
Here is another set of facts:
Everyone’s phones are made in China.
But of course iOS is made in the US.
Consumers are choosing not between a titanium and aluminum phone, but almost always, they are choosing between Android and iOS
The margin on the software is like 99%
Apple News, the App Store, etc have a very powerful DRM scheme, where Apple is one of the only companies, besides maybe Sony, where you cannot pirate things they sell for the iPhone like services subscriptions, game IAP and extra iCloud storage.
The price of the iPhone isn’t its $770 sticker but the LTV of the owner.
This is a big deal because the second set of completely and utterly true facts is why Apple is the richest company in the world. And then you look at NVIDIA, another really rich company but which people feel less passionate about, and unequivocally, people choose NVIDIA because of its software, because of CUDA, which is why you can’t “just” add more VRAM, which is something else that everyone wants and would be a key differentiator, yet for some reason doesn’t manifest in the market.
This matters to firms everywhere not just Japan. If you can’t make 99% margin software someone else will. And consumers LIKE software. So everything you are saying is true but it doesn’t really disagree with me.
You are right, it is not specific to software, just wanted to add more context and also, because I don't know the answer and I believe there are multiple factors, but my two cents: a mix of history and culture.
By the time software came around, Japan already had a well stablished manufacturing industry that had a reputation for quality (this wasn't always the case).
Software was something totally new and wasn't considered important, why? perhaps management didn't understand it or didn't know how to handle it and did nothing.
The above made a career in software not very attractive compared to other industries. Since then, companies struggle to get good developers, who can move to more attractive sectors or countries than trying to change things within Japan with its rigid hierarchy.
How things move in Japan is generally by someone breaking the status quo and the rest following if it is a success. That was the case with Toyota in manufacturing for example. For software it hasn't happened.
Another problem IMHO is that code is invisible to users. If the app works, people don't care if the code is beautifully made or not, and without consumer pressure, management doesn't care either. Compare that with the complains they'll get if a physical object had the sightless defect.
Finally, there is a higher entry barrier for physical products than software. Any teenager can build an app in her bedroom, it is a different story to develop a bullet train. Inefficiencies and slow decision processes in manufacturing are less obvious than in tech (though manufacturing industries in Japan are struggling as well because of this), and Japan simply isn't competitive in this area, making it less attractive to invest.
And perhaps, the most important: People got used to it and don't have higher expectations.
Blaming all ills of any Japanese industry on the keiretsu is in vogue for decades, but at best, keiretsu is a symptom, not a cause, of the underlying risk-averse culture. Keiretsu, even when they were toxically anti-competitive, did not go out of their ways to crush would-be global startups in Japan; keiretsu, by the author's own argument, didn't care about the global software-only market, thus would not kill those startups. The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development.
It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.*
I am a little surprised that the author, who is active in Japan, is off the mark. I regularly talk to many engineers/entrepreneurs in the region, and the cause-and-effect are quite easy to see and are unanimously agreed upon. Kudos to people there who are trying to change the software development culture for the better.
* Elon's ventures seem to challenge this conventional dichotomy as he attempts to bring both agility and top-down leadership into his firms. More power to him.
As a software engineer currently working in Japan, I fully agree with your comment.
But I think it is not just the risk aversion, Japan is a very rigid country with an strong emphasis on following the hierarchy and rules, no matter how ridiculous they are, but introspection and critical thinking are not appreciated. This works well for industrial environments, but not for software development.
I think there is a bias for perfectionism. This can be a good point and a bad point.
I remember being a junior engineer and spending time to really make my software good and my first review had a comment that I spent too much time adding "bells and whistles" (which was only partially true). So it gets drilled out of you in US software.
I agree with you. As my first boss taught me, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But after 6 years living here, I find the image of the Japanese as perfectionists to be a myth. Sure, the old sushi master that has dedicated his life to the craft might a perfectionist; most other people are not. Take a look a the average Japanese city with its ugly buildings, chaotic street layout, and insane cabling. Or the average office or shop, with a mess of boxes and piles of documents everywhere. Or the countryside (where I live) and the abysmal state of most roads and infrastructure. Those are not the signs of a perfectionist society.
I agree, the myth and mystery around "perfect Japan" which is funny because the west also loves its "wabi-sabi" and "ikigai" among other things. Japan in up on such a pedestal for some people, especially through the narrow lens of being a tourist or a consumer of their goods/services/media.
Heck, A LOT of things that have that desirable "made in Japan" sticker are made by abused migrant workers with very little protection and pay. They aren't even made by the "mythological perfect and careful Japanese hands."
Note: been here 15 years and I have many friends in the manufacturing industry
>Heck, A LOT of things that have that desirable "made in Japan" sticker are made by abused migrant workers with very little protection and pay. They aren't even made by the "mythological perfect and careful Japanese hands."
Same with made in Germany and the US. Actually, Made in Germany is worse.
Every consumer electronic I have labeled Made in Germany is absolutely crap. The Bosch stove has the sealing gasket wrongly mounted, the Siemens vacuum cleaner is poorly designed and built, so is the Fujitsu laptop I just sold which felt like bottom of the barrel e-waste.
Electronics from Xiaomi, Huawei, etc feels way better built and better designed than stuff labeled made in Germany.
I would go for Electrolux from second hand store, at least 15 years old. So far in my life I only bought one hoover. Still going strong after 30 years, just a new bag and filter now and then. And I had to replace the power contact once.
Warranty is still the legally required minimum of 2 years for Miele. You have no guarantee it will last longer than that. If Miele had so much confidence in their products lasting longer they'd offer longer warranties like Samsung does on their SSDs of 5 years or so.
The concept of "Miele lasts forever" is as outdated as the "German cars last forever". It used to be true in the past but we can't be coasting on that trope today.
sabi-sabi is more of a niche practice in Japan, that's overplayed by westerners for western audiences.
More like finding a handful of people in the whole of US history making paintings by sticking pasta onto a canvas, and presenting it as some huge cultural thing.
>Take a look a the average Japanese city with its ugly buildings, chaotic street layout, and insane cabling. Or the average office or shop, with a mess of boxes and piles of documents everywhere.
They are perfectionist, just not anal about it. Their perfectionism is not about tidy small shops.
And compared to the average US city, the average Japanese city is a masterpiece, including the modern buildings and streets.
Again, they are not perfectionist, that is a myth.
Second, I don't know how the average US city is, because I have never been to the US, but I think that you really overestimate how the average Japanese city looks like. People who have never lived here think that all of Japan is like the cool neighbourhoods of Tokyo, but that could not be further from the truth.
The average Japanese city suffers from serious urban sprawl, most are just a bunch of big box stores interconnected by stroads, and little houses scattered everywhere without any kind of planning. There are plenty of old, decaying buildings everywhere and streets in pretty bad condition.
Look, I live in Misawa, Aomori. Please take a look around on Google Street View, and then tell me how much of a masterpiece it is: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d5DDV3PT6MiSNYPYA
>Look, I live in Misawa, Aomori. Please take a look around on Google Street View, and then tell me how much of a masterpiece it is: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d5DDV3PT6MiSNYPYA
Compared to the average equivalent US city (all around, but especially in places like Mississipi, South Dakota, Alabama, the Appallachia, etc) this looks like Paris. Much less (essentially non comparatively) homicide, violent crime, or junkies there either.
Maybe perfectionist is the wrong word for it, but me, as a European I do feel there is some kind of (obsessive?) attention for details and (at least desire) for order in Japan cities that you don't see/feel in other places. This is my impression after 2 weeks around Japan, both cities and some country side.
There is an obsession for rules, procedures and order when it comes to people's behavior, but not the physical order of the city itself. Zoning laws and construction regulations are extremely lax, and that results in chaotic cities.
For example, the city where I live is full of farms and orchards in the center of the city itself (totally open to the street because Japanese people don't like fences), and half the streets are unpaved. That is unthinkable in my home country.
>For example, the city where I live is full of farms and orchards in the center of the city itself (totally open to the street because Japanese people don't like fences), and half the streets are unpaved. That is unthinkable in my home country.
Perhaps that home country could take a lesson or two and relax, instead of suffocating everything with rules and zoning then?
Cant reply, but how can japan cities have sprawl? They are usually one bay between mountains and the sea. Where do you sprawl in the us-sense from there?
First of all, half the population live in either the Greater Tokyo Area, or the Keihanshin area (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe). Those areas are very dense.
Second, it is true that they don't have much usable land (but they still have some big flat areas), but outside of the aforementioned big cities, instead of building vertically, everybody wants to have their own house. The result is sprawling cities made of a combination of little houses and narrow streets cramped together, and big box stores connected by stroads.
I agree in substance. I see adherence of hierarchy as a facet of risk aversion. One doesn't wish to stand out too much but stand comfortably behind the veil of rules and orders.
To me, a simpler reason is the Japanese language has 140million speakers vs English At 1.4 billion.
You can argue that they've succeeded in other areas in the past like TVs and cars but software and apps imo are much harder to communicate usage and much harder to localize.
It's not just localization, it's close zero conscience of the world outside of Japan by most people in it. That is not to say people in the USA have more consciousness of the outside world. It's that they don't need it by luck that English works with 1.4 billion people
South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency and continues to retain Japanese style corporate law and norms, yet does comparatively better in tech entrepreneurship than Japan.
The big difference is capital markets, as SK along with other Asian countries became more attractive for Japanese capital than Japan during the 2000s.
> South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency
This shows that even on HN, all you have to do is sound confident.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time residing in both countries could tell you this is not true. English proficiency levels are significantly higher in Korea, to the extent that this difference has a societal and business impact on each country.
I have spent a lot of time in Japan and some time in SK and I cautiously disagree.
In both countries I found English levels to vary widely based on which industry and location you were in. I think Korean society in general has higher English skills among younger people especially due to the number of Koreans that have spent significant time in the US. But among IT industries and top graduates I'm not sure there's a big difference.
Among the IT industry there's definitely a noticeable difference, e.g. when you compare IT teams at their big local companies (not local branches of US companies), same goes for non-IT teams. A significantly higher percentage of Chaebeol subsidiary employees are able to conduct productive business in English than at Zaibatsus.
