Probably not, Japanese firms excel at hardware and generally build extremely poor software. This a hardware product, so consequently it is probably fairly good.
This is just my hypothesis, but I believe the language barrier is an issue. English is effectively a necessity for programming because real programming languages with ecoystems, error diagnostics, documentation, and useful articles/blogs/books are written in English. Japanese software developers know enough to get by, but they're still by-and-large insulated from the Anglosphere learning culture, where ideas and best practices rapidly propagate in the open. I'm not involved in hardware, but I'm guessing this is less of a barrier for hardware because hardware/documentation tends to be proprietary rather than open anyways, so whereas the Anglosphere gains a cumulative learning advantage from an open source + technical blogging culture in their fluent language, this does not manifest so much in hardware.
Japanese software don't get much recognition. Nintendo Switch(1 and 2) isn't running Linux, and it supports NVIDIA graphics stack. That shouldn't be possible unless Nintendo is actually capable of building a graphical operating system, which it is. Hardly anyone realizes this. There are also tons of (trashy)software embedded in Japanese hardware and none of those somehow mentally register.
Japan is also extremely weary of getting in the way of US. Software is one of few remaining consumer high tech domains that US leads. Challenging that without a good reason isn't a great idea.
I think Ruby would be a counterpoint - although it's the only one I know of.
I worked for a Japanese company although in a local office with local management. Through all those layers of protection I got the impression that they suffer from what all corporates suffer from - no software engineers that have made it to the top. Software companies run by people who have no clue.
In the US, for example, I think some people who have a clue or a partial clue have made it up the ladder in some places and therefore although everyone there has their horror stories of idiotic behavior it is probably somewhat better.
Honestly, no idea. In my career I have worked with a lot of Japanese firms and have always found their engineers to be excellent. I used to think it was a lack of consideration for UX, but that obviously can't be true when you see excellent examples of UX in hardware (e.g. Switch controls), even though its exceedingly rare on the software side.
If anyone on HN knows (there are several other commenters more deeply steeped in Japanese engineering culture), I would love to know why as well.
Japanese culture and work culture is very hierarchical/top down. They excel at waterfall but it's basically impossible to do agile in a Japanese office environment, and waterfall is suitable for hardware but terrible for building software.
＞Japanese culture and work culture is very hierarchical/top down.
This, and the 'rise or climb to the top' is more about seniority and social standing than anything else, especially at large Japanese conglomerates. The result us that there are almost none of the software competencies in senior management, and even if there were those would be software competencies from the 1970' and 1980's who are still leading while being 80 years old. There is also a 'filter' put in place at most organizations which are sufficiently large or diverse, such that middle-management is moved across multiple divisions every two or three years during their career. This is presented as a cross-training/cross-competency, but has an effect of preventing those with the most direct contact to the production staff from building enough localized social capital and systemic capability which would enable changes to the workflow not directly from the top. The middle stays in the middle, and the top gets to keep their seat well past any reasonable capability to adapt to the changing world of business.
This leads to the situation, where if leadership were changing with incoming capacity and points of view, there would be a motive and opportunity to admit to company errors; such as acquiring an international subsidiary which produced a faulty product that directly harmed people, because the newer leadership could say: "Sorry, that was a series of bad decisions, and as new leadership my role is to correct the course of business operations."
However, when the leadership is still the same clique that made the errors in either acquisition, oversight, response to the negative outcomes, then that "Sorry" statement would be a career ending move and result in massive social penalties beyond simply a forced retirement which would have lasting socio-economic impacts on the entire clique's family in every facet of business and later prospects. Combined with the strict social responsibility of a large enough scale of harm could lead to actual, not-figurative, suicide.
So, no, there's not going to be any 'mea culpa' for the direct actions of a foreign subsidiary, because those negative outcomes of those poor decisions are not in the direct social awareness in Japan of those surrounding the entrenched leadership and thus do not impact the daily social standing of that clique to the extent that a formal 'taking responsibility' would.
Instead, there will be very public announcements of improved capability which has the indirect and implied meaning of: "Engineering a way to make a better product will keep that from happening again" without ever directly addressing the existence of the faults. Social and economic uplift to counter any negative pressure in the local social awareness equals a success, not a failure.
In order for Japan to actually become successful at software in the near and medium time-frames, there will need to be a large shift in the work-life balance and internal social structure of new startups. This is beginning to happen in small scale, and to the extent that those newer 'brands' can avoid becoming subsidiaries of the larger established conglomerations will determine the slope to that success.
The groups which can empower and embrace a 'star' network topology inside and among organizations instead of 'waterfall' hierarchy will both; struggle to reach the social equity available through corporate-government-financial integration that is strongly entrenched in the established systems, and will outperform those entrenched systems in terms of real productivity through reliable delivery of improved capacity.
The socio-economic inertia of the giant keiretsu-gaisha are immense, but the geriatric cliff is already here and the nation and it's business cultures are at an 'adapt or cease operations' threshold. It's questionable whether any of the globally well know names will remain operational in their prior fields of production over the next 50 to 100 years without a significant shift in developing a way to build direct connections to capacity and applied skills at every tier of each company.
The 25 to 30 year old employees group in every main workforce is barely a fraction of what it used to be, and handling that small group as if it needs a 'filter' to keep the authority concentrated at the top is a significant risk for these organizations.
