
Why Japan didn’t create the iPod - chaosmachine
http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod
======
rythie
Yes, Japan didn't create the iPod but it doesn't mean they are behind.

I remember showing my black and white iPod to some people in Japan in 2005 and
they had never seen one before. However, if you looked in the shops you could
find 100s of better spec'ed MP3 players, much better than the ones in the U.K.
at the time and much cheaper. I guess the iPod just looked like a over priced
fashion accessory to them.

Then looking at some of the phones people had in 2005 when I was there, people
were able to do all sorts of things, like look up train times with complete
ease. At the time was very difficult on European phones.

The author of the article seems to think that it's progress to plug your MP3
player or phone into a computer, but it's not. For example look at iTunes, I
can only put music on from one machine and can't get it off again (using
iTunes at least), it's needlessly tied to a single machine, when I don't want
it tied to any machine. Also people don't want to plug their digital camera
into a computer to upload pictures, they just want to send them straight to
the internet from their phone, the Japanese were doing this long before the
iPhone+Twitpic.

I think not requiring a computer as the digital hub is the future, not the
past.

~~~
irons
Your friends in Japan had never seen an iPod in 2005? Apple claimed the iPod
had 60 percent of Japanese market share as early as November of that year.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/nov/16japan.html>

It kept the lead until September of 2009, when Sony crowed that the Walkman
had outsold the iPod the previous week... because the iPod's share had been
cannibalized by the iPhone. Nice work, Sony!

[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ansrP2IonbRA)

"Better spec'ed" devices that didn't involve a computer necessarily cram more
user interface onto a limited surface, which is why almost by definition,
those devices were harder to use.

The iPod won not just because its interface was better, but because there was
so much less of it. Offloading complex functionality to a general-purpose
computing device made the iPod a better music device. There's really no
getting around this point, even if the iPod's successors are becoming general-
purpose computing devices themselves.

~~~
rythie
Well they weren't my friends as such just normal non-tech Japanese that I met
in various hostels around March 2005. It seemed like it was just getting
established at that time, whilst a few had heard of them, the people I had met
had never used one. I note that even in the U.K. 2003 very few of my non-tech
friends were aware of the iPod still.

The big things at the time in Japan in March 2005 seemed to be the PSP (just
released), High Definition TVs (there was one in a shop but were impossible to
find in the U.K. at the time) and 100Mbs broadband. Oh yeah and I saw 3D
cinema in the World EXPO whilst I was there. Mostly these things are being
touted still as new in 2010.

I'd agree that the iPod won because they made a nice device, but I think
that's because that is what the American/European markets demand. However
there are lots of markets in the world where functionality and price are lot
more important than usability, like the massive emerging ones in India and
China.

------
TorKlingberg
I spent some time living in Japan, and I recognize a lot in this article. When
I came to Japan I was surprised by how people are really not computer savvy in
general. Most families have a computer, but only one, it's in the kitchen and
nobody is very good at using it. This is strange, because people are quite
tech-savvy in general and not at all techno-phobic like many non-geeks in the
west. Japanese mobile phones have been awesome for years and there are plenty
or really cool mobile web services. Non-mobile websites on the other hand
frequently look like a mid-90s abdomination, only with more colors and
animated gifs. Perhaps that is just a different preference in layout style
though.

Computer gaming really doesn't exist in Japan. It's all on consoles, handhelds
and phones. Few Japanese have even heard of World of Warcraft, Starcraft,
Quake, Counterstrike or Civilization. I think there are some erotic games for
PC because the console makers will not give them licenses. So the few who know
about computer gaming think it's for perverts.

The authors explanation seems reasonable to me. Japan simply took a different
direction towards appliances rather than general-purpose computers, and has
continued on that path. Appliances are easy to use, but are far less suitable
for hacking.

This means you really don't find many "hackers" in Japan. There are plenty of
nerds, but few of them are into programming. Similar to my impression of
China, software is seen as a branch of engineering like any other. Software
companies will actually hire developers with no programming experience, as
long as they have a good engineering degree and seem like a person that would
fit into the company. They didn't lie on the CV either, the company fully
expect to put them in front of computers with "Perl for beginners".