Of course this difference disappears at the top 1% level, but this holds pretty much anywhere in the world. China might be an exception because it's so big, not sure, but elsewhere you're not going to be at the forefront of things if you can't participate in the international community.
Yeah it’s extremely rare to see the typical employee at a major Japanese firm’s office in Japan with passable verbal english skills. So rare they practically don’t exist outside of foreign companies and upper management of Japanese companies and their consultants/‘advisors’/etc…
And this isn’t limited to IT, it’s pretty much the case in most departments.
Decent written English skills are not as rare though.
Exactly this. At their Korean equivalent its the norm that to get a promotion above a certain (middle management-ish) level, there's a hard requirement to get a certain grade on an English speaking test. This is taken seriously to the extent that some people who particularly struggle with English will take a several-month sabbatical just to get up to that level. I've never seen this kind of thing at Japanese companies except for very limited cases where the job inherently required near-daily communication with foreign businesses, definitely not as an org-wide policy. Sure, such English tests are always gamed and not super reflective of actual proficiency, but they're still indicative.
I can recommend reading about Chaebol in this context. [1]
Basically conglomerates grew so big through foreign investments that they control large parts of the legislative and executive body. The families regularly get threatened by some aspiring/greedy politicians, then they threaten to fire a lot of people, and then they get spoken free.
I'd argue that this was the inspiration for the Mr.Robot series (apart from enron group), as it's portraying a similar disfunct democracy that's effectively owned by oligarchs or is effectively an oligopol.
I agree with you. Samsung is probably their only global software exporter. Their other top companies are exclusively local: Naver, Kakao, Daum. Pretty much no one outside of SK (or Japan) knows of them.
I will say they come out with some dank video games like Lineage, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, PUBG
Line is the biggest messaging (and taxi, and many other things) app in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand.
The software Samsung puts on their phones may just be a layer on top of Android but is still very influential by being run on billions of end-user devices.
The country's definitely low on internationally impactful SaaS, though they do exist e.g. Sendbird and Moloco.
Line was previously owned by Naver, but is now Japanese-owned. I believe it was actually developed in Japan - it happened as a reaction to communication problems during the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. It's an absolutely excellent app, no ads or anything, only pure communication with everything you would want for that purpose.
LY Corp is owned 50/50 by Naver and Softbank. It started as a reskin of Naver Talk, and the product development has effectively been done in Korea throughout the years. They've intentionally marketed it as being a Japanese app/company to assauge the Japanese government, as unlike in the West, East-Asian governments understand that an app that the entire nation has come to rely is a critical piece of infra that needs to be in national hands. But this has not reflected the reality.
This strategy of pretending to be a Japanese app has worked for a decade but now seems to be coming to an end, with the JP government looking to force Softbank to somehow broker a deal with Naver to reduce their share to less than 50%.
This is completely false. Line has been developed almost entirely in japan after the first couple years. The japanese team at this point is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the korean one, and most of the development is decided in japan.
These people aren't being hired to pick their nose [1]. Nor is it like the US where they only place such adverts to justify H1Bs.
There has been an entire scandal about Line's data having been hosted in Korea all this time for more than a decade, after which the servers finally got moved to Japan. You're hardly going to place all physical servers in country A and then do all backend and infra development in country B.
No, the difference is cultural. Japanese people are very capable, but the flipside of that is they don't need tools to get stuff done. This is why their software sucks fucking donkey arse balls, and I say that as a Japanese myself.
To put this in a more relatable way: Most people will invent apple peelers to peel apples, and make better peelers to make peeling easier. Some will just be lazy bastards and eat the apple skin and all. Japanese peel the apple with just an ordinary kitchen knife, their cutlery technology thus never advances beyond kitchen knife because "Why?".
Japanese simply cannot grasp the appreciation of good tools made for purpose because they can do everything with their bare hands, they can't understand WTF good software is because they don't need it and don't use it.
The syntax may be eyebleedingly awful but damn if it doesn't actually keep working. Justfiles aren't even parallisable, but make had that baked in decades ago.
And no matter how much vi(m) might be a plugin-bloated mess that never really gelled for me, it also never lagged out or randomly failed to do things like autocomplete or formatter running to nearly the extent VS Code does daily. And it didn't use half my CPU just sitting there.
Autotools, now, that's some real self-flagrllation.
What an excellently worded comment and great analogy. I've witnessed so many similar things in Japan.
It isn't until very recently that new houses in Japan were built with insulation. Why? Wearing a bunch of layers, slippers, sitting in front of a kerosene heater or under a kotatsu... It works, so why fix it? Maybe it's a lack of creativity, critical thinking, or suppliers.. but it doesn't matter. If it kinda works, don't fix it.
Which is interesting, because hundred of "keep warm in your house" little junky products have come out in the past decade like USB warmers and whatnot.
And yeah, there are some arguments (other than the status quo) against insulated houses: more cost, when houses are seen as a one-type-thing and not a long-term investment. No basements for a furnace for central heating. Earthquake standards. But really, it's mostly just the same "Why" from your comment.
Huh? Is this comment meant to be parody? Japan’s full of gadgets to help with everyday tasks, including vegetable peelers. Just visit Daiso or Loft or similar and look around a bit.
Or look around your typical supermarket. Instant noddles, pre-made curry mixes, pre-cut meat and vegetables, instant miso soup, precooked side dishes and so on. It’s not like this stuff cannot be prepared at home. It sells well because it’s convenient.
Apple peelers are more artistic license than not to prove the point, but there are other real examples.
The chief example are mobile phones, the poster child of Galapagos Syndrome[1]. Once Japan figured out mobile phones they stopped moving. They kept reiterating and ended up with the craziest mobile phones known to man, but they got 1HKO'd in broad daylight by the invention of the smartphone and haven't been relevant since.
Another is the Mitsubishi Regional Jet. With expertise building licensed F-15s and the pride of restarting Japanese domestic aviation manufacturing since the YS-11, they built one of the best regional jets ever and failed to sell a single one because they couldn't figure out how to document how the thing was made and thus the required certifications from the FAA and other authorities.
Both examples are of Japan simply not understanding what a good purpose made tool is, because they don't need to. Why would anyone want a smartphone? Why do we need to explain how this jetliner is made? Of course they realize why once they're crashed in the dirt, but by then it's way too late.
While not immune (eg: the ancient state of US banking), the rest of the world and the United States in particular on the other hand respect good products that shake the markets, people and companies who don't (eg: Boeing and Intel for recent examples) are tarred and feathered for their insolence.
I think these are good examples of Japanese corporate culture being quite insular, often not just of the world outside Japan, but often of the world outside the same company. Product design often stumbles because it focuses on the needs of the company not the customers (not a uniquely Japanese problem; cough Google).
It’s not a problem of people not appreciating good products - e.g. smart phones rapidly displaced the old “garakei” feature phones in Japan. Japanese consumers clearly appreciated them, just like they clearly appreciate fruit peelers..
Rather the mobile makers that reached market dominance became complacent. They failed to innovate, failed to expand overseas and were disrupted by innovative products.
>It’s not a problem of people not appreciating good products - e.g. smart phones rapidly displaced the old “garakei” feature phones in Japan. Japanese consumers clearly appreciated them, just like they clearly appreciate fruit peelers..
The problem is they need a Steve Jobs selling them on iPhones more than anyone else on the planet, and they almost never get their own "Steve Jobs" especially these days.
For a software example, consider LINE: The most popular instant messaging platform in Japan. It's owned and operated by a Japanese company today (LY Corporation, or the LINE Yahoo Corporation), but LINE is originally a South Korean piece of software engineering by Naver. Japan couldn't make their own product because "Why?", email and texting are fine they say; South Korea had to show them why.
A particularly egregious example is Toshiba putting the inventor of NAND flash (Fujio Masuoka) out to dry and claiming the technology was invented by Intel, because they so utterly hated the idea of creating an entire new market and needing to answer "Why?" when hard drives and floppies and tapes were just fine.
Japanese people are too capable for their own good, arguably they are so capable they are incapable.
Incidentally, Japan is still trying to make the metaverse and NFTs a thing. That should tell you all you need to know about how stagnant the Japanese can be once they're satisfied.
Toshiba fumbled the initial opportunity with NAND memory but went on to became a major player. The modern Kioxia is one of the largest makers in the world and a direct spin-off of Toshiba’s memory division.
They were motivated to claim that Masuoka was not the inventor of NAND because they would have owed him millions in inventors rights on the patents. Masuoka eventually sued and settled out of court.
Line wasn’t particularly innovative. It’s basically a WhatsApp clone. It was mostly developed in Japan, by a team of mostly Japanese engineers, working at the subsidiary of a Korean company. It succeeded because of good timing and execution, not because it was innovative.
The Mitsubishi Jet project had many problems. It was massively overtime and budget. Its design didn’t match the needs of foreign carriers. They didn’t have the right team in place to navigate the certification process. Seriously read the Japanese wiki page on it. It’s a good summary of where the project went wrong.
I don’t see how any of this supports the conclusion that Japanese people are “too capable for their own good” and “so capable they are incapable”, or “incapable of recognising good tools”.
There’s plenty of counter examples where Japanese companies have been innovative and pivoted. Look at Kodak vs Fuji Film.
Kodak invented much of the underlying technology for digital cameras but failed to capitalise. Instead their business was disrupted by Japanese digital camera makers, eventually driving Kodak to bankruptcy. Meanwhile Fuji Film saw the writing on the wall and successfully pivoted.
I don't agree with this, I have researched English proficiency across the world and South Korea consistently ranks quite a bit higher than Japan. Here is one example:
I also regularly talk with many people from both Japan and South Korea (being that I learn the languages), with those people having wildly varying degrees of English literacy... but in talking to all of them, the one consistent thing everyone has agreed on is that Koreans by-and-large definitely speak better English than Japanese.
My sense (as a Japanese expat) is that the smaller and closer to China the country is, the more serious people there are thinking about moving out of the country as a risk management, encouraging them to learn English harder. Another good example is Taiwan. It has a lot of good English speakers in its highly-educated cohort.
Japanese people aren't that serious about moving out (at least my generation. Your people look a bit different though.)