Those workers at the start of their career who are looking hard at the work-life balance aspect of employment have an inertia which is at odds with that of the organizational behemoths. Many of them are in a position to be drawn out of the crowded city, embrace a rural lifestyle and remote work without the centralized office and it's toxic overwork for underproduction culture. The rural municipalities are developing stronger incentives to attract this mobility, including relocation assistance and direct support with childcare and family building resources. Some prefectures and town offer up to several years of basic food and housing subsidies, low to zero cost fibre internet; next-generation FLET'S Hikari Cross or NTT's eqivalent 10Gbps in a HOUSE instead of a tiny apartment. The major central large conglomerates are going to find that the local in-office work pool will stagnate as the most capable and best informed no longer flow in directly from university and fill every available desk from a waiting list.
The "bigs" have insulated the ledger books with massive foreign investments, so they have the capability to stay 'in-the-game' for quite some time, so long as those investments continue to be productive, but the hollowing out of the main offices in Tokyo is pretty much guaranteed in the next two generations as rural Japan's liveability and economics for raising a family continue to grow, because the 80+ hour workweek labor staff in the city has no incentive to pair up and have kids, and the kids who are graduating in this and the next generation's rural school graduates are less and less likely to stay in the city after university if they want a family.
It's pretty much Japan's only way out of the population crisis that is still worsening. So, either they will adjust and become a productive, blended high tech semi-rural powerhouse without the high stress office culture that developed in postwar recovery, or they risk becoming a history lesson about over-concentration of inflexible management culture and loss of productivity.
The third option: succeed AND keep hyper-concentrated power is dependent on the types of moves that Fujitsu et al. are making today, find a way to automate more and more capacity via Machine Learning and robotics in the hopes of not actually needing an influx of skilled workforce for production.
If this 'hail Mary' play actually were to succeed it only cements a productive income for the shrinking population without resolving any of the causes of that shrinkage, i.e. the population still works 80+ hours a week in a socially disconnected state that in antithetic for raising healthy youthful progeny.
Taken to an 'in extremis' view: Within another 60 to 80 years, this might result in a well funded country of the elderly being waited on by robot butlers with until there is no one left to be waited on or fed the produce grown in automated fields.
I think that he most likely path will be a mixture of all three, in varying measure and with an array of outcomes. We live in interesting times indeed.
This was a fascinating reply to read with an outside perspective. Thank you for your comment.
> It's questionable whether any of the globally well know names will remain operational in their prior fields of production over the next 50 to 100 years without a significant shift in developing a way to build direct connections to capacity and applied skills at every tier of each company.
With this, is it your contention that the demographic problem in Japan is so existential that even large established companies may quite literally "die out" because there is nobody left that knows how to operate them?
How does that square with increasing foreign investment? Does it seem like there may be a shift towards foreign control of these large companies via equities markets instead? (Ala US style PE / zombie brands)
> Taken to an 'in extremis' view: Within another 60 to 80 years, this might result in a well funded country of the elderly being waited on by robot butlers with until there is no one left to be waited on or fed the produce grown in automated fields.
It does seem that way, but it seems at odd with the cultural values espoused in the media. Do those at the top not feel any social obligation to ensure continuation of Japanese society beyond serving their own selfish needs?
> ... that even large established companies may quite literally "die out" because there is nobody left that knows how to operate them?
We are already seeing this in the catastrophic system failures at major Japanese mega-banks like Mizuho. These failures are the classic symptoms of this exact condition: senior cliques that do not understand the underlying technology and by trying to manage massive systems via hierarchical edict combined with a side effect of greed made possible by institutional shortfall of observation and analysis and the inevitable results are operational paralysis and collapse.
> Do those at the top not feel any social obligation to ensure continuation of Japanese society beyond serving their own selfish needs?
I would refer you to:
The Psychological Consequences of Money by Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode
Science 17 Nov 2006, Vol 314, Issue 5802 pp. 1154-1156
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1132491
The Abstract:
"Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance."
These effects are observable across many cultures and social ideals. So, yes, those at the top do view themselves as distinct and independent of the larger society, as demonstrated by the highly selective and insular lifestyles that they actively seek and engage in. Exclusivity is very nearly a defining feature of that 'filter' which is applied at Japanese organizations as I explained above, such that mid-level employees find an enforced social ceiling to keep those who are not already in the leading cliques from rising into a controlling position.
> How does that square with increasing foreign investment?
Foreign investment into Japanese industry is not the same as foreign investment into other jurisdictions, like EU, UK or US. Foreign investors do not gain actual control of the Japanese parent corporation. Companies will allow foreign investment in strict minority positions. This applies in most industries even without official legal requirement, and the regulatory review threshold for control in any critical; semiconductor, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, medicine, rare earths is as low as 1%. Investment in these requires approval BEFORE not after finalization.
Agriculture is another field with strict foreign investment rules. Non-Japanese citizens cannot purchase Ag. zoned land, period.
It is not likely that foreign investment, i.e. PE will find much room for capture of potentially closing Japanese companies. What I think is more likely will be a blend of collectivization, as many operating companies are already highly leveraged from banking and national investment due to the durable extremely low interest rates of the last three decades. The firms which have successfully invested heavily overseas and have restrained those investments from repatriation, in order to maintain the low inflation rates, have immense capacity to absorb local productivity downturns. These 'external' finance pools do not appear on the Japanese companies balance sheets due to how those investments are structured, and will enable these companies to dwindle to extremely low staffing levels while maintaining the level of comfort and financial wherewithal for the executive board members.
