

Japan: We're losing to Apple, and here's why - shioyama
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/10/18/japan-were-losing-to-apple-and-heres-why/

======
ilamont
Nintendo is an interesting case that may dispel some of the stereotypes about
Japanese companies and management styles.

First, the company is quite old (1889, I believe). It started out
manufacturing playing cards, yet had a pretty remarkable evolution after its
post-war CEO (a member of the founding family, surnamed Yamauchi) took over.
While it was a top-down organization, Yamauchi recognized and encouraged some
out-of-the box and risky thinking. The company at one point was invested in
things like hotels and food, but started to develop a new business in the
1970s around video games. Keep in mind that in 1977 video games were not
nearly as popular as they are now, and the nearest product line Nintendo had
at the time was toys. Famicom/NES was launched in the mid 1980s, at a time
when the videogame market was in a slump (this was post-Atari 2600). It turned
out to be a massive hit, that really kept Nintendo on top of the console
market until Sony came out with the PlayStation.

The Wii is another example of an innovative approach to product design. It was
not designed by focus groups, as the company was worried about leaks. Rather,
the design of the console and controller came from an internal group made up
mostly of career Nintendo engineers like Shigeru Miyamoto (of Mario Bros.
fame). Yamauchi's successor, Satoru Iwata (himself a former game developer)
was also on the team. They recognized that they couldn't win the hardware arms
race with Sony and Microsoft, a race that focused on specs and pleasing
hardcore gamers. They thought of a different set of users, and not only kids
and senior citizens waving around a Wiimote. The team even considered how
housewives would react to a new console in the living room, and therefore
designed a box that was sleek and stylish, and not much bigger than a stack of
DVD boxes.

There's a great interview series with the Wii design team, called "Iwata
asks". It talks about many of the issues they had to overcome, and the
prototyping process. It was published on Nintendo websites all over the world
-- I think Iwata wanted to do a little victory lap, and get on record how they
came up with the brilliant ideas behind the Wii. You can start reading it
here:

<http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/wii_console/>

~~~
dantheman
I think Nintendo's success primarily has to do with them employing one of, if
not, the best game designers that has ever lived - Shigeru Miyamoto. By
trusting and empowering him they are able to have taste, just as Jobs's taste
defined Apple, Miyamoto's defines Nintendo.

~~~
jbm
Some of the best graduates from Tokyo University wind up at Nintendo. It was
considered one of the best places to get a job.

Nintendo is not a company I would want to emulate. It is getting squeezed by
Sony and Microsoft, and even its innovations in terms of casual gaming seem to
be on the verge of going away. I consider it a colossal waste, but I guess
YMMV.

Disclaimer: I thought the same when the DS came out. I was very very wrong.

~~~
wavephorm
Sony's network problems will haunt them for years. I think they're done in the
game industry. Microsoft is lacking in innovation in every single category I
can think of.

This would be the perfect time for Nintendo to crush them both.

~~~
latch
How xbox 360 escaped the ring-of-death is baffling to me. I guess the
$1billion hit they took to extend warranties either really spoke to consumers,
or people just don't care if they have a 1 in 3 (or was it 1 in 4?) change of
getting a dud.

~~~
lolwutreddit
They replaced several of mine for free, waiving all shipping and repair costs.
I can't think of another experience I've had like that. They're also a US
company, and they have the best online gaming experience... those are just a
few of the reasons I can think of.

~~~
absconditus
One of the reasons why one does not typically experience something like that
is because most companies would go out of business if they blew that much
money on a faulty product. Microsoft has other revenue streams that allow them
to throw billions at any problem.

------
kstenerud
The article kind of misses the point.

The reason why people are leaving the Japanese phones for the iPhone is
because Japanese phone interfaces SUCK BALLS. And they have ALWAYS sucked. I
suffered through 5 years of one phone after another being such a terrible user
experience that I think it scarred me for life. And don't even get me started
with Sony, who replaced the perfectly functioning joypad in their phones
(which USED to be the best) with that stupid "sony" sidewheel they spent so
much money developing and insisted on putting in every product, whether it
made sense or not.

The fact remains, emoji ARE important. Easy text input IS important. Being
able to pay for stuff at the combini with your phone IS important. It's just
that having apps, and a UI that doesn't suck balls is even more important.

iPhone took YEARS to penetrate the Japanese market, precisely because it
didn't have the features that customers wanted, and they spoke with their
wallets, buying the Japanese models. But now that app and smartphone fever has
finally landed, people are more willing to compromise.