That breaks down as soon as you leave Asia. In Europe, most people attribute it to whether the country prefers subs v dubs. SK and Taiwan use subtitles for foreign media so they hear English language. In Japan, it's more common to dub.
This is mirrored in Europe where countries using subs (Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, etc) have better English language skills than dub countries (France, Germany, Spain).
Yeah. Horrendous Japanese English has to do with what I'd describe the "software" approach. Japanese English textbooks is written like a programmer's manual that grant readers a means to generate or analyze English scripts in certain punctual grammatical ways. IIUC, most other Asian nations including SK don't take this approach at all, and their English proficiency is massively higher.
I'm not sure if any other countries than Japan do that, but I smell something similar might be going on in public education in rural China; it's a somewhat usable alternative where immersive training is not available.
> The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development.
Not even that. It's just about financing.
Japan's domestic capital markets collapsed due to the Asset Bust in the early 1990s, the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s, and the Great Recession in 2008-12, and domestic asset managers turbocharged the "Flying Geese" development model in order to make themselves whole.
There's no reason for an Asset Manager at SoftBank, Nomura, or MUFG to invest in a Japanese startup when a South Korean, Chinese, Indian, or Singaporean startup can command outsized returns in an IPO or Acquisition.
Japanese asset managers play a major role in Tech VC/PE in Asia, but they prefer to invest abroad.
Look at the outsized returns from Alibaba (SoftBank), Flipkart (SoftBank), and Grab (MUFG) compared to anything that came out of Japan in the last 30 years.
> but at best, keiretsu is a symptom
South Korea and China both use the same corporate model that Keiretsus use, as much of the reform era leadership in both SK and China studied in Japan, and both countries got significant technical and economic advising from Japan via the "Flying Geese" model
Software tends to create winner takes it all markets, which means if you're a small fish wanting to get bigger you either need to create your own market, or get enough money to win over the other players.
Keiretsu not caring about a market forces new comers to go for the blue ocean strategy, as they won't get investments for fighting in the more crowded markets.
As the keiretsu also hold the capital, they also shape markets and should totally be blamed for what happens there.
To compare to the US, Microsoft wouldn't be there if IBM didn't invest in it. Apple also benefited from Xerox and got saved by Microsoft etc.. That's the kind of dynamic the Japanese market only saw in cars and customer electronics manufacturing.
I think if you work in an analysis of the exception to the rule - the success of Japan's outsize piece of the gaming industry - you'll have something really, really compelling.
I do not know if the Japanese gaming industry is an exception rather than of the rule. I see the game studios as part of the larger entertainment segment in Japan -- anime studios, music studios -- where it is actually very top-down vision driven by strong hands-on head figures like Hideo Kojima or Hayao Miyazaki. AAA titles (of games or motion pictures) have very different production, finance, and life cycles from typical dozen-person-developed consumer apps.
An illuminating question is, is Japan a leader in boutique shop games?
I think that's a misconception. AFAIK, the size of game development teams in Japan is generally smaller than that of Western teams, on average. Particularly in the industry's heyday of the 90s-early 2000s, teams were small enough that employees would be asked to wear many hats. For example, Tetsuya Nomura was famously hired by Square to be a creature artist, and found himself contributing in so many areas that he was eventually asked to direct. This includes on games like Final Fantasy VII, which at the time of release was one of the most expensive games ever produced.
Maybe it's a matter of Japanese firms becoming rigid and hierarchical at a faster rate in their lifecycle than Western firms do.
Japan is not leading the video games industry anymore for a long time now. They still have a good chunk because of strong long lived IPs but it's heydays are in the past
Japanese AAAs seem to be heading into the same slump as Western AAAs which is going to be more of a problem for them, since Japan has fewer indie and AA developers than the West, while Chinese competition is also growing, but I would neither say things have been this way for a long time, nor that Japan isn't still punching above its weight in video game sales and influence.
> but I would neither say things have been this way for a long time
What do you mean? It's fairly clear that most of the innovation in Japan was in the 80s and 90s. Since then, there's hardly any outstanding titles coming from Japan. Every year at the TGS it's just remakes and sequels or prequels. A sign of a dying industry.
> still punching above its weight
I'd call that inertia. But you already see that signs of decay: Final Fantasy is selling less and less, Capcom relies way too much on Monster Hunter for their own good, Konami is mostly dead (selling remakes contracted to third party studios), SEGA may be the most successful but that's mostly thanks to Atlus at this stage. Even Sony has hardly anything to show in their first party line-up. It's getting depressing.
Sequels aren't a problem if they're continuously improving on their predecessors. Setting aside Atlus which you already mentioned, and stale N+1 sequels, we've got: Square Enix with Octopath Traveler and Dragon Quest Builders recently (which improved with their respective sequels), From Software with Sekiro and Elden Ring, and Nintendo with Breath of the Wild (and its improved sequel).
However, I think in the main you're right (the industry is slowly dying), I just don't think it's as manifest (or irreversible) yet. I do think if Nintendo and Game Freak prevail against Palworld, things will get bleaker for Japanese development, though.
My feeling is that postwar Japan was a chaotic time and empowered a lot of crazy risk taking individuals along with the old zaibatsu who became keiretsu. As the Shouwa era progressed Japanese society became more risk averse and that most of Japanese industry now succeeds on the creative seeds of Postwar Japan and the rigidity born through the structure that came after.
It’s well documented how lenient the U.S. was with enforcing international law on Japans high ranking military and political leaders. The U.S. covered it up and whitewashed Hirohito’s role in WW2. It’s why Japan still has never apologized or even admitted to genociding Chinese and enslaving and raping Korea.
Open up a Japanese textbook on the early 20th century and you will find a glowing portrayal of an Imperial Japanese Empire.
I'm not talking about Hirohito, Yasukuni, the failure at regulating the zaibatsu, the occupation, or Japanese conservatism at all. I'm very familiar with Japanese history. I'm specifically talking about IT corporate culture in Japan. Not sure why you're bringing politics into this.
>It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.
So, Japan could be doing software like many think it should be done: as an well designed engineering practice.
> It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco.
But it didn't. It did well in Palo Alto. It only moved into San Francisco when Palo Alto decided it was full, but the software industry continued growing anyway. San Francisco succeeded in software because it was near Palo Alto.
Games. Sony, Nintendo, are we really saying the country that makes PlayStation and Nintendo's is 'bad' at software?
And, Didn't someone in Japan make the Ruby language?
I didn't quite find it. How are they categorizing Japanese software as 'bad' compared to any other country? Was it just because US Silicon Valley has had a few bigger startups in general? Is that really a good benchmark?
I propose Japanese ATMs as a example of truly awful software. Most ATMs in Europe or the US have software that is merely bad, the Japanese ones are in another level.
I just booked a trip to Japan. Every single website was pretty bad, from airliners to bullet trains and hotels. They all look like something out of 2005 and have confusing flows.
He makes a lot of people mad but that doesn’t make him an idiot. It just makes him genuine. Everybody else who looks polished is hiding secrets behind excellent PR.
I agree that making a lot of people mad doesn't necessarily mean someone is an idiot. At the time time, making a lot of people mad does not necessarily mean someone is genuine.
For example, someone who manipulates a lot of people with misinformation might manifest anger in many. In that hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't think that the anger is because the target's an honest, forthright, genuine straight-shooter.
Furthermore, most people are genuinely kind and compassionate towards others. For those people, mass anger is not their genuine goal, or a likely consequence of them being genuine.
I don't know what you'd call firing the entire supercharger team because the head of the department pushed back on layoffs as anything other than idiotic.
No, I'd say they're running interference for Musk. It's one anonymous source claiming that the media was wrong, and many other fired sources that were willing to step up and say their entire department was axed. Why would I trust an anonymous source?
I spent ~11 years in Japan, porting/building telecom protocol software and, more importantly, trying to build software development and business competence in our teams. Sadly, although I had a reasonable impact on individual software engineers technical ability, I was unable to find any path to leverage that into "software business building" expertise.
Of course, the attribution of causes to this is highly subjective and I expect every person to come away from the elephant with a different interpretation.
In my case, the very, very top down 'age hierarchy' culture was (and continues unabated) to crush any ideas and proposals that come up from younger and more competent engineers. In the last 30 years with Japan, I have met only a small handful of people that are willing to take input, let alone change direction, from someone younger than them. (a trivial example was a fellow company director of mine that was born 5 _days_ earlier than me. In 4 years working together, not once would he take anything I said seriously. Hmm...)
Give the number of excellent Japanese software engineers that I know, the burden of this "culture" is (to me) quite tragic on its impact slowing down national progress in an important global field. If anyone as ideas how to get around this, I would love to know and learn.
I guess the solution would be to build a different company from the ground up and then shield against the common culture sneaking in. You would need to repeat it very often though. Or have a branch office of a non-japanese company.
I live in a small country and there are foreign companies and while they have to adjust to local laws and have mostly local employees, they still are culturally different from each other.
I wonder how GE with a strong central process and culture control is doing in Japan?
It is not only in software that Japan has currently difficulties. It is in any domain that requires to "move fast and break thing".
Japan is excellent at incremental improvement (Kaizen) but absolutely terrible at managing disruptions.
And the reasons are exactly the ones you point out: Excessively hierarchical management practices means that mid-management will kill any evolution that is seen as a risk to them.
There's one more aspect to this that wasn't mentioned at all in the article.
In Japan, home computers never really made sense until it was far, far too late.
In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose.
Computers eventually caught up, but some of the cultural impact remained, still making them less popular than in the west.
This is one of the reasons why Japanese were so good at consumer electronics, they just needed that electronics a lot more than we did, and the devices needed a lot more features, as "just plug it into a computer to do the complicated stuff" wasn't really an option there.
> In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set.
NEC sold a Kanji board for their Z80-based PC8801 mk II (released 1983). The original 1979 PC8801 didn’t have an official Kanji board from NEC, but one was available for it from a third party vendor. With a Kanji board, you could do Japanese word processing. I believe the same was true of many other 8-bit vendors.