On a side note, I really don't like the western HR buzzword bingo either,
where having exactly the right acronyms on your CV means more than your
aptitude and actual ability to program. Is there any country in the world that
strikes the right balance in general?

~~~
kazuya
I am here on HN to contribute a different view about this allegedly exotic
country, again.

> Computer gaming really doesn't exist in Japan. It's all on consoles,
> handhelds and phones. Few Japanese have even heard of World of Warcraft,
> Starcraft, Quake, Counterstrike or Civilization.

Computer gaming does exist. They aren't aware of the titles you mentioned just
because they aren't localized. Many Japanese have difficulty with English
despite of the amount of education throw in, but that's another story.

> This means you really don't find many "hackers" in Japan.

Hackers do exist. Again just because... well they don't speak English and
often not visible to the hacker community at large. However I admit English is
lingua franca of programming, and often I have to bridge them.

Re CV, it's not the same CV as in the western, in fact it's almost wrong call
it CV. On the contrary, many Japanese job applicants assume the CV same as
their counterparts and fail miserably.

------
_delirium
As a nitpick, this isn't actually true: "Before the advent of computers,
katakana was never used to write entire sentences." There were quite a few
books written entirely in katakana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
since it was seen as more accessible to the uneducated poor. Japanese
socialists in particular tended to use katakana as an anti-elitist gesture.
For a while there was even an active reform movement aiming to abolish kanji
entirely, similar to the one in Korea that successfully abolished Chinese
characters there in favor of the phonetic Hangul (the Korean switch happened
in the 1890s, a time when the Japanese debate was also particularly heated).

~~~
w1ntermute
_the one in Korea that successfully abolished Chinese characters there in
favor of the phonetic Hangul_

That's actually not true. Hanja (the Korean name for Chinese characters) are
still used extensively by newspapers, in academia, and in legal professions.
As in Japanese, it provides a method of distinguishing between homonyms, which
can be particularly important when writing contracts and the like, where
precision of meaning is essential.

Just like with Japanese, Korean has a large number of homonyms in its Sino-
Korean vocabulary because while Chinese is tonal, Korean is not. Moreover, the
more formal Sino-Korean vocabulary is in prominent usage in the aforementioned
situations.

While hanja use has certainly declined over the years, and many Korean youth
these days are incapable of recognizing even the most basic of hanja (largely
because of fluctuating education policy that has at times entirely eliminated
hanja education), that was certainly not the case prior to the last 40 or so
years.

Ironically, the place where hanja would be the easiest to read/write - on the
computer - is the place where it is almost entirely absent. Take a look at the
Korean language Wikipedia for an example of this; Hanja are almost always used
merely for the purpose of disambiguating a word written in hangul.

~~~
_delirium
Thanks for the correction! For some reason I had thought the change to Hangul
was earlier and more complete than it actually appears to be. The fact that I
mostly encounter Korean online, where as you note it's almost exclusively
Hangul, might be part of the reason for that perception.

------
allenbrunson
I thought conventional wisdom on this subject was that Japanese culture prizes
conformity, so their equivalents of Jobs, Woz, Gates, et al would have been
strongly discouraged from doing their own thing. The other side of that coin
was that they are better at commoditizing technologies first invented in the
U.S., like industrial robots, and RAM production.

Does this article mean that my assumptions are out of date?

~~~
jbm
My sense is that the conditions at small and mid-sized Japanese companies are
reminiscent of the early 20th century, and are not compatible with producing
innovation at a level necessary to sustain the economy.

Some things that I feel contribute (take them for what they are worth)

a) I haven't met a single female Japanese employee who hasn't been the victim
of power harassment or other forms of emotional abuse. I can honestly say that
80% of women I have met at 5 different companies have been on some kind of
psychological medication to cope with the stress at work. (Goodbye many useful
innovations from female employees.)

b) I have met people who work 15 hour days; albeit where work consists of 6
hours of doing nothing, 4 hours of work, and then another 5 hours of waiting
for the boss to leave. (Reasons include saving face - and poor housing
conditions.)

c) The best university graduates tend to go directly to big companies; they
don't create their own companies, because of the number of practical
difficulties. (being accepted for & paying for rental properties, getting
loans, etc..)

d) Everything has a big city perspective, since practically everyone has to
come to Tokyo to do something important.