But the point is, they SHOULDN'T have to compromise. That's just Apple
deciding what people will use, even if it's the wrong thing. It's taking a
little bit of good advice to such an extreme that what appears on the surface
"visionary" would upon closer inspection reveal itself as insanity. Hubris has
a way of creeping up on you when your power remains unchecked for too long.

Yeah, Sony used to be good, but then again they used to make good products.
Once their arrogance got the better of them, their products started to suffer.
My first Vaio was awesome. Sleek, light, and fast. My last Vaio was
practically useless out of the box. It took me 3 HOURS to remove all the
crapware they loaded into it, which slowed it down so badly that it was almost
unusable. Oh, and it had that stupid useless Sony sidewheel on it, and their
incompatible-because-we-said-so memory stick port too. I shudder to think of
how the average user would endure with such a monstrosity.

~~~
delackner
This is so true. Example: My iphone died recently, so while waiting for the 4s
to come out I used a 3-4 year old Sony Ericson lying around the office. It has
so many buzzword features! It even has dedicated media playback buttons on the
outside! Yet how do you call someone? It takes 6 button presses. Press down >
click on first name > Call > Voice Call/Video Call/PushTalk > No
Message/Create Message > Call/Call with ID/Call with no ID/Country code

That's insane. It is like no one ever tried to make a phone call with their
phone when designing it.

Don't get me started on the text editing screen. It is a modal text area that
flips between movement within the whole text and movement within the single
word you are editing. I love Vim, and I still hate this text entry method.

This whole topic has been covered many times before, but its roots are various
and you could write a book on the subject of why most firms (both japanese and
non) are just so horrible at consumer software interface design.

Some people suggest that it is just that the Japanese firms were only really
good at hardware, but that rings false. I've seen a lot of really horribly
designed Japanese computers and mobile phones before the iPhone came out, even
just judging the hardware by itself on simplicity and reliability.

~~~
angus77
Wow. I've only owned Toshiba phones (on both au and SoftBank) before I got my
HTC Desire, and making a call was always a matter of clicking the 電話帳 button
and selecting the name. Although I've used other people's phones plenty of
times, and it was always pretty much the same. I've never used anyone's Sony
Ericsson, though.

~~~
delackner
Just tapping the name actually placed the call? What an idea. Just for fun, I
looked at an older Docomo model on my desk by NEC. It is even worse:

Phonebook > Search > List of ways to search, NONE of which is just "show me my
phonebook".

Let's try name lookup > Enter a string to search for > Search results > Choose
a result > Dial.

Let's try Group > List of Groups > First Group > Choose name > Dial

~~~
kalleboo
Just tried the docomo NEC (N-02A) I had lying around. Down arrow > Left right
to pick the first kana of their name > select name > Press dial button. Not
_that_ bad, but a far far cry from the european Sony Ericsson's smart
phonebook.

Right now I have a SH-12C as my main phone, and it's basically an Android
phone with a kickass screen and all the crazy japanese features jammed in it
(1seg, mobile suica, 3D camera+screen, privacy veil, etc). And it's great -
Google software really makes those features finally worth it. There's even an
Android widget to display your Suica balance.

------
flocial
I read this article and it was interesting. Sony can still make some
beautifully designed products and even beat Apple in certain ways, the Vaio X
had similar capabilities to the MacBook Air and still much lighter and well-
designed. However, the greater issue is not the "design by committee" problem
but the fact that the entire country is simply lost and headless. It's not
only business but politics and society in general.

The reason why companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google inspire is because
they do things with conviction. They are executing on vision. They don't let
internal processes become ritualized. Key executives don't stick around long
when the fire goes out in their soul, they move on. In Japan, nobody knows
what they want to do. Japanese manufacturers feel the heat from Apple AND
Samsung, they're scared of China's growing clout yet they can't figure out
what they want to do.

They can't race to the bottom with an aging population with an acquired taste
for high median salaries. They've lost the drive and intellectual fortitude to
innovate in all but very limited areas. They don't want to relinquish the
"made in Japan" brand, even though the Chinese have shown that with the right
management in place, they can make products better and cheaper.

I don't know where this paralysis comes from. Maybe the Japanese think all
their woes stem from some economic missteps from the bubble era and once these
are righted they can happily resume their old formula for success. Maybe over
two decades of stagnation and slow decline lead to a death by a thousand cuts
along with the false security of high savings.