Inevitably the greater complexity of Kanji required more advanced hardware, so Kanji-capable machines usable for business and education were initially more expensive than games-only machines that lacked it. But in 1990 IBM released DOS/V, which demonstrated that standard PC hardware had become powerful enough to support Kanji without needing any dedicated circuitry. And even before that, I believe already by the late 1980s many machines (such as NEC PC-9800s) were coming with Kanji support as a standard feature rather than an optional add-on card.
There was this entire Japanese subculture of microcomputers/home computers/PCs. Machines like NEC PCs you mentioned, proprietary models from Fujitsu and others, the many incarnations of MSX (which I think might have started out as a Microsoft initiative?), and of course the nowadays legendary Sharp X68000, that were marketed and sold in Japan but not necessarily well known - or even available - outside of east and south-east Asia (though I think MSX also got some traction in South America).
The MSX standard was originally developed in Japan, with the cooperation of Microsoft in the US-its OS was a port of MS-DOS to 8-bit Z80 systems, Tim Paterson the original developer of MS-DOS did the port-he’d left Microsoft by this point to found his own company, so he did it at his new company under contract to Microsoft. MSX systems
were also quite popular in Europe-Phillips was also a major manufacturer of them. Like other 8-bit machines, you could get an add-on board or cartridge to add Kanji support. First generation MSX machines, some higher-end models had Kanji built-in, lower-end models you needed to buy the expansion. Later generations of Japanese MSX machines, Kanji support was standard even on the entry models. Machines were also differentiated by how many Kanji they supported (JIS1 provided the ~3000 most commonly used Kanji, JIS2 added another ~1000 which were less commonly used).
There were other Japanese machines which found a foothold in some overseas markets. IBM Japan developed a modified version of the PCjr, the PC JX, for the Japanese market. IBM ended up also selling the JX to schools in Australia and New Zealand (minus the Kanji circuitry), and many bought them (I remember using one at school when I was 9 or 10.)
Similarly, Fujitsu’s cloned IBM mainframes, the FACOM machines, were popular with Australian businesses and governments in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. They were also sold in other markets, but in other markets were generally rebadged (or even manufactured under license) by vendors such as Amdahl in the US and Siemens in Europe, whereas in Australia they were sold directly by Fujitsu and generally closer to what was sold in Japan.
That powerful IBM system was unique to other systems being brought into Japan, in that IBM started up that business just before the rule that required a Japanese partner. So it didn't really get shared like other technologies that lead to most other Japanese tech giants.
DOS/V was just PC-DOS with some additional device drivers. IBM licensed it to Microsoft who in turn licensed it to other vendors such as Toshiba, Sharp, AST, Compaq, Dell and Fujitsu.
The biggest barrier to its adoption was vendors such as NEC (with their PC9800 series) and the AX consortium (Oki, Casio, Canon, Sanyo, Sharp, Hitachi, Mitsubishi) who had already invested in proprietary hardware for Kanji support and were threatened by the support of Japanese text on global standard hardware. (That said, some AX vendors decided to embrace DOS/V anyway, such as Sharp.)
Another barrier was that DOS/V had different APIs from those previous solutions so you needed new software that could support it.
The article seems to under represent how advanced and widespread i-mode cell phones were in Japan - over 60% of the population used it in the early 2000s.
I stayed with friends in Japan in 2001 who noted all their friends used email on their handsets rather than have a PC. They also could watch certain broadcast TV channels on their phone which was popular on the train.
The only people I knew with mobile email in my home country were some execs with blackberries.
I don't know exactly the reasons but Japanese software is basically embarrassing. I was talking to a good friend of mine last month who is a very good photographer about how you basically don't have GPS or a ton of other features in the main cameras from Japan--so both of us increasingly just use iPhones unless we really need to use big bodies and lenses.
Sure, some of it is that iPhones (Pixels) do a good enough job for a lot of us. But it's also that the gap has closed so much and a lot of it is about software.
Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes.
And even in the large systems space, when I was an IT industry analyst, there was just a lot of quirky Japanese tech stuff that was out of step with the world as a whole.
I don't have a coherent theory for it all but Japan just fell out of alignment with mainstream patterns especially in the 90s or so.
Japanese companies and organizations (and people) love diagrams to present to the public. Whether how to navigate a website, book a ticket, check-in to a hotel, etc. the number of process diagrams in daily life (as a perceived effective way of communicating information) is unseen outside Japan.
Also, the amount of highly detailed posters in public places. For example, the departures board of a train line -- far more information than probably the average US rider knows how to comprehend even. Or is interested in.
Both are standard-looking maps, honestly - stem and leaf is so obvious I have problems imagining what other form you'd expect, and I have never seen japanese public transport timetable sign before now. It's just standard over here (Poland, UK).
The format of metro map is actually based on London metro, the only major difference is the amount of lines.
That first board is just a list of departure times by hour, with express trains highlighted. For weekdays and weekends. Not exactly a huge amount of information.
I'm more impressed by their maps of where each station exit leads to, or where on the platform to wait based on your seat number. Those can be tricky to figure out as there are multiple wait points based on the train route and number of carriages. Shinkansen even take into account what end of the carriage you're closest to.
Sooo yeah, I agree the Japanese one is much nicer. I don't recall ever even seeing a schedule at the stations, just "train arriving in X minutes". The train map and per-line map are at every station, and the train+bus map is pretty common too.
I notice the Chicago map has multiple stations with the same name -- is this not a problem when using Google Maps and other navigation apps? How would the app know which "Pulaski" I want to go to?
Those are the names of the street the station is at, if you follow the map north/south you'll see all the Pulaski stations are on the same street. In an app you'd use the address for where you want to go and it may or may not include the train. Though the apps can also understand "Blue line Pulaski" if it really is your destination rather than a stop on the way.
I had a Fuji point-and-shoot with GPS built-in nearly 15 years ago. The problem with GPS built-in to hardware is that it takes like 30-60 seconds of standing still to get a lock on the satellites, it doesn't work indoors, and so on. Phones work around this by downloading ephemeris data and triangulating using the cell towers and nearly Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, things that a camera can't do without incorporating a whole phone with SIM card into the camera and burning battery.
That's a bit of a red herring. Why do cameras integrate so poorly with phones, which could provide this information, backup and upload images etc. Same is true of professional video cameras, which are used for much longer periods of time in a single place, turned on etc. It's a mindset thing with camera manufacturers, running enormously outdated software with terrible UX on underpowered processors.
Battery life. A good camera will have a standby time of months and will do heavy image processing for days on one charge. And that's a key feature. It's also one of the reasons most people quickly turn off features like GPS and WIFI in their cameras. They're relatively useless and a massive battery drain.
But yes, it could still be made better by waking up the radios fast and having e.g. reasonably smart tethering based on an open de facto standard spec that would be only woken up when the camera is switched "on" (which is mostly a key lock in many cameras, not a boot up).
This isn't true at all of cinema cameras - which run off v-mount, b-mount etc type batteries and are expected to burn through them, and still face the same processor and feature limitations. There isn't (to my knowledge) a single cinema camera that supports bluetooth headphones for example, bizarrely.
Phones handle that this way, but it's not necessarily a good thing if that's the only way they can get the ephemeris data. I used to navigate in Japanese cities using not my phone, but my tablet. Worked fine. Then I changed to another tablet. Didn't work at all, could not. The only time I could get a GPS lock was if I could connect to a local wi-fi, which is not something easily done. Its GPS software clearly didn't even try to get the ephemeris date via the GPS signal, it relied 100% on network download. Which made it utterly useless, in the place where I needed it most - another country, non-EU at that, and my tablet doesn't even have a SIM slot, and if it did, I would have had to buy/get a SIM card (as would I for a phone, something I normally wouldn't need).
In short - downloading ephemeris data from the internet is fine, but if it also cripples the whole thing by not using the embedded GPS ephemeris data.. horrible.
> you basically don't have GPS or a ton of other features in the main cameras from Japan
I'm just a happy amateur photographer, but this fact has been annoying the sanity out of me for over a decade now. Mobile phones are taking increasingly large bites out of the camera manufacturers' market share, but companies like Fuji/Canon/Nikon/Olympus, for some unknown reason, are unable to adapt at all. Sure, there is still and will always be a market for larger glass and more pixels, lower noise levels, ergonomics etc. - but why in 2024 GPS, Wi-Fi, uploading to Instagram and similar functions are not standard in ALL cameras is beyond my understanding.
It's like watching the car industry in the early 2000's where manufacturers would pride themselves over finally putting a USB jack in their car.
> Sure, there is still and will always be a market for larger glass and more pixels, lower noise levels, ergonomics etc. - but why in 2024 GPS, Wi-Fi, uploading to Instagram and similar functions are not standard in ALL cameras is beyond my understanding.
Specifically on uploading to social media and having apps that depend on external APIs — maybe it's because putting Android on such devices and having to constantly keep the social media apps updated "dates" the camera and forces consumers into an upgrade cycle because of software bloat.
I've noticed that for some reason, cheap Android phones tend to objectively slow down over the years even without software or app upgrades — as if the cheap Mediatek chipsets and RAM are designed to eventually degrade. Something similar happened to some of the wi-fi connected printers I have owned, which slowly become sluggish and unusable even after factory resets.
On the other hand, I can still use my 16 year old full-frame Nikon D700 DSLR purchased in 2008 very, very well. Even back then, it supported a GPS attachment, though it's utter trash compared to in-phone AGPS these days.
I increasingly don't travel with a dedicated camera. In fact, I suspect in the next year or two I'll purchase a new phone sooner than I otherwise would to have a backup camera when traveling especially given a backup phone has other uses.
I have a couple of good cameras and glass but they're getting old and I really can't imagine upgrading at this point.
Adobe (sorry, subscription haters) made up for a lot of defects in the manufacturers' PC software for downloading etc. But I totally get frustrated by the lack of GPS metadata at this point because I hate entering that sort of thing which geo data makes irrelevant in many cases.
> Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes.
As an European living in Japan, I can confirm. Japanese advertisement and presentations look like a competition in who can cram the most text in epilepsy-inducing colors in a single page/poster. Bonus points for cramming both horizontal and vertical text in the same page.
I don't know if they really like it, or if they just follow what everybody else does.
