
Whatever happened to 'Japan'? - chrismealy
http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2011/02/whatever-happened-to-japan.html
======
kylelibra
I spent a couple of weeks in Japan last summer and spent a lot of time
thinking in the context of Japan being a lens through which we can divine
insight towards where we are headed as a country in the future.

There are two major issues facing the Japanese economy. Nepotism of the old
(there is a much more succinct word for this, but it escapes me) and the
incredibly long life expectancy of the population. The nepotism of the old
(someone please tell me the name for this) is causing issues in a few
different ways.

The older government officials are notorious for taking private sector
positions in the very industries they previously regulated. This happens so
frequently there is actually a Japanese phrase to describe it (again I can't
remember for the life of me what this phrase is). In America this happens, but
isn't nearly as blatant or widespread. It Japan it is a near guarantee.

The older population in Japan has a stranglehold on influencing public policy.
They are a huge block of voters who actually turn out for elections. They
consistently vote for, or force politicians to push for, unsustainable short-
term solutions to problems. Japan has a pension crisis similar to our social
security problem. Everyone knows it is unsustainable, yet the older people
vote for it and push the burden onto the young.

The young people entering the economy don't have the job availability they
need. Old people aren't retiring as early as they once were and basically
aren't getting out of the way for the young. People are living longer and need
to work longer. As a result, young workers are forced to be underemployed and
struggle to become part of the economy.

There is also the issue of failure being viewed as shameful. There is very
little entrepreneurial activity going on in the country so they don't have
this potential of creating jobs for the economy.

The long life expectancy is exacerbating all of the above issues. That said,
Japan is a fascinating place, the projections towards the strain social
security and medicare taking on our economy in the future are good proof that
Japan may still offer insight towards our own future.

~~~
xiaoma
> _The young people entering the economy don't have the job availability they
> need. Old people aren't retiring as early as they once were and basically
> aren't getting out of the way for the young. People are living longer and
> need to work longer. As a result, young workers are forced to be
> underemployed and struggle to become part of the economy._

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your argument or not, but it sounds like
you're saying that the more old people work, the fewer young people can, i.e.
there are a fixed number of jobs. If this were truly the way economics worked,
then it would be easiest to find in places full of lazy and/or incapable
people. This isn't the case though.

As long as there exist services or makable things that people want enough to
spend money on, there are always jobs to be done. Maybe the issue is in
education, willingness to retrain, liquidity of job markets, or hurdles to
starting businesses, but I don't believe that old people working means that
young people can't.

If 99% of Japanese companies truly did hire old people into upper management
_who weren't as capable as younger people_ at doing their work, the other 1%
would eat them alive.

~~~
neutronicus
_If 99% of Japanese companies truly did hire old people into upper management
who weren't as capable as younger people at doing their work, the other 1%
would eat them alive._

"Doing one's work" in the modern world does not happen in a vacuum. If
substantial segments of the market refuse to do business with you on the basis
of your age, yeah, you're not going to be quite the stellar businessman.

When performance is measured by how much money you extract from a few
organizations (think government contracting, think enterprise sales, think
manufacturing), institutional prejudice can become one of the primary factors
determining success.

~~~
xiaoma
Yes, that's a reasonable scenario for heavily regulated industries, some B2B
and most government work. It doesn't really address my point about "running
out of jobs", though.

Older people doing jobs of that sort in no way means that there's a shortage
of work younger people could do... unless you're implying that Japanese people
are both

1) unwilling to purchase goods and services outside of large industries that
discriminate against young people

and

2) incapable of creating goods or services non-Japanese would pay for

~~~
neutronicus
When people say "jobs" they usually mean "access to an upwardly-mobile career
path".

Most of the goods and services that _I_ purchase, anyways, are enabled by some
sort of expensive and heavily regulated infrastructure. Every physical object
that I buy was produced by a factory and purchased at a large retail outlet.
The main services I pay for are communication-related (cell phone, internet,
etc. - huge infrastructure there), automobile maintenance-related, and
liability-related (e.g. insurance), medical-related, and the occasional meal
at a restaurant. The only ones of those that one can do as a _small business_
are automobile repair and food services, neither of which are the first things
I think of when I hear "upward mobility".

Basically every highly-upwardly-mobile profession relies on expensive
infrastructure (communications), access to an enormous pool of money
(insurance), good relations with government regulators (law, medicine,
insurance, communications), access to a large distribution channel (retail),
or manufacturing (retail). There are some peripheral service professions
(advertising, real estate brokership, stock brokership), that rely on having a
good relationship with a wealthy clientele, not to mention a good relationship
with regulators.

Basically, upward mobility relies on existing infrastructure _of some kind_ ,
and if someone who isn't you and doesn't like you controls it, you're fucked.

So, you know, they could write web apps, since no one really controls the
internet. Maybe. And they probably won't get VC funding. Or get bought by a
company, unless they're _really_ profitable. Or get advertising deals.

It's only in web app land that 2) is possible without manufacturing, and the
Japanese are at a steep disadvantage because of the language barrier.

------
poutine
"The future will now be produced by cheap and abundant labour, not by
mysterious oriental tech-wizardry (NB I am trying to describe an imaginary,
not a reality!). "

This is an artefact of today, not the future. As has happened in the developed
world the developing world will eventually see automation and robotics become
cheaper than human labour. Possibly within the next decade or two. Once this
point is reached and those countries haven't lifted themselves up they're
screwed. They'll have a massive number of undereducated, illiterate and
underemployed people.