For whatever reason, Japan is simply ill-prepared to compete on any level in
the global economy. Perhaps the greatest Achilles heel for Japanese
manufacturers is not so much the core hardware technology but their utter
disregard for the software that drives so many electronics. If you go to any
electronics store in Japan you'd be amazed by the utterly useless features
manufacturers try to differentiate themselves with (this camera can take
pictures in the dark while shaken vigorously, this one makes your face look
pretty, etc.).

When the iPhone came out I was one of the skeptics who thought the lack of
things like TV reception, RFID cards (used for train passes), the lack of
emoji (back then), or the ability to render ketai/mobile web sites wouldn't go
down well with customers. However, in the greater scheme of things it didn't
matter. Now all the feature phone manufacturers are scuttling decades worth of
in-house code to work on Android.

~~~
shioyama
I'm the author/translator of this article. Thanks for your thoughts, which I
agree with entirely.

I actually think that although the post I translated is interesting, it is in
fact missing the point, in a sense. There's a deeper malaise in this country,
and although there are bright spots - I'd point to home-grown companies like
Cookpad, for example - the overall picture is bleak.

However, Japan has a track record of suddenly changing directions when nobody
expects it. Many people thought that 3/11 would trigger a change, and were
disappointed when it didn't, or at least not to a significant degree. But if
you look deeper, things _are_ changing.

I'm cautiously optimistic. You really have to be. But it will get worse before
it gets better.

~~~
rubashov
The "overall picture is bleak" if you measure societies by flashy, marketable
headline developments and gadgets. It is rather good if you more soberly
consider household incomes and trade figures. Japan continues to dominate many
high tech industries. Look at the 787; over a third of it is made in Japan and
it's all the key hi tech bits like the carbon fiber wings.

Japan may indeed be in some sort of withdrawn middle-class ennui. They're
still doing better than the US or Europe in most ways that count.

<http://www.fingleton.net/?p=919>

~~~
shioyama
The malaise comes not from the absolute position of Japanese companies in the
world, but from the direction they're headed in.

There was a great article in the Economist a while back about this:

<http://www.economist.com/node/14793432>

Since this article was published, the situation has gotten worse. The
earthquake sure didn't help, but the situation wasn't good even before that.
Sure, 10% or something of the parts that go into the iPhone are developed by
Japanese specialized parts manufacturers, who have skills that no-one else in
the world can match. But if you look more closely, you'll see that these
industries are hollowing out -- there isn't enough interest from younger
generations to keep the mom&pop shops going in the long run.

The problem which many have mentioned here and elsewhere is that while Japan
is unrivalled in craftsmanship ("monozukuri") -- making physical things --
exactly the opposite is true when it comes to "unphysical" things like
software. That's why Japanese mobile phones have such utterly terrible
interfaces, as someone else pointed out here. There is very little respect
given to that side of the design process, and that's not going to change
without a major shift of consciousness.

~~~
tuppy
>The problem which many have mentioned here and elsewhere is that while Japan
is unrivalled in craftsmanship ("monozukuri") -- making physical things --
exactly the opposite is true when it comes to "unphysical" things like
software.

This is something I do not understand. Why is there a cultural aversion to
creating beautiful software? As an example, Honda has some of the most
beautifully designed interiors in the automotive world. Simple, elegant,
functional, with quality materials. The design is often very Apple-like (at
least relative to other manufacturers, though they are improving). I would
think that the culture that gave us wonderful interaction with a vehicle would
be able to provide a similar sort of experience with a phone. What's bizarre
is that most pre-iPhone Japanese phones have the UX of a mid-90s Buick: lots
of buttons, nothing really arranged properly.

To me it's just strange that they were unable to produce it, but I am not
surprised at all that the iPhone is so popular. I feel like the iPhone should
have come out of Japan, but didn't.

~~~
shioyama
Have you looked at Japanese websites? Most of them have pretty terrible
design/UI. It's the same thing.

My take on this is that you have to look more broadly to understand the
tendency for cluttered design in Japanese interfaces. Walk around a small
neighbourhood in Tokyo and you'll see how cluttered the layout is. On small
"roji" (back alleyways), Japanese like to stack potted plants outside their
front doors in a pretty disorganized arrangement. Streets are generally not
straight, neighbourhoods rarely follow a grid layout.

(Shimokitazawa is probably the best example in Tokyo of this:
[http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/11/04/japan-debating-
the-...](http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/11/04/japan-debating-the-fate-of-
shimokitazawa/) )

It's the same thing with cluttered interface design, except that whereas in
urban layout it produces something amazingly complex, intricate and
fascinating to explore, in UI design it just results in frustration and
inefficiency. But I'm convinced the two come from the same source, and that
you can't entirely separate them.

The beautifully designed interiors you mention come from a completely
different place (mentally, not physically). I don't quite know how to
reconcile the fact that the two come from the same country/culture, but I do
believe they have both been here for a long long time. It's just that software
somehow tends to bring out the former, whereas monozukuri brings out the
latter.