Ah yes, the myth that East Asian countries are better at math because their numbers are just one syllable, so they can calculate faster.
Leaving aside the fact that math is not only basic arithmetic, the reality is that they dedicate much more time in school to this kind of problems. But as usual, skills that are not used often atrophy over time, and in my experience the average Japanese adult is not much better than the average Western adult.
Even assuming your theory is true (which I kind of doubt), you could be confusing the symptom for the cause.
Why didn't software work for Japanese business purposes? Keep in mind the 80s and 90s were the peak of the Japan economy, and if they actually wanted a software system that could handle Japanese requirements, they had the resources to build it.
Where's the Japanese counter-part of Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc? Why didn't any Japanese firm make this software, or if they did, why didn't it become popular?
Certainly Kanji makes things a bit more complicated, but IIRC I've seen systems that mainly dealt with Hiragana and Katakana. It's a limited character set. Nobody says you need to use ASCII.
We could dig a big further and ask why computer were able to handle alphabet characters before hiragana for instance.
Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows.
At the end of the day I think the capital and investment aspects, market protections and political situations account for way more than sheer cultural or technical aspects.
> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows.
Because if you're making something in the US, you have immediate access to a market of 330m[1] people, and they all speak a single language, follow roughly similar laws and regulations, and have relatively similar needs (e.g. software made for schools in Arizona is pretty likely to work well for schools in Kansas, because things like the A-F grade system stay the same).
This rich market gives you plenty of opportunities to grow quickly. Once you grow large enough, you have pretty easy access to other large and rich markets that also speak English, and then you can get into the hard stuff like internationalization.
If you start out as an EU company, you only have access to the population of your own country, and you're not large enough to handle internationalization or the 30 slightly different systems of laws, regulations, agreements with retailers and different store chains etc. It's a lot harder for you to grow at first, because the potential pool of customers able to use your product is much smaller.
You have markets like China and India, which are technically better, but at least historically, they used to be poor enough that the US was a much better option in practice.
I don't think this is the only reason for US domination, but it's definitely one of the reasons.
[edit] [1[] the population was different back then, but the difference in scale was similar
> We could dig a big further and ask why computer were able to handle alphabet characters before hiragana for instance.
JIS X 0201 was released in 1969 and widely adopted on mainframe systems in the 1970s. It supports a modified form of Katakana (“half-width”) as well as the Latin alphabet in a 7 or 8 bit encoding. 8-bit encodings supported both, for 7-bit you could switch between Katakana and Latin using control characters. So, by the 1970s you could already do Japanese language computing if you limited yourself to katakana and romaji.
Kanji took longer because there are too many characters for a 7/8-bit code and their visual complexity required more advanced display hardware, but already in 1971 IBM was selling their “IBM Kanji System” which contained specialised software, printers and keypunches to support Kanji on IBM S/360 mainframes. In 1979 IBM added support for 3270 terminals (with additional Kanji circuitry) to enable Kanji in interactive as opposed to batch mode punched card computing.
Early systems without kanji support generally used katakana rather than hiragana, because if writing everything in katakana looks weird to Japanese speakers, doing the same thing in hiragana looks even weirder. Also, the “blockier” shape of katakana makes it more legible than hiragana on low resolution displays.
> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows.
In the 1990s, Oracle licensed RISC OS from Acorn in the UK, and sold it in the US as Oracle NCOS (Network Computer Operating System). But the whole “network computer” thing was never as successful as its backers had hoped.
> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows.
They sort of did. For a while Symbian had two thirds of the smartphone OS market. And the real winner in the global OS marketplace today is Linux (I'm including Android here, though you could debate that), which started out life as European. But I do agree about investment opportunities.
Hiragana (or rather Katakana) alone could never be enough to allow businesses and government institutions to use computers for their daily tasks. These scripts are not just different ways of writing the same things, but rather certain classes of words or certain words in certain contexts tend to use certain scripts. I doubt a fairly conservative society like Japan's would have switched to Katakana for legal documents just to accomodate computers.
Well, what is now the EU market wasn't fully integrated into the "single market" until 1993, well after Unix (from which MacOS is obviously derived) and Windows OS's were starting to be developed. As others have said, trying to target all those different countries and languages is not that straightforward, but it was significantly harder 30 years ago.
> home computers never really made sense until it was far, far too late.
That's not really the case. There were a lot of PCs in the 1980s and Japan was a strong leader in the early laptop market as well. All these PCs and many hand-held devices for sale then handled the character set just fine.
I don't follow your argument. PCs weren't popular because they couldn't handle the Japanese language encoding, but somehow, consumer electronics were popular because they could handle the complex tasks with the language?
JIS C 6226, the encoding for the Japanese language, was made in the 70s. While later than the US, I would not call it late.
>In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose.
Some, much complex, JRPGs such as Falcom's titles (the Ys series), began on Japanese computers (though they did end up getting NES ports anyway).
There's also the proliferation of smut on Japanese computers, since you can't have that kind of stuff of consoles. This also eventually trickles down to some "underground" computer magazines in Japan having that stuff on their pages and coverdiscs - the stuff you would typically find on their weekly gossip magazines.
Hi, I'm the author and I'm delighted that people are still interested in this topic.
There are a lot of great comments, but I'd like to collect and respond in bulk to the ones about keiretsu, since there are a lot of misunderstanding about them.
1) It's not the keiretsu, it's X.
It's not just the existence of keiretsu in isolation. They keiretsu produced incredible innovations in the 60s and 70s. It was the combination of the keiretsu control and the shift to domestic markets (which the keiretsu also controlled) that killed the PC software industry in its infancy.
2) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google are like keirestsu.
They really are not. In fact, they operate on a radically different philosophy. Keiretsu would be willing to lose money (and a lot of it) in order to keep business in-house. Their supply chains were owned, integrated, and exclusive. Employees did not leave their keirestu group It fostered innovation as long as they were export facing, but it fell apart once they started to focus on the domestic market.
Thank you again for reading. I'm happy to discuss.
How much do you think the MITI Fifth Generation Initiative negatively impacted the Japanese software industry by side-tracking so many educational and corporate initiatives?
The list of US firms are media companies and also the reason people choose their products is software.
Why didn’t Sony, Nintendo and Sega become the biggest firms in Japan? They were well positioned to become its biggest media companies. Why is WhatsApp adopted widely without preloading but not LINE, which was way ahead of the curve in terms of media apps?
Those are all strong and (at varying times) very innovative companies, but I don't see how any of them were positioned to be media companies in Japan. Sony owns a lot of media assets (ie Sony Pictures) but those are from M&A rather than something developed by the core business.
LINE is far more popular in Japan than WhatsApp. It's a Korean company, and if you mean why it never took off outside of Asia, I suspect its a matter of network effects, but I have not looked into it in detail.
Was hoping this would be about Unicode and Han unification.
Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language. You can't make an application that displays Japanese correctly using Unicode, unless you implement mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware, which no-one (except web browsers) actually does. Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that.
The result is that Japanese software mostly doesn't use Unicode (because it sees no benefit), and, more insidiously, the whole Unicode-first (and, increasingly, unicode-only) world of open-source libraries and languages is much less useful in Japan. So whether by accident or design, Japan is cut off from the global market, in both directions.
On the other hand, it makes it easy to spot cheaply made foreign goods that don't bother to use Japanese glyphs, which is a (slight) form of protection for domestic industry.
> Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language
I'm not seeing any reason this is worse in Japanese than Chinese.
Only in recent years has Chinese overtaken Japanese as the predominant CJK population (for tech products). For a long time the Japanese market was larger than the Chinese market. You can just check the historical GDP as a ballpark figure.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, we (context: Hong Kong) kind of thought knowing Japanese was so cool because it allowed us to type Kanji which we repurposed as Chinese characters in some systems. (I think it was mostly Japanese games or games localized for Japan, and maybe some obscure systems.)
Even today this isn't just a fonts issue. Simplified Chinese uses different codepoints for many of the characters, so international software makers need to localize totally differently anyway. There's no reason they can't use a Japanese font when the language is Japanese.
Why didn't Japanese software adopt Unicode in the early 2000s? Why did Chinese software adopt Unicode?
> I'm not seeing any reason this is worse in Japanese than Chinese.
A priori yes, the fact there's a collision between Japanese and Chinese only tells you one of them is going to win and get the normal experience and the other is going to lose and have Unicode uniquely suck for them - history could conceivably have flipped which was which. Another reply suggests that China had laws requiring products sold there to display Chinese correctly whereas Japan did not, which could be the kind of thing that tips the default/standard.
> Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that.
I am not a speaker of either but aren't kanji and written Chinese the same language? It's like French and English, you can use the same keyboard except for certain diacritics. What's so special about Japanese that it can't be displayed by Unicode? Unicode seems to work fine for Korean and Chinese, and Japanese is basically a hybrid of those two.
If the Unicode standard has space for an ever-expanding list of emojis, they can fix their rendering issues with the Japanese language too.
> The problem stems from the fact that Unicode encodes characters rather than "glyphs," which are the visual representations of the characters. There are four basic traditions for East Asian character shapes: traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While the Han root character may be the same for CJK languages, the glyphs in common use for the same characters may not be. For example, the traditional Chinese glyph for "grass" uses four strokes for the "grass" radical [⺿], whereas the simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean glyphs [⺾] use three. But there is only one Unicode point for the grass character (U+8349) [草] regardless of writing system. Another example is the ideograph for "one," which is different in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Many people think that the three versions should be encoded differently.
> aren't kanji and written Chinese the same language?
No. They're different languages, and the written forms are similar but distinct, akin to e.g. Fraktur - you can read glyphs from the other language, but it's harder and looks odd. (Yes Unicode doesn't have codepoints for Fraktur either, but no real-life world language uses Fraktur, so it's not a significant issue there).
> What's so special about Japanese that it can't be displayed by Unicode? Unicode seems to work fine for Korean and Chinese, and Japanese is basically a hybrid of those two.