I can go through a hundred reasons; but the idea that there is some simple
cultural issue that could be chopped away like a Gordian knot to solve the
problem is a bit too simplistic.

~~~
patio11
We should talk about hacking Japan some time. Everything insane about large
Japanese corporations just spells market opportunity. (In addition to the
issues in the above post -- which I partially agree with -- you could pick
"Engineers are grossly underpaid relative to skill", "No socially productive
work is expected by anyone below the age of about 35", "Some of the best
educations in the world are wasted on undifferentiated 'office work'", etc
etc.)

~~~
jbm
Dude, you're seriously welcome to stop by sometime and eat with me. I'm sure
we'd have a million ideas. Mail me sometime (jawaad.mahmood at!_? i do.t
softbank d.ot j.p)

What gets to me is how there is absolutely no respect for younger workers; the
idea is that they need to get calloused or be "hungry" before they have a
shot. As if a clean-cut young man has never had a good idea in his life.

As for engineers being underpaid; there was an article in Asahi about how
engineers being paid 5 million yen in Japan go to Silicon Valley and make
about 10 mil. It's nonsensical.

(I'm not sure how up I am on the education system of Japan, but that probably
belongs in another conversation)

~~~
patio11
You Tokyo engineers and your insanely high wages! Five million yen ($55k),
hah. In Nagoya, the Employer Who Must Not Be Named exercises essentially
monopsony on engineering labor, and they pay roughly according to the
traditional yardstick: 2.X million yen for 20-somethings, 3.X million yen for
30-somethings, etc.

~~~
jbm
If you are in Nagoya, you have my sincere pity.

I have a friend who went from Montreal to Nagoya with Ubisoft; he was telling
me about the terrible conditions and the utter inability of companies to re-
invest into the company itself. They wouldn't even pay for a proper screen;
they were using CRTs or something like that.

It's truly bullshit because you can take 100% of any money you spend on the
company off your taxable income (as long as you have proper receipts). It
makes no sense for a company NOT to upgrade its faculties in Japan.

~~~
patio11
Your friend may be finding a company- or industry-specific issue there. My
company has occasional frugality attacks but Nagoya is _cough_ no stranger to
capital-intensive industry _cough_.

------
sliverstorm
I have always felt English works as a language to interact with computers
pretty well, perhaps one of the best or the best. It could be argued this is
just because I speak it as a primary language, but this article illuminates
exactly why I believe it is a good candidate. Our character set is very small
and very simple, which is important. There are sets with fewer (the indigenous
Hawaiian language IIRC has 13 letters), but English is also very widespread,
and words don't wind up crazy long (like in Hawaiian).

Other European languages with the Latin alphabet could be fair contenders as
well because of this, although the ones with accents are a bit more complex,
and none of them are as widespread that I am aware of.

So actually really what I'm getting at is not 'go English!' but 'go Latin
alphabet!'

~~~
asnyder
I believe Hebrew would work pretty well too. There are 22 letters, it's also
phonetically very similar to Latin characters. Most words are also shorter in
Hebrew, but are phonetically equivalent to an English sounding word. For
example, "Comment" could be "כמנת", thus 4 characters instead of 6, and are
phonetically equivalent.

~~~
xsmasher
I'm not sure it passes the 8x8 pixel font test, though.

~~~
sliverstorm
Suddenly another interesting thing springs to mind. Punctuation has become all
kinds of useful for computers in the shell, in programming, etc. Things like /
for folders is intuitive and easy to see. Do many other languages,
particularly the better candidates w/ lower letter counts such as Hebrew, have
punctuation beyond the period?