~~~
cdavid
Concerning websites, when you compare rakuten Japan and say UK, you see a
stark difference in how things are presented. This may just be due to the UK
site being done outside Japan/by foreigners, but this would hint at a some
preference toward clutter for Japanese customers ?

~~~
shioyama
The classic case of this is Google vs Yahoo in Japan. Yahoo is more popular,
and if you look at the layout, you'll see that it's much more cluttered (or at
least, that there's loads more information). At one point Google caved in (in
Japan) and added more buttons to their top page, but I see they've switched
back to the basic logo + search bar.

Another thing to consider is that the cluttered thing is not only Japan: I've
heard that other Asian countries also have a preference for clutter. I can't
vouch for whether that's true, but it sounds pretty believable.

~~~
cdavid
Yahoo Japan is a pretty Japanese company (dunno about the proportion of
Japanese workers there). I only got a very small look at it during interview
there, but google Japan seems much more westernized as far as the workforce is
concerned.

It would really interesting to know who is responsible for rakuten UK (or any
other country). Since prices are in JPY, I am quite confused about the meaning
of rakuten UK...

------
6ren
> I'm getting sick of these Japanese who love nothing more than to put their
> country down.

Sony and many other Japanese companies once pioneered new products - and Sony
was the ideal that Steve Jobs said he aimed for. In fact, it's pro-Japanese.
Just not its present state.

Christensen (innovator's dilemma guy) thinks that present-day Japan suffers
from large companies: the disruptions that are tomorrow's riches start out
small and unpredictable. _Small_ is simply not interesting to a big company;
_unpredictable_ even less so. In post-war Japan, companies were small: excited
about small opportunities; and having little to lose, unafraid of risk. (In
contrast, he says, Silicon Valley incumbents often populate their usurpers,
such as Fairchild to Intel, when frustrated workers want to exploit something
uninteresting to management. This doesn't happen in Japan.)

The enigma here is Apple. The largest company in the world, yet acts like a
startup in terms of risky new products in unproven new markets that start out
small:

 _launching a product without consumer research is risky._

------
teyc
What Apple has executed is actualy mass luxury. Its goods are perceived as
high value objects, where status is more important than breadth of
functionality (more on this later).

Perception is very important. For instance, a discount store would stack up
items and use cheap-looking layout to create the perception that they are cost
cutters.

Similarly, a luxury item should be perceived as objet d' art where
functionality is clear and straighforward.

Viewed from this perspective, an iPod isn't about inbuilt graphic equalizers.
It is about frictionless and effortless getting-music-into-your-hands ease. I
remembered that even the Queen wanted an iPod. It is obvious one would know
how to use one.

It is the same with the iPhone. The less the engineers talk about dual-core,
split antenna, the more they focus on how users interact with their devices.
Even the app store is actually a luxury bling. It signals all the things are
are potentially available "at your service" without actually cluttering up
your device.

~~~
rayiner
Apple doesn't really market themselves as a luxury brand. Compare a Mac ad to
a Lexus ad, for example.

What you're describing isn't luxury. Having a product where "functionality is
clear and straightforward" isn't luxury, and it isn't art. It's good
engineering.

~~~
shard
Apple markets itself as a luxury brand in one of the largest markets in the
world: China.

"Apple's image in China now emphasizes not rebellion, but luxury --or as Wolf
puts it, "exclusivity." Its gorgeous glass-walled storesare located next to
high-end clothing boutiques like Armani, Versace, and BMW Lifestyle."

[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/01/red_delicio...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/01/red_delicious_and_rotten?page=full)

------
bane
I've had a feeling for a long time that Japan (not South Korea or China or
other regional countries) is on the _verge_ of a massive cultural shakeup.

I can't quite pin it down, but when you peel back the vast homogeneous
conformist mass consumer oriented society, there's a really wonderfully
quirky, genuinely interesting underground scene that's so vibrant, so full of
energy, that it seems like it's about to burst into the mainstream in the same
way the beatnick and then hippy movement did in the West.