Live everyday Korean is written in Hangul, Hanzi are only for historical documents, which limits the impact. Taiwanese glyphs (which you don't mention, but for completeness) get their own codepoints because the Unicode consortium had a certain amount of geopolitical realism. So the only collision in real-life world languages is between Chinese and Japanese, and everything gets set up to use Chinese glyphs by default (or, more often, to exclusively use Chinese glyphs) and Japanese is the only real-life world language whose glyphs don't have proper codepoints in unicode (and are fobbed off with mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware).
> If the Unicode standard has space for an ever-expanding list of emojis, they can fix their rendering issues with the Japanese language too.
Oh they absolutely could. They don't want to. Also migration would be difficult - you would have to make a hard compatibility break to ensure that people switched to the new standard, otherwise you'd have old documents that look almost but not quite right and now also where e.g. search doesn't work properly (because searching for the new codepoints wouldn't find characters encoded at the old ones, because no-one actually follows the standards for how to do text search, they just search for byte substrings and call it good).
It doesn't work fine for Korean and Chinese either, we just accept it begrudgingly.
Check out the Noto Sans CJK fonts repo[1], as of now it has five variations: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hong Kong. There wouldn't be a need for so many variations if Unicode works perfectly.
But Unicode is already infinitely better than what existed before, so as I said above, we just kind of accept it begrudgingly.
Japanese adopted the "traditional" Chinese characters and their system evolved from that point. Both Chinese and Japanese characters underwent a simplification process from those original traditional forms, but the simplications aren't always the same. Japanese also has hiragana and katakana, which are syllabic and phonetic and often used to represent foreign names. So the short answer is that no, you can't simply use the Chinese unicode block, whether traditional or simplified, to represent Japanese.
Korean uses Hangul, which is an alphabet and entirely unrelated to Chinese or Japanese.
I'm not Korean but my understanding is they do use the Chinese-derived script occasionally, for emphasis or to solve ambiguity, among other things. So some users will need access to that script too.
My very limited understanding is that Hanja use is extremely rare today, only ever cropping up in niches of academia. Basically everyone will exclusively use Hangul and will disambiguate with synonyms, idioms, etc. instead of Hanja.
Yes from what I heard it would be very few users, definitely not the general public. Maybe academia, signage, marketing, historical/legal use, etc. It might be enough to simply plug the gap with occasional images instead of fonts. But CJK fonts often do apparently include Hanja.
It's not the same language, just the script. Someone brought Japan the newfangled concept of language scribbled on objects some time between 3 to 5 century AD, and the Japanese nobles adopted that Chinese written language for record keeping and transcriptions.
There was already the Japanese spoken language, and nobody in Japan had personal connections to Chinese people(having a rough sea between two countries tend to do that), so Japanese interpretation of "Chinese language" and its characters is completely its own thing - in China the script is called "Hanzi", pronounced like "kHang-zeh", rather than "knanJI" in Japanese.
With the "Simplified" form created by Chinese communist movement in the mid 20th century, there are currently at least 3 major branches of Chinese scripts: the OG "Traditional" kind, its alternate "Simplified" form, and the Japanese "Kanji" - plus (deprecated)Vietnam Chunom variant, (minor)Hong Kong PRC-traditional variation, Korean Kanji w/o post-war Japanese simplifications, etc.
Each ... has slight variations and significant overlaps. Unicode technically supports a lot of those, some by co-mingling, some by rubberstamped-in duplicates, some by IVS(Ideographic Variation Sequence).
To realistically support all languages in one font or app, there need to be distinctions based on languages rather than bandaging hand-wavy "it's all kanji" approach(the word kanji is Japanese, for starters), but the Unicode Consortium is not doing that.
Many Kanji and Chinese glyphs are distinct. There are also many variants of Chinese, among them simplified and traditional. They don't have distinct Unicode codepoints due to Han Unification which tried to cram them all into UTF-16.
You have to know the intended locale or the text to disambiguate and select the correct glyphs.
Weirdly, there _are_ separate codepoints for simplified vs traditional chinese characters, cf. 丟 (traditional) vs 丢 (simplified) [1]. This contributes to the annoyance of Japanese users, it feels like the unicode consortium went out of their way to mangle only their language.
[1] One major reason is that pre-Unicode charsets exist which encode both traditional and simplified characters, and one of the primary goals of Unicode is to support round-trip mapping from any charset into Unicode and back without loss of information.
Well, the world is on UTF-8 now, they can extend the standard and put the Japanese characters there. There's plenty of space since it's variable length.
It's actually what they did. I heard from people involved in the CJK-unification project that the Japanese representatives insisted this be done as a condition for their participation.
Given that there were thousands of such characters, some characters slipped through and the same code point was used by both Chinese and Japanese.
The Japanese have been bickering about the handful of those cases ever since.
You are half right, just like unicode. IIRC you can mostly translate Kanji and Hanzi characters and they are almost 1:1 but you need to know whether to use a Japanese or Chinese font, and unicode just assume you have the right font IIRC (and good luck if a span of text has both for some reason).
Like, image if coordonner (french), coordinate (English) and coördinate (variant) all were encoded.as the same bytes.
IMHO this is as stupid as a Italian complaining about Americans using English fonts to display their language.
As I mentioned in another comment, there already are separate Japanese and Chinese code points for most CJK characters. It's just a handful of cases where for whatever reason the same code points were used (maybe they forgot to separate some characters due to human error), and the Japanese (it's always the Japanese) has been bickering about the situation ever since.
> and Japanese is basically a hybrid of those two.
This is prime /r/BadLinguistics fodder but you've ironically hit the head on the problem.
The underlying issue is that Unicode was run by people who thought 16 bits was enough[0], ran into the issue of Chinese characters, and imposed a bunch of very specific unification rules to work around their own self-imposed technical limitation so they could retain 16-bit codepoints. The rule is that characters that only differ in appearance are treated as the same character[1].
To explain how dumb this is, I'm going to invent a concept called UniPhoenician. You see, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and a few other phonetic scripts have significant derivation from Phoenician writing, so we're going to just merge the letters that happen to have a shared pedigree. i.e. Latin a, Greek alpha, and Cyrillic a. Of course, once we do that, software now has to be consciously aware of what language text is written in so it can substitute the right set of glyphs to work around UniPho.
To make this even dumber, the limitation that motivated UniHan went away with Unicode 2.0, which went to 20-bit codepoints. Except we didn't fix UniHan, AND we subtly broke old software. You see, 16-bit codepoints was the only encoding for Unicode 1.0. Unicode 2.0 added UTF-8[2] and UTF-16, the latter of which is a series of rules on how to fit 20-bit codepoints into 16-bit text in a way that subtly breaks old software, which hopefully will get updated and then people can just pick what codepoint length they want.
Well, uh... turns out Windows NT and JavaScript already were using 16-bit codepoints, and integrating the new UTF-16 rules into them subtly breaks existing software based on that. So those can never be fixed, and any software built on their text-handling capabilities is subtly broken in the face of emoji, rare characters, and so on. Bonus points is that, because they can't understand UTF-16's special characters, naively written conversion functions working with 16-bit-only software will leak invalid UTF-16 sequences into UTF-8, as documented in WTF-8[3].
[0] Competing proposals for a universal character set, including ISO's UCS, used 4 byte characters, see:
[1] Unless the difference is between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, because Unicode didn't wanna piss off Mainland China but was okay with pissing off Japan and Korea
[2] AKA Filesystem Safe Unicode, which shoves Unicode in 8 bits in a way that is mostly acceptable and doesn't impose any Latin-centrism that non-Latin script users need to worry about. Bonus points is that it was originally designed for 32-bit codepoints (anticipating UCS?). If we ever needed 32-bits, UTF-8 could handle them, while UTF-16 would require additional layers of hacks that would spill over into WTF-8.
> The underlying issue is that Unicode was run by people who thought 16 bits was enough[0]
It really depends on how you look at it. I wouldn't fault the original designers of unicode who thought 16 bits was enough.
In modern unicode there are apparently 90k+ CJK characters, but honestly "nobody" actually uses more than the 10k. The thing is the unicode codepoints proliferate:
One for Japan, one for simplified and one for traditional. That's potentially 3x. Korea and Vietnam wants some too.
Then you have this thing called the Kangxi dictionary which was the most comprehensive Chinese character dictionary that includes all obscure characters people could find in the classical literature. Probably half of the characters in Kangxi have this description: "Variant of <more common character>". (I'm pretty sure a significant portion of these variants are just "typos" in old books)
If they were more "economical" in the usage of codepoints, i.e. don't create new code points for each country (just let them use the right fonts), don't include all the frivolous characters in Kangxi, etc... I'm pretty sure it's technically possible for CJK to use less than 10k characters in total. (which, if it did, will let unicode fit within 16 bits)
But this is a political nightmare and nobody wants this compromise. And the Unicode Consortium isn't going to prescribe some solution to some Asian countries on how their languages should be used.
So while the 16-bit limit was a bit tight even assuming optimal conditions, I really wouldn't fault the people who designed this limit to realize Asian cultural politics was so complicated. Heck, AFAIK, before CJK-unification, ALL East Asian codecs were 16-bit, and it was sufficient for each country respectively.
Not just Windows and JavaScript, the JVM (Java etc.) and CLR (C# etc.) also use 16-bit encodings natively. It's actually kind of amazing how short-lived 16-bit Unicode was and yet how much of an effect it has on software today.
> You make sure to use a Japanese specific font (not just a CJK one) if the language setting is JA.
What "language setting", and how do you check it? Do your testers know that they have to test this Japan-specific thing, and how to even tell whether it's working or not? And what about users who need to read Japanese, but don't want their UI to be in Japanese - or, worse, users who need to read both Japanese and Chinese?
You have to render strings in (Chinese|Japanese) font if you believe the string to be meant to be (Chinese|Japanese). Literally that. That's the official Consortium sanctioned way to handle Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters.
There are no particularly good ways or ready made frameworks for that, as it wasn't a huge issue pre-Internet because most people are monolingual in these languages: you pick a language in OS(or buy computers with a ROM) and everything user would see was in the user's language.
It's a giant pain today - there's no "Arial in Chinese", no easy way to mesh multiple fonts together in UI, or good ways to determine intended language of a string, and the fallback default is least common denominator of Simplified Chinese(PRC) for some reason - but not much is being done on those fronts.