Edit: good for them, Hebrew does have punctuation.

~~~
_delirium
Hebrew does, but only really because it imported it from modern European
languages recently. Classical Hebrew and the religious Hebrew of the middle
ages didn't have much in the way of punctuation, but when it was revived in
the 19th century as a living language by European Zionists, it borrowed
(adapted versions of) the punctuation common to European languages of the
time.

------
Jun8
There should be companion pieces: "Why China didn't create the iPod" and "Why
Europe (Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc.) didn't create the iPod". Japan and
these places are all very tech-savy but their cultures are very different than
that in the US, you can almost think of it as different solutions to the same
equation.

Simplifying and summing up, I think the arguments go like this: * In Japan,
the conformity culture, bureaucracy in big companies, and lack of foreign
brain power and venture capital is the problem (The Economist was saying that
Japan has the lowest foreign technical investment in developed countries). *
In China, the lack of entrenched copyright culture is the problem, in fact,
taking a product and hacking to add new features is prized. Also, good product
design design and customer feedback is unknown. * Europe does have excellent
designers; however, it lacks a start-up worshiping culture, in fact they're
given the cold shoulder in government-heavy countries like France. Their modus
operandi is to proceed by government-funded huge projects, e.g. Galileo,
Airbus. And the foreign brain power is there, too.

So, you see, it's not Japan's fault: US has a unique combination of cultural
and other factors that produces things like the iPod. I don't think this is
unrepeatable, though.

~~~
swernli
I agree with points in general, but for one detail:

> Europe does have excellent designers; however, it lacks a start-up
> worshipping culture...

So? The iPod wasn't made by a start-up. The technology wasn't built from an
acquisition of a start-up. I dare say it had absolutely nothing to do with
start-up. Yes, Apple came from a start-up. But to my mind, the distance
between Apple the start-up from a garage and Apple that envisioned the iPod
and DRMed iTunes is sufficient to stop assuming only a start-up could've made
the iPod.

Big companies make things too.

------
astine
Fascinating. Makes one wonder about how many changes in ttrends in technology
were motivated by seamingly insignificant details about of our cultures.
imagine if people had four fingers on each hand, would floating point
arithmetic binary be more intuitive?

~~~
sliverstorm
Before you dream of 4 fingered hands, stop and consider with fewer fingers
counting would have been more difficult in the old, old days, and things would
probably have progressed a bit slower! :)

~~~
bad_user
Not necessarily ... we use base 10 because we have 10 fingers, but that's not
the only choice humans could've made.

Geometry could've played a role ... angle degrees aren't base 10, which makes
measurements of angles / time awkward.

Mayas used base 20. Babylonians used base 60, which is very convenient for
angles since it's also divisible with 3 and 4.

Of course, I don't think there were number systems that had a base not
divisible by 5 (except those that were baseless), and this probably does have
something to do with the number of our fingers.

But I think we would've been just fine with 4 fingers ... we would probably
count our feet too ... and base 16 would've had been the norm.

~~~
yardie
I couldn't imagine what a baseless numbering system could be. A quick google
showed that Roman numerals are baseless. I always assumed they were a form of
base10 and crazy shorthand.

~~~
bad_user
I can't imagine what would be like to live with such a baseless numbering
system ... life had to be much simpler for it to work. Like you didn't pay
your taxes this month? Your possessions are confiscated or it's off with your
head because calculating interest is too much work :)

They probably used counting boards, and specific units for measurement ...
like they knew the size of a legion in their army and said "we have 3 legions,
with 2 other joining, that's 5 legions" instead of ~ "we have 12600 men, 8400
more are joining, that's 21000 men".

------
ilamont
I'm kind of surprised hardware and software interface wasn't really addressed
in the discussion about the iPod. It compares very favorably with the
engineer-designed UIs that many local manufacturers release for consumer
electronics in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia, and I think has helped drive
its success there, as well as the success of the iPhone/iTouch.

------
Simucal
This reminds me of the recent article talking about one of the major obstacles
to China spreading its culture is the complexity of its written language.