Steve Jobs came out of that movement, who's to say we aren't about to see the
birth of the next Steve Jobs in Japan? Only his parents were in a banjo kettle
drum band in Osaka that played basement coffee houses and did cosplay on the
weekends to super indie Manga series that explores the meaning of identity as
a pop star with only digital, manufactured fans.

In the States Vietnam was the flashpoint that really caused people to gel
around the question authority hippy movement, perhaps some current or future
event will cause the same with the Japanese youth.

------
jayfuerstenberg
Here in Japan, risk is extremely frowned upon. As a result nothing innovate
comes about. Only minor improvements over the existing design.

A lot has been written about the cultural views of risk/failure and why
nations like the US are kicking butt over Japan and India where you're not
allowed to fail.

Japan has shown that it can stage a comeback when the nation as a whole can no
longer deny it has been defeated and must reinvent itself to move forward. It
happened after WWII and will likely happen in another 10 or 20 years if things
continue the way they have.

------
russell
He says the problem is design by focus groups. Consumers know exactly what
they want, but when a company produces it, they go buy something else more
interesting. I've tried using focus groups back in the last century. It doesnt
produce anything useful, except when you are looking for flaws in your
product.

~~~
InclinedPlane
The problem is that so often users will express their desires not in the most
distilled form, they will typically express them in the form of some
unimplemented solution that they have arrived at via a process of mental
satisficing. They don't know how to design software, or hardware, and they
damned sure don't know how it works either. But they sure as hell know that if
your product would "just" do this one little thing it would help them out.

The problem, of course, is that you then end up delegating design to people
who lack the expertise. You can end up implementing ridiculous features if you
just implement suggestions uncritically. For example, if you sell a sports car
that people think should be more powerful they could express that by saying it
should have a bigger engine, even though there are many ways to approach that
problem (EFI programming, turbo chargers, lighter frame, different gear box,
etc.) If you end up doing this a lot you end up with a big ball of mud design-
wise as everyone's disparate needs and half-thought-out solutions collides
with each other.

It takes a lot of effort to take the needs of customers and distill it down
into a core set of functions and then tie those functions together in an
elegant manner in a cohesive and highly useful design.

If you look at a lot of the "also ran" products from any given genre you will
notice a trend towards a chaotic implementation of a laundry list of features
whereas the market leaders tend to present a more elegant and cohesive design,
even sometimes at the expensive of a handful of features.

~~~
umtrey
Great point. Consumers are also heavily biased towards what they already know
or see in similar devices - "oh, if it had a removable battery, I need that"
or "I need it to vibrate when I type on it," and so on. They might all be
valid desires by the consumer, but it doesn't mean it has to be there.
Establishing the correct prioritization of features is the principle goal of
these product development teams, and Apple seems to be winning there.

------
Steko
Fairly mundane observations.

I liked his point that today's Japanese executives are all corporate drones,
salarymen that worked their way up through the system and aren't going to
boldly design anything.

~~~
9999
That's really not fair. Some of them are competent foreigners that get thrown
out when they expose yakuza cronyism.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020365880457663...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203658804576634792112130906.html)

------
BadassFractal
I wonder is part of their failure is from listening to people's reason, such
as focusing on the nitty gritty features (see emoji, typing with one hand and
so on) rather than on the big picture of the device and how it fits into one's
lifestyle.

It's known that humans are ultimately emotional beings, they think with their
feelings regardless of how rational they believe they are. The iPhone is the
ultimate user experience, titillating the senses and the emotions more than
any PDA out there with 1000s of convenience features. It's similar to BMW,
Steve Jobs' source of inspiration for his marketing strategies. You want the
device on a primal level, it's sexy, it's a status symbol, the release of
every iPhone is a cultural event, a celebration of incredible UX.

I never ever get that emotional involvement when looking at the latest super-
souped-up swiss-knife phone from Japan.

------
ChuckMcM
For me the meta insight is that this kind of thinking is a huge deal for
startups.

So the challenge is that as a team you are putting together something that
probably everyone thinks is useless (or at least only marginally useful), and
yet to have to stay focussed on the problem(s) you are addressing and take
care to address them cleanly and with style.

It is actually in those places where others cannot see that some of the best
ideas can be brought to fruition. Of course releasing too early can lead to
disaster (ask the Color folks on that one, at least I perceived it as a PR
disaster).