I realized I can add a bit more here in hope it'll be useful to someone at some point, all [citation needed]:
It seems that there are Chinese regulation(?) that require Chinese text to be _always_ displayed in _appropriate_ font, which causes "wrong font" problem to Japanese users, while there are no such equivalent requirements elsewhere that computer software face no hard dilemma to follow two regulations in same code point; one is law and one is just unanimous customer complaints.
The rationale for that Chinese regulation(?), I think, is that Chinese computer users long had an exaggerated version of the same problem due to how Kanji was adopted to Unicode; the Kanji map was created by first enumerating common-use Japanese Kanji from reasonable existing tables, then merging additional Chinese common use characters not found on Japanese texts which are plenty. Duplicates were merged on loose and pragmatic-at-time judgements, some by shapes, some by meanings(!), some left as duplicates.
It seems to me that this had lead to a situation that lasted at least some period of time, that Chinese UTF-8 strings on a computer displayed in a mishmash of Japanese and Chinese fonts, Chinese one filling the gaps of Japanese rather than the other way around, which was frustrating(imagine top 10 most used characters of alphabets in Comic Sans and rest Arial), and solved by that regulation(the regulatory setup is a Chinese national GB or GB/T standard and enforcement of "applicable industrial standards", I believe).
There are such attempted solutions to this problem of same-system Chinese-Japanese text coexistence, such as registering all the Japanese Kanji as first choices on Unicode IVS map along legitimate Japanese variants, such that each Japanese characters with the IVS suffix sequences per each characters would be in Japanese form. Obviously there's no such font that this is going to work well with, and it's also unnecessary bloat and just a committee backstage influencing war.
The moral of the story is, the "it's all Kanji after all" approach never worked, simultaneous Chinese-and-Japanese support in Unicode and Unicode-based apps is a mess, and it has to be fixed higher up at some point in the future.
I don't disagree. The only practical strategy now is that if you know the text/user is Japanese, use a specifically Japanese font (Windows and MacOS have a few built in options), not just one that has the CJK codepoints.
> For example on an android phone, set language to Japanese and all kanji is in a Japanese font by default.
If it's an app that uses the native UI toolkit, sure. If it's using one of the package-it-up frameworks, you'd better hope the developer configured it correctly.
> For more niche uses you can usually set the font or language on a per app basis.
You very often can't, or it's impractically difficult for regular users. Try changing your locale but not your language and watch how many programs screw it up.
> You make sure to use a Japanese specific font (not just a CJK one) if the language setting is JA. It's not that hard...
I need to use Japanese language in a setting outside of the local language setting. Even my wife needs that (she's a native Japanese). Just switching everything to JA is simply not an option, and shouldn't be necessary if just UTF-8 could do the right thing. Granted, it does, to a certain point. But sometimes there are issues which I haven't been able to work around.
One of the main reasons I am bearish on Sakana.AI is that for a Japanese-first LLM to work you need to solve a context sensitive language where all 4 alphabets intermingle in a given body of text. So when you are hiring Japanese-speaking PhD's (an already small market), to solve this problem you are moving your attention away from building a great product to optimizing edge cases.
People exoticise Japanese a lot and it's not really warranted IMO. 4 scripts do not make AI-related tasks meaningfully more complex, and context awareness is already an important problem that any AI will need to solve.
> Japan simply missed the opportunity to develop a globally relevant PC software industry.
The PC software industry was organized around American operating systems that couldn't even display Japanese text without having your path separating backslash turn into a yen symbol.
Pretty much nobody outside of the USA or USA-based multinationals developed a globally relevant PC (no non-PC) software industry.
There are only some rare exceptions to this like SAP (German).
All the American software was developed for English speakers, with internationalization as an afterthought. Not for the global market at all.
You could not take this approach in Japan, like oh, I'm gonna write a word processor for people here in Japan and then we will throw it over the wall to an i18n team to internationalize it and sell it everywhere else.
China also has the 996 working system in many companies. Anecdotally from many Chinese friends studying in the US, they virtually all agree: they would prefer to work for an American company or even a Japanese company, but not a Chinese company, with a very short list of exceptions (e.g., miHoYo). I think China does get results with its businesses, but it's not as if that comes for free or at anywhere close to the same cost for people in the US.
We're back to keiretsu. They're called Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix. Each has its own closed world, moat, and small vendors subservient to it.
Depends how you count. Walmart is biggest by revenue. If you look at profit Berkshire Hathaway is most profitable followed by Apple, Microsoft, Google, JP Morgan.
Citation needed; Netflix has a ~$350 billion market cap [0]. Google has one of $2.227 trillion [1], and 10.25% of its revenue is attributed to Youtube revenue. Since I haven't found a quick reference to youtube's net worth, let's assume it's 10.25% of $2.227T, which is ~$222 billion, making YT smaller than Netflix.
Regardless of numbers, Netflix is nowhere near as influential as the others. It’s just a website that plays videos, and one can easily live life without it.
The other big companies are much harder to avoid, they’re basically infrastructure.
If Netflix closed up shop tomorrow, there'd be a long a thread here, lots of headlines, and lots of whining, but at this point there are a ton of other streaming services and most of us would shrug and move on. Netflix has been on my bubble for a good couple of years and has only marginally kept my monthly subscription.
In fact, I'm still somewhat angry at Netflix for wiping out disc rental and then killing their own DVD by mail which was a good source of reliable one+ year old movies.
I mean it's all about production companies (and the quality/quantity of licensed content). And Netflix increasingly just doesn't justify a premium price for what it delivers.
It's also pretty easy to live life without Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. At least for me. I'm not counting services hosted on AWS. Removing that still leaves Apple and Facebook, which I use not at all, and have no desire to.
A better argument against Netflix is that they don't have a closed ecosystem. Netflix does make some movies, but Disney has much more of a moat and ecosystem.
I work for a fortune 500 Japanese tech company developing software.
Its a cultural problem Japanese cant create software. There is no sense of "Hacking".
For them everything has to be formalized with detailed processors, costing and KPIs. There is a huge bureaucracy to slow down development as much as possible and complain when things get delayed.
They look at the company as a factory that output lines of code, bugs as product defects and treat developers as factory line workers who are insignificant and easily replaceable.
A lot of people in this thread have been mentioning the importance of risk tolerance in Japan's (lack of a) software industry. He gives some good examples of just how omnipresent that risk aversion can be; from getting funding, to renting an apartment, to finding a significant other, running a startup makes your life much more difficult in Japan than in eg the SF Bay. He also gives a bit more context on the matter of overall software quality, and I think that's an important point: writing assembly for small-scale electronics or cars or industrial machines is just as much "software" as writing a modern web app.
Also, while I'm not universally endorsing Japanese web design; dense UIs for the win!
"I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports."
"In a Japanese company, people in general do not speak openly in meetings, because they are afraid of disrupting group harmony. Ideas need to be circulated in a series of one-on-one discussions--this is called "newashi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi). This means that for a group of N people, it's N*(N-1)/2 private discussions that need to happen. And everyone needs to be in agreement and comfortable that the idea is "right", and that there is nothing the slightest bit off with it. Only after all these discussions have happened and everyone is fully bought-in, there is then a meeting to "rubber stamp" the idea."
"While the risk-adverse and face-losing-adverse traits of the Japanese culture can explain the (in general) slow development and response of Japanese companies (not limited to software), they cannot explain the quirky, often ugly and not user friendly UI of Japanese software. Germans are a bit risk-adverse, too, though not comparable to Japanese, their software, especially enterprise software are showing the same rigid UI and in general difficulty to use. In fact, you can not use them without reading the manual or being trained and that is expected from the end users, too! In a stark contrast, user-oriented software today are very intuitive, offers pleasant onboarding thus every user can use them casually."
"The same holds for Germany. Beside the "no pain no gain" attitude, the pursuit of "perfection" leads to weird outcomes. For example, the music band Kraftwerk dissolved because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded."
Is it really true that the Kraftwerk "dissolved"? (They do tours still in 2024)
Also the claim the reason anyone left because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded - where can I see any confirmation of that?
I truly believe that. Their close to the chest self-taught masters of programming did not scale well. They competed even within companies this way - every coder having to produce their own libraries. If they embraced open source earlier and in a big way they could have catapulted themselves to success but they also have a Not Invented Here attitude...
The fact that I could code better than them (performance wise) was regarded as a marvel.
This is actually really interesting history, but I wonder about apps like Line, which the Japanese still prefer. It's not a great app, but it's a user app, not a corporate one.
I find it unreliable and feature poor compared to western messaging apps. Calls drop/lag/cut out all the time, notifications fail to get delivered, and so on
I find it feature richer than Whatsapp and FB Messenger, but that is not saying much. I am still salty that Whatsapp is the most popular application back home in Europe...
Compared to Telegram, I find Telegram to be much faster and robust, and the multi-device synchronization works better. IMHO, it is Telegram's strongest selling point.
But there is one LINE's feature that I really like and I have not seen in other messaging apps: the ability to create albums with your friends, to organize your pictures properly instead of having an endless stream of disorganized pictures.
The biggest problem I see with it, almost daily, is that I'm trying to type in a sticker, by typing some text that brings up relevant stickers, and it just doesn't work. Usually, I can type in something like "happy" and a bunch of stickers will pop up that are relevant to that keyword, and I can select one and send it. But sometimes (it seems once a day lately), it gets into some state where it just never brings up the stickers at all, no matter how long I wait. So I have to kill the app and restart it, and it works again.
I almost never use it for voice calls these days, so I haven't seen issues there. But the sticker thing happens to me frequently, and it's not a good sign I think. I'm guessing the app has gotten too bloated and now weird bugs like this are showing up.
FWIW, this is on par with reviews for _anything_ in Japan.
The fanciest and most recommended ramen shops don't crack 3.9 on local review sites, the mindset is completely different from "oh nothing went wrong, 5 stars I guess!".
Ha, I'm reminded of reviews from Vietnam where you'd usually see restaurants get destroyed in reviews because they are 20 cents more expensive than some place else. Price was such a much bigger part of the review than other places I've lived.
Yes that one. It works very effectively for me and I've not had any dropped calls, except for the obvious where we one of us loses network connectivity.
