Hacker News Reader

Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

You could make many of the same arguments about Japan post-WWII. As I understand it, Japan stopped exporting as many low quality, low-margin products during the 80s (largely due to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), and was able to very quickly gain a good reputation and brand. I've heard they had a similar reputation to China before this.

China has been well-aware of this impending trend, I'm sure they can make similar shifts. I think it's happening to some degree - I'm already impressed with some Chinese companies, like Xiaomi.

View on HN

They built some thoroughly respected world class stuff in the '70s. My family legally pirated 8-track tapes in the early to middle part of that period (no $$$ to the RIAA, $$$ reserved for ASCAP but they refused the payments), and all the duplication equipment was built on TEAC reel-to-reel tape drives (with the 2 track head and electronics behind it replaced by an 8 track head). Sony made a fabulous direct drive, cast aluminum record player that I got a copy of in the mid '70s that was still working fine and worth an assessed $900 when a tornado trashed it in 2011.

Other stuff of course took longer, e.g. their '70s cars weren't too hot, I got a ride in a grad student's Toyoda Corolla in the summer of 1977, but they soon started selling well, "Datsun, we are driven", my sister bought a used one in the early '80s and it was much better although still had a ways to go (and it's hard to imagine how much brand equity Nissan threw away when they re-badged in the early-mid '80s, their out of pocket costs were well over a billion in 2015 dollars).

I guess I'm saying that to those of us paying attention in the '70s, we were willing to believe Japan would get there in things like cars, and of course it didn't hurt how well they engineered and built things like the Mitsubishi Zero WWII fighter, WWII still had a big effect on people's minds in the '70s.

Hmmm, Sony was not, at least initially, one of the anointed MITI companies, Morita (and it says something that I don't have to mention his given name) had to convince the powers that be, MITI very possibly, to get the authority for $10,000 ($90K in 2015 dollars) of foreign exchange for the rights from Bell Labs to make transistors, came out with the first model in 1955: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-55

Then sometime in the '80s? they moved a lot of production for the US market to Mexico and my family started suffering from cold solder joints. We're rather careful about buying Sony equipment nowadays and don't buy much.

Xiaomi is a good example and I intentionally left it out so someone smart could mention it ;). The engineering is quality, and I can see it becoming popular outside of China.

Regarding manufacturing quality and the similar trajectory, you are correct. But in the 80s and onward it wasn't just electronics we were getting from Japan. Anime, jpop, ramen, sushi, all of these cultural products - which couldn't quite be emblematic of anywhere else - made Japan a soft power juggernaut.

Can China do the same? I'm not sure. Part of being cool is the ability to say "fuck the man," whoever that is and in whatever way, but dissent is too tightly managed for such an entity to be both globally enjoyed and accepted by the state, lest others start asking questions about the way things are run.

Plus, people also seem to forget that Japan started its industrialisation as soon as during the 19th century. It was a super power nation-state in Asia before the war, with numerous cultural ties with Europe and USA on a peer to peer level. China is a different story.

Japan has always been fascinating to the West, from the moment Perry told them to open the hell up. Japan has such an interesting wacky culture, architecture, art, lifestyle. They've always had craftsmen the like of whom can compete with the Germanic countries; something which few countries can say. When it came time to industrialize, Japan was able to build very advanced stuff on their own- the Zero, for example. And they make fantastic movies!

The Japanese language is also not super hard for the West to pronounce, and it is even possible to learn it. The writing system(s) are a bit confusing, but we can pronounce it. Contrast that with Chinese, and especially Chinese music. Yeah, no. The operative question: Is there any reason to learn Chinese apart from making money?

Taiwan, on the other hand, is an interesting place. Really good food, and it's going to experience a major boom as a travel food destination in the near future.

Spot on. Especially about Taiwan. It's not that "China" is culturally lacking, it's Mao's China, where the exact people capable of stimulating culture from the ground up - intellectuals - were killed off if not dead from starvation.

But Japanese being easier to learn than Chinese? I'm in shock: I've always found Chinese to be simple and Japanese to be mind-bogglingly impenetrable, even if I like it more.

"Made in Taiwan" is now also a marker for higher quality than "Made in China", you'll sometimes see a line of equipment where the best is made on the island.

Ah, and for culture, those wonderful crazy animators in Taiwan have made a very widespread impact, at least in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Media_Animation

It is mind boggling that the Mao-created famine that killed 40 million was only ~50 years ago.

I suppose if you're young enough. I was born in the middle of the Great Leap Forward, but very fortunately in the US, came of political age during the middle of the Cultural Revolution (which we're now learning, which should be to no one's surprise, slaughtered and maimed millions) ... and all this was brought into sharp relief when Nixon sundered the PRC from its alliance with the USSR and went to China in 1972. Only someone with his impeccable anti-Communist credentials could have pulled off that essential victory in the Cold War (with, of course, the aid of the USSR, which offered us co-dominion, to take out the PRC's nukes and rule the world together, at least for a while; we declined and took that offer to Mao and company, who by then were not surprised). So the politically aware of my generation and older know this sort of thing, and know the leadership of the PRC is today only somewhat less murderous.

Ramen started getting big in the late? '70s in "flyover country", sushi became big in the early '80s, anime in the '90s. There was definitely an inflection point sometime in the '80s, "The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals" was published in 1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Japan_That_Can_Say_No) ... hubris was followed by nemesis, the asset bubble got popped in 1991, and the aftermath was bungled.

If my personal experience makes any difference, when I was shopping in IKEA with my mother there were two seemingly identical ceramic bowls, one made in Turkey and the other made in China. My mom chose the one made in Turkey because she doesn't want to eat out of something made in China (she knows nothing about manufacturing in Turkey btw).

Also, I would personally never consciously buy any technology designed and built by a Chinese company because even with all of the NSA scandals in the US I still trust my information more on an Android or IOS device than a Chinese Android variant.

Japan's reputation changed way before the 80's. For example, there's a speech by LKY from 1965 stating the "Made in Japan" no longer means cheap stuff, that it implies a top-tier product in certain industries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com