~~~
rdtsc
> So the challenge is that as a team you are putting together something that
> probably everyone thinks is useless

Isn't selection bias a problem with this thinking? Yes companies that are very
successful did something outstanding perhaps, going against the flow, but how
much do we know about the number of companies that did stuff everyone thought
was useless and it was useless and the whole thing flopped?

We hear about the success stories, I want to then also hear about every failed
attempt as well, or it not an accurate picture then, is it?

To put it in other words, it is a bit like encouraging people to play the
lottery by showing images of winners. "Look these guys flipped a coin, talked
to their astrologer and now look, they are winners!". But what about the ones
that play and lose?

~~~
ChuckMcM
_Isn't selection bias a problem with this thinking?_

It may be, although in my experience 9 - 9.5/10 startups, when measured from
concept to death, fail to exit. And many of those were pursuing an idea that
clearly wasn't as special as they thought it was for what ever reason (could
be early, could be silly, could be too complex)

But to be a startup you have to accept those odds.

------
victorbstan
Great insight into leadership and product decision making strategies, couched
in a velour of discontent with the JP status quo.

------
greggman
Did anyone bother to do some fact checking? As far as I can tell Android
phones are massively outselling iPhones in Japan. Look at any best selling
list for phones In Japan before the 4S shipped. Check again in month once the
upgraders have upgraded.

------
TruthPrevails
It's the law of nature at play. The infinite cycle of life and death. Old
making way for the new. Apple will go weak one day. Some other company will
come to the top. This law of nature cannot be challenged. It is inevitable.

------
stupandaus
This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's piece about New Coke in Blink.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Should be required reading for marketeers one would think.

------
bluedanieru
One thing he didn't mention that I've noticed is that many Japanese companies,
particularly in the consumer electronics space but in other industries as
well, maintain completely separate product lines outside Japan vs. what they
sell here. This is (or was) especially striking with phones where you simply
couldn't buy made-for-Japan mobile phones outside Japan, and likewise you
couldn't find non-Japanese phones in Japan. This is why it was such a shock
that the iPhone was a success here, and the entire emerging smartphone market
caught Docomo and AU completely flat-footed.

There is a particularly irritating component of Japanese nationalism which
holds that Japanese are unique, as in physiologically unique, among the
world's population (down to having different immune systems, in fact). In
seems natural for a Japanese company that it would essentially have to act as
two companies, one for exported products and another for domestic ones. It's
very inefficient. It's also remarkably stupid as the iPhone demonstrates -
what sells anywhere else will also sell here, and vice versa (I would always
get comments on my phone when I went overseas and had to tell people the model
was only available in Japan, to their disappointment).

Contrast this with most other large manufacturers where they will have more-
or-less the same products globally, with some localization.

Actually the solution for Japan is rather obvious and I suspect many know it:
stop acting as though you're an alien race crash-landed on planet Earth a
thousand years ago. Start treating the global market the same as the domestic
one, and Japanese the same as Korean, Swedish, Canadian, whatever. This will
be a hard lesson for the Japanese national psyche to digest, and I don't know
that they're up for it. It's entirely plausible they'll spend the next 50
years making stunning breakthroughs in the fields of (nursing home) robotics
and new delivery mechanisms for god-awful Japanese broadcast television.

~~~
paperwork
So why would an international company have separate product lines like you
mention? It is hard to believe that international businessmen would forgo the
opportunity to profit abroad, simply because something is made for the local
market. Could it be that Japan only products are more experimental, and when
the prove successful, they are rolled out to rest of the world?

~~~
bluedanieru
In the case of mobile phones, if they were in fact experiments they must have
considered every experiment a failure, as virtually none of what you saw in
the Japanese domestic market informed the design of overseas products. Yet
they continued with the same basic design principles year after year. Look
some of them up if you like, and you will see what I mean.

They don't see themselves missing out on any opportunity, because they are
already certain that their domestic market is fundamentally quite different
than every other market in the world, and must be treated as such. This is
something fully within the sphere of consensus for them. They aren't behaving
like rational actors, but rather like normal humans whose cultural attitudes
prevent them from even examining many of their beliefs. Bring it up and you
will likely be treated to an expert display of confabulation and
rationalization. You can do this with any people on Earth depending on the
topic, but the Japanese happened to have picked an unfortunate one.

This is why people think Japanese are xenophobic. They're not, not really. Not
any more than most other cultures. But they do tend to think they are very
different from everyone else in the world, for better and for worse. This
essay is itself a good example, being more _nihonjinron_ navel-gazing.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron>