Interestingly, Line originally was developed by Naver which is a South Korean company, although it's gone through several changes of corporate control since.
It's jointly owned by Naver and Softbank. A few months ago, there was a public outcry in Korea when the Japanese government threatened to twist Naver's arm to give up its share of Line, and South Korea's inexplicably pro-Japanese government stayed mum. With both governments enjoying abysmal public support, I have no idea how it will eventually be settled.
Why wouldn't Koreans care? We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries. Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind.
It was also popular in Indonesia, but the userbase eventually moved to WhatsApp and Discord.
People who run "official accounts" on LINE in Indonesia eventually moved to Twitter (the Indonesia-specific "base"/"menfess" accounts/culture were originally from similar LINE accounts allowing users to send anonymous messages so it can be relayed to many users, as well as from K-pop roleplaying on Twitter) and Instagram (for news, after LINE Today, their news aggregator, closed), too.
I read this book a long time ago. It provided some insights on the role of Japan's difficulty with foreign languages in the 1980s and the desire to create AI translation. The "Fifth Generation project" was a massive government and big-business joint venture that amounted to almost nothing.
The author explores why with some surprises along the way. I would say it is like the "Mythical Man Month" from the Japanese side of computing.
The book also opened my eyes to the difficulty of mastering Japanese.
That was an actual question: why is there a space in the link, why not just post the actual URL? Is there some technical limitation I'm unaware that makes it impossible to select that space char and delete it?
Not to mention, 100 people could manually edit the link, or one person could edit the comment - the latter is clearly the better option.
>Cutler found what he terms "the worst code he has ever seen," some IME code developed in Japan. He states that the code had no regard for bugs and that it got to a point where they couldn't fix some of the overflow plugs.
In the very same article he said:
>However, progress on this project halted as Windows XP's security had gone from bad to worse. Cutler states that his team alone fixed over 5,000 bugs while turning over some of the system's code.
His team fixed over 5000 mostly security bugs in Windows XP, and he still thinks it's still better than "some IME code developed in Japan". The mind boggles.
I think it’s not so much that the code doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. It’s that it’s an absolutely impenetrable mess. You’d never know if there were bugs unless your customer (or QA team) runs into them.
> The reason Japanese software development stopped advancing in the 1980s had nothing to do with a lack of talented software developers.
I disagree. Software is very bottom-up-orientated. The culture that developers create is a very strong influence on the industry as a whole. And Japan had for very pragmatic reason a serious lack of this. PC usage in Japan was for a very long time very low. Partly because they are expensive and big, and most Japanese homes are small and have no place for them. And partly because Japan has a very elaborated culture around their language and analog tools, which was hard to transfer to the digital world. This ultimately resulted in highly specialized, small and focused devices, which left no room for people to grow the same deep software-culture that other industry nations had. And this resulted also in kids not being embraced by computers from early on, preventing the growth of a serious foundation for the next generation in the 90s+.
Funny enough, we see the same now happening with younger people in western countries, who also are lacking serious competence in PC-usage, leading to similar effects.
Young Japanese computer hobbyists created a number of small games companies in the 1980s and 90s and many of them went on to become large world wide successes. Most people would be aware of the big dogs like Sega and Nintendo, but companies like HAL, Game Freak, Square, and Koei were all tiny startups at one point.
It seems implied in this article that Japan has struggled in consumer or business software of the sort that startups in SV make. It would be interesting to discuss why that is while they became quite successful in games software.
South Korea and China both adopted the Keiretsu model for conglomerates due to Japan's Flying Geese doctrine, yet both still have fairly robust software scenes.
If I were a betting man, my hunch would be the collapse of domestic financing during the Asian Financial Crisis and Great Financial Crisis.
Japanese asset managers who concentrated on tech like SoftBank, Nomura, and MUFG had better options in Asia (South Korea, China, India) or in North America (USA) to invest in with better returns compared to Japan.
This is why SoftBank has always been a prominent checkwriter in those markets.
I mean it is _better_ than Japan, especially after 2015. But Korean software scene is still pretty bad. I still have nightmares about ActiveX/IE6 era. It's just comes down to whether the management sees software as a product or as cost centre. When it is seen as a cost centre, they tend to start a chain of sub-contracts which is never a good thing for software quality.
Video games are technically software and we all know the Japanese are highly skilled in making them, with few to none glitches, etc.
My view is different: software is a response to a need. And the Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without software. They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them.
Sometimes software is a solution to a trust problem, or a reliability problem, or a synchronization problem. The Japanese are trustworthy, reliable and punctual in general and do not have those problems.
>They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them.
You obviously don't live in Japan. No one here uses faxes unless they're at work, doing business with old-fashioned companies. It's not much different than the USA, where fax machines are commonly used by lawyers and realtors.
> I have about 30 of these article in progress, and that’s far more than I’ll ever develop into podcasts. I’ve been thinking of starting a Substack newsletter to publish some of these in a much shorter form. Let me know what you think. Is that a good idea?
No, If you do that you get the satisfaction from the shorter format and won't have fuel to get around to doing the podcasts of the same topic.
Japan makes beautiful things like Mario and Katamari Damacy and El Shaddai. America makes ugly things, like Facebook and Twitter and Android/iOS (Stallman is right). The SoCal money-machines make whorehouses and speakeasies look like social reform institutions. If only such a killer could make its way over here...
Because innovation tends to come from younger people who have bright ideas, or want to make a name for themselves, or simply because they have free time.
You also need other people to work with, so even if you have an idea, it’s much easier when there are a lot of people in the area with the right skill set.
With a significant declining trend in population, especially in younger people, there just wouldn’t be as many opportunities.
Japanese software is not the only place where we are seeing a decline in innovation. This is the country that that provided us a lot of modern electronics as well.
35% of people are now over 65 in Japan. A much larger percentage of the economy now has to be dedicated to taking care of the elderly. The percentage of elderly in 1950 was tiny.
Some other aspects are covered in a favorite paper and recent book:
- How Law Made Silicon Valley by Anupam Chander https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a... compares the US, EU, Japan, and South Korea policy including copyright, intermediary, and privacy and US policy was more permissive and very importantly, offered more certainty earlier, to internet entrepreneurs; I don't recall the Japan-specific details but the abstract includes the line "Innovations that might be celebrated in the United States could lead to imprisonment in Japan."
- Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition by Jeffrey Ding (not open access that I know of) uses Japan/US competition in IT as a case study in its critique of the idea that "leading sectors" determine economic and ultimately geopolitical dominance, roughly the idea that early innovators capture global monopoly profits which ultimately accrue to the state/military; instead it argues what's determinative is diffusion of general purpose technologies throughout an economy. In IT, Japan attempted to translate "leading sector" theory into reality with its 5th generation computing project, a widely known failure. At the same time, it was decades behind the US in both establishing CS as a discipline at top universities and making CS education widely available across state/equivalent universities.
I imagine there's substantial interaction between the above theories and the keiretsu system but I don't recall (which doesn't mean much) anything on that in the above two works.
> First, as the cold war heated up in the 40s and 50s, America’s idealistic vision for a democratic and progressive Japan took a back seat to the more practical and pressing need to develop Japan into a bulwark against Communism.
Funny how protecting the ideals of progressive democracy from Communism so often involved suppressing those ideals ourselves. Beat the Commies to the punch, I guess.
Post-soviet Estonia si an exception rather than the rule, plus it has little industry other than digital services with next to no manufacturing compared to Japans which si at the cutting edge of manufacturing and little digitalization.
In General post-soviet countries have a larger focus on the digital industry as it was the lowest hanging fruit to build up the economy quickly as the other industries were not competitive after the fall of communism, too far behind the cutting edge west, and too expensive compared to the cheap east, so internet and software it is.
But it does improve life. If you can't see the massive improvements in efficiency, or the benefit of doing any paperwork in 5 minutes from the comfort of your own house instead of wasting half a day or more going to whatever physical office, I don't know what to tell you.
We see similar factors in Germany, which I find interesting. To the point where Volkswagen is investing billions into Rivian to save their software side. I've never heard anything good from developers I know who worked at VW or any other German manufacturer.
Having worked at a number of hardware manufacturers, a lot of them really don't understand software at all. They look at software as if it were just another line item on the BOM: 12 qty 6-32 screw, 2 qty rubber gasket, 1 qty plastic case... OH AND 1 qty "firmware software thinggy," that we add to the product at station 244 on the assembly line. Go make some software that meets the requirements and spoon it into the product so we can ship. No thought about longevity, updates, security threats, intercompatibility with other devices and standards, UX, accessibility, the software ecosystem, nothing... Software is just another part number that's supplied by a supplier and bolted onto the "real" physical product.
So it's no surprise when software companies come in and eat this mentality for lunch when they decide to come up with a competing hardware product.
Your comment wonder me. As I hear from CS community like a mirror words - because semiconductor manufacturing is prohibitively expensive, cs becomes too abstract.
But my own exp, mostly confirm your words, even when I sure see just my side of whole picture and I'm attracting to explain my exp as regional specific (I'm in Ukraine, exUSSR, and people here conservative and share old USSR habits).
- Graduates don't apply to a job, but to a company. The company decides where to place then. The first years are generally a rotation between departments until it is decided where to allocate them. This means that they will be often misplaced in positions for which they don't have the necessary background nor motivation to learn or contribute because in 6 months they'll be somewhere else.
- It is not uncommon for developers not to have a CS or coding background. They learn on the job how to "program" but lack best practices, etc. and figure out things as they go.
- Standing out is frown upon
- People who are good at their jobs are generally rewarded with more work. One can know who the manager's favourite is by who busy the person is. At the end, the good ones end up burned out, over-stressed and brain death.
- Looking busy or hard working is more important than the outcome.
- Combine the above, and there is no point to do a good job: There is no reward other than more pressure to deliver but on the other hand, as long as you look busy, not delivering is not "punished". Clear what option most people will take.
- As already commented, decisions are top down and often very conservative replicating old methods digitally.
- Many customer facing products will try to cover as many cases as possible to avoid complains, perceived discrimination or causing trouble, for example. This results in over bloated software, websites, flyers full of information, etc.
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