
Doing Business in Japan (2014) - bholdr
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
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partycoder
I had a chat with a Japanese coworker some time ago.

Some of the Japanese addiction for work was to distract themselves from the
destructive effects of WW2.

By working, they thought they would gradually turn their homeland into a
better place and become a better society.

Now we can see some of the side effects of the excess work, like a reduced
birth rate, increased suicide rate, growing debt, death from overwork
(karoshi), people doing secret nap meetings or sleeping in their desks
(inemuri), etc.

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Havoc
>people doing secret nap meetings

Haha that's one way to solve the problem

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glandium
Previous discussion with 300+ comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8573992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8573992)

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mrottenkolber
> The Japanese economy is roughly 1/3rd the public sector, 1/3rd low-
> productivity firms like restaurants or traditional craftsmen, and 1/3rd
> high-productivity household-name megacorps.

Why are restaurants and traditional craftsmen considered “low-productivity?”
That really strikes me as odd, I have the opposite connotation. I.e. the
former being only sustainable as long as they serve a direct demand, while the
latter spends most of the time for leviathan’s sake, and is more focused on
generating demand (advertising budgets) than solving problems (leviathan can’t
be sustained when there are no problems left).

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brianwawok
Well, the average McDonald's makes something like 40k profit per employee
year, and Apple makes something like a million bucks per employee year... So
the salary of the two tends to reflect that.

(Numbers made up but I bet they Aren't that far off)

That is what productivity means here. Not how hard or socially useful the
product is. If we all have service jobs, we all would make the same pay.
Productivity is why software developer can make good pay.

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user5994461
$1.8M per employee for Apple

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-
per...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per-
employee-2015-10)

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lultimouomo
That's revenue. While Apple is hugely profitable, I'm pretty sure it has great
manufacturing costs and per-employee profits are a fraction of that (the first
google result says $0.4M).

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foota
Profit includes employee cost though. It seems those should be excluded.

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luckydata
Depends if you're calculating gross or net.

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princeb
> ruthlessly capitalist racists

actually, these people are not racists. the racists are the ones not hiring
outside their race, even if it's cheaper. the ruthlessly capitalist is an
equal opportunity discriminator.

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danieltillett
I have always thought that capitalism is the grim reaper of other ism's like
racism, sexism, ageism, etc. If a society underprices a group of people for
irrational reasons then a capitist will recognise this and solve the problem.

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edpichler
This description of how business is done on Japan makes me sad. It can't be
all true, I really hope I didn't get the jokes and the author is exaggeration
facts more than he described.

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sdrothrock
I've been living and working in Japan for almost a decade; if there are parts
you're wondering if are exaggeration, feel free to comment here and I'll try
to give you a second viewpoint. :)

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edpichler
This text makes me curious about some points on Japan's economy:

\- How do be innovative without taking risks? Is Japan innovative? (May the
answer is: they developed techniques to innovate without taking risks)

\- How Japan is wealthy if "risk and returns" are co-related? (May the reason
is because they are the country with most robots per inhabitant what makes
them very very productive and wealthy)

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Question1101
I wonder: how is it being an artist in Japan? How does working part-time work?
How is the culture for people working in academia?

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tjpnz
I work for one of Japan's largest tech companies and somewhat fit the
salaryman description he provides (although I put in no where close to the
hours he mentions). The bit about what happens to those who move companies
stopped me cold. Is this really accurate for what might happen if somebody
jumped from one of these companies to a startup?

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godmodus
as a 32, english bachelor holder, current CS student with mainly experience in
linux and scripting, this was some of the most terrifying prose i've read.

this will give me many a sleepless nights.

thank you.

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apsdsm
It shouldn't. As a 35 year old who never got a CS degree but currently works
in a tech company in Osaka, the whole article scanned like it was mostly
relevant 10 years ago to me.

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twblalock
Yeah, I think the article's description of working hours is a bit extreme. In
my time in Japan, I noticed two distinct rush hours on the trains and
expressways in major Japanese cities: one around 8-9am, and another around
5-6pm. That seems like a pretty normal working day to me. If everyone was
putting in 8 hours of overtime, the evening rush hour would start a lot later.
(And it's not like the employees are going home and continuing to work for
many more hours. Remote work is not common in Japan.)

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mattnumbe
I agree about the rush hour on the trains in the cities. I also live in a
large city in Japan and have to battle to get on the train around 8am and
6:30pm. The guys that are working all the over time tend to work in the really
big name companies (Toyota, Honda, Mitsui, etc.) which have their main working
centers outside of the big cities. We have a lot of engineers who work at
these locations and it seems that the minimum amount of paid overtime is
40hr/month for our employees (I have interviewed engineers here who have
reported working 110hr+ of overtime in a month, which is illegal here). The
problem is, these are all reported paid overtime hours for contract employees.
Patrick is talking about lifetime employees of the large firms, who do a lot
of service overtime, which is unreported and un-paid. When I was an English
teacher I was often hired by these firms to do 6 month intensive courses for
employees who were moving to an English speaking country for 3-5 years. These
guys had an unbelievable amount of work for that six months and often slept at
the office (which has showers and changing rooms) for their 3 or 4 hours of
downtime.

So I think you're right, that not everyone is doing this, but there is a
certain circle where it is highly expected.

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Kenji
_90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment_

I don't believe it. 90+ is absolutely insane. If you are working this much,
you seriously have to reevaluate your life choices - living under a bridge is
probably healthier for you.

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donw
There's a reason that Japanese has a convenient word for "working oneself to
death": karoshi.

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entwife
Being that women may have a harder time adapting to salary man position,
perhaps they would be better hires for Japanese startups?

~~~
intro-b
is there speculation that Japan might be, in the future few years, a promising
place to establish startups and source promising talent? intuitively, i feel
like there should be an amount of young engineers/designers/marketers and
other professionals disinterested in typical salaryman positions at large
corporations

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tomcam
Unlikely. Population is declining precipitously. The rate of reproduction has
plummeted in Japan. There aren't nearly as many young people as there used to
be. Why would they want to stay in a declining country rather than go to
places where conformity is not prized, being an entrepreneur is prized, and
there is a growing market?

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Panoramix
Irrelevant. There's no link between population decline and startup culture.
There are still millions of young people growing up over there. There are
multiple reasons not to go to the US, with language and atrocious visas at the
top of the list.

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jpatokal
Err, is too. As one simple example, when the electorate is heavily skewed
towards older people (and in Japan, and this skew is further exacerbated by
how low-density rural areas have higher weight in the Diet), politicians will
enact policies that favor the elderly at the expense of the young, Japan's
increasingly Ponzi-like public pension scheme being a prime example.

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dismantlethesun
What kind of policies would better favour the young?

There seems to be a lot of "don't give old people this" whenever the question
of age-based rules comes up.

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E14n
Policies that encourage internships and entry level recruitment of young
workers. Policies that encourage the supply of child care, schools, university
access and other services to support families. Access to family medical
insurance.

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gnipgnip
How do the work/startup cultures in other Asian nations compare ?

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kahrkunne
Gee an article about Japan written by a foreigner is incredibly bigoted and
factually incorrect, who would have thought?

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anonymoushn
Can you point out any specific problems?

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biot
[2014] for those getting déjà vu.