Many people think that this fact alone will stop Chinese culture from
dominating and spreading in the same way Western/English culture has spread.

~~~
sliverstorm
Good point. I know tons of nissei (well, the Chinese word for nissei, whatever
it is) who can speak Chinese but completely gave up on writing it, and it
looks to me sorta like the language is going to die in the US as the
generations go on partly because of that. (unless immigration from china stays
high)

~~~
berntb
In a few years we get mobile phone cameras with OCR and reading/translation.
(There might be apps for that on the iPhone already?)

Better living through technology. :-)

~~~
Glide
Oh god, that would be horribly slow.

But I dunno maybe we'll have a future where most people will speak Chinese and
English....

~~~
berntb
Not slow with a server solution and next generation upload speed. (Most of the
OCR could be implemented on a hardware chip, so not a full image has to be
sent.)

------
wisty
Another question - why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe, not
Asia? My guess - movable type works better with latin characters than
thousands of kanji. Cheap (and more varied) books = cheap knowledge for the
masses.

~~~
arethuza
See: [http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-
Societies/dp/03...](http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-
Societies/dp/0393317552)

~~~
wisty
I've read it. GGandS claims Africa and the USA were slowed down by their
geography (vertically oriented continents makes sharing crops and hunting
technology difficult) and native flora (Eurasian wheat and rice is good,
African crops aren't so great, and corn is poor) and fauna (African animals
are too dangerous to domesticate, and the good American animals were wiped out
roughly the time that humans arrived).

He may mention that the Arab world was delayed by climate change
(deforestation, desertification and other reasons?), but I think he says
assumes that Europe only beat Asia to the industrial revolution through dumb
luck.

Thus my suggestion that latin scrip was far superior from 1400 to about now
(when laser printers and LCD screens are replacing green screens, movable type
and dot matrix printers.

~~~
quant18
Woodprint was probably "good enough" to enable widespread book distribution,
especially since it enabled (from the author's point of view) a superior
financing model: [http://www.froginawell.net/china/2009/12/china-where-the-
fut...](http://www.froginawell.net/china/2009/12/china-where-the-future-is-
already-the-past/)

I think the real problem is that the necessary books weren't being written in
the first place (or were suppressed more ruthlessly), not that the cost of
printing them was too high. The massive character set meant that becoming
literate required a huge investment of time/money. And so, at least in China,
all the literati went into civil service jobs, and had little incentive to
publish books which would shake up the status quo.

You may be interested in the book _Asia's Orthographic Dilemma_ by William
Hannas.

------
teyc
The simpler answer is "Steve Jobs isn't Japanese". Any one else remember about
the single button mouse on the Mac?

Aside from the snark remark, my perception of the Japanese is that they are
willing to put up with difficult equipment.

~~~
jbm
The single button mouse is not just Steve Jobs; Jef Raskin makes a very strong
case for it as well.

------
Rauchg
Not a Japanese speaker, but couldn't romanji be used in replacement?

~~~
blintson
No. Japanese has a LOT of homonyms. Kanji are necessary to tell the difference
between all the possible meanings of a given set of sounds^. IANAL^^ but from
my experience it seems Japanese is much better for speaking and reading than
it is for writing. In speech the homonyms are more useful because it's easier
to tell what something means from context. I find that I'm often much terser
in Japanese than in English in speaking and vice-versa in writing.

^The number of kanji in use is actually INCREASING because of auto-completion
software.

^^(I Am Not A Linguist), actually readability of Japanese could go either way,
I'm not sure. On the one hand, the characters are more complex, requiring more
space and processing; on the other, they stand for larger chunks of meaning.
Has anybody here seen any studies on the reading-comprehension speed of
Japanese vs. English?

^^^Also, on readability: Kanji help show the grammatical structure of a
sentence somewhat. The same way you read English words by recognizing their
shape, you can recognize the structure of a Japanese sentence by it's shape.

------
teeja
Good article on a fascinating and complex subject. Thanks.

------
stuartjmoore
They don't focus on UIs? That's what makes the iPod special. Japanese cell
phones are know for their terrible UIs (yet awesome features).

~~~
harshpotatoes
a click wheel scrolling through all 20gb of your music is the king of UI now?