This is not China's century as many people are saying. Robotics will turn vast
numbers of people in to a liability, not an asset.

~~~
michaelchisari
On the flip side, if robotics are taking care of mass production with very
little human input, 3d printing and other emergent home technologies will
create an explosion in artisan production.

We're about to see a shift in the material world similar to the way the open
source world changed software.

~~~
Retric
I don't see how "open source" had all that big of an impact on software.

IMO, "open source" software fills the same roll as government spending on
infrastructure. Basically, contributing a small amount of energy for a share
of a public good has a net positive result. But, little changes from the
perspective of a user or a developer.

~~~
treeface
"Little changes" from the perspective of a developer? I'm going to have to
disagree with you on this one.

If I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I am), a plurality (if not an
outright majority) of web servers are run using an open source OS.
jQuery/Prototype/MooTools together hold an obscenely high share of the
JavaScript library market. The great majority of websites on the internet run
some combination of PHP, Python, Ruby, many of those running open-source
frameworks like Pylons, RoR, CodeIgniter, Kohana, web2py, Django, etc. A great
number of developers code using Vim, Eclipse, or some other open source text
editor.

And from the perspective of the user? It's hard to quantify this just by
saying "Firefox" or "Chrome" or the "V8 JavaScript Engine". I think open
source projects (like jQuery) benefit hugely from crowd sourcing their
problems. By making their bug reports and code public, they allow someone like
me to fork the project on GitHub, fix the bugs, and issue a pull request back
to the master branch. They're basically fine-tuning their product without
doing nearly as much work as closed-source shops without paying the person for
fixing the problem. To the user, it looks like things get done quickly and
bugs tend to come far less often (if the crowd sourcing is done right).

In my humble estimation, these are rather important considerations when
judging the success of open source...and these are only web technologies.

~~~
Retric
After many years of software development I have briefly used Eclipse which
sucked (IMO) and VIM which was slightly better than good old vanilla VI and
nothing else on your list. (Note: as a developer.) Granted, I don't do a lot
of web development but my point is just because there are some popular tools
for your nitch does not mean there has been a fundamental shift in software.

~~~
huherto
Open source is way bigger than that. But, if you didn't like Eclipse or vim.
What did you like?

~~~
Retric
BBedit was more useful for me than vim (at the time).

Recently I find Visual Studio is a nice IDE and last time I compared them
Eclipse was clearly worse (it's been a few years). However, I have used a wide
range of things from early versions of Borland Pascal and various things I
can't even recall on old versions of Mac OS etc.

------
russell
The 80's were Japan's time in the sun. I remember shock waves in the Valley
when HP announced that it was no longer going to use US-made memory chips
because Japanese ones were so much better. And a picture in Forbes Magazine
open on a Tokyo sidewalk, saying that the real estate taken up by the magazine
was worth $500,000K or some such astronomical number. General Motors announced
that its goal was to make a car as good as a Toyota. And for us technical
types the big shock was the Fifth Generation Computer Project was going to
make Silicon Valley a backwater. Well it didnt happen that way. US
semiconductor manufacturers learned to make chips, companies learned just in
time inventory control and QC, and the Fifth Gen computer was overtaken by the
PC, Moore's law, and the internet. (OK we did loose Detroit.) Then the 90's
came and the Japanese economy tanked from the real estate bubble, insane
infrastructure protects, and fiscal mismanagement, and never recovered
dominance.

~~~
kiujhygtfhj
>US semiconductor manufacturers learned to make chips

No they didn't - the chips are now made in Singapore or Malaysia with Japanese
plant. When did you last see a US mask stepper?

GM make a car as good as a Toyota? I think their current goal is to make a car
as good as a Fiat.

~~~
ghc
That's odd, I seem to recall Intel, AMD and IBM having major chip fabs in the
US, Germany and Israel. Or are you talking about something different (I don't
know much about mask steppers)?

------
adario
There's comment made on the site under the post which I think is the most
accurate, concise, spot on explanation of the difference between the Japanese
market and the American market. Here it is:"Could Japan be a secret counter-
example to the worldview that sees prosperity coming only from high growth?
Maybe the Japanese have in many ways decided that they don't want high growth
lives?"

I say the answer to that likely rhetorical question is YES. I've been
traveling to Japan for business for 10 years and I think this difference in
approach is the chief reason why most American firms never really 'get' Japan.
Their business motives and market DNA are fundamentally different from
America's devotion to growth and scale. In Japan it's not about growth, it's
about consistency and quality, often even to the detriment of the business.

I think that's also why, in terms of tech startups, Korea & China & Singapore
will ultimately leave Japan behind.

------
jwcacces
Japan became America.

Labor prices went up to ours, people grew to want their pensions just like us,
the old are living longer just like us, they now want the good things in life
just like us.

In the short time since World War II, they have grown to have that good life.
And in that they have become more and more plagued with the same benefits and
detractions that we've been enjoying. During the time they were rapidly
advancing, they had the same abilities as us, but a different lifestyle. And
they beat us.

But what was the point of their growth? The point was to get to where we are.
And now that they're the same as us, in the end, they'll just be the same as
us.

China's the same. One day all of China will be just like America. And then
they won't be competitive. Until then, they'll eat our lunch because although
they can do the same things as us, they just don't yet have our standard of
living.

------
bpfh
Curious coindidence – I was thinking about this the other day, wading through
Gibson's _Neuromancer_. The novel, just like earlier Stephenson fiction,
paints a not-too-distant future entirely dominated by "Nipponese" brands and
cultural artefacts. _Neuromancer_ was published in 1984. A lot has changed
ever since.

