Doing Business in Japan (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Doing Business in Japan (2014)

kalzumeus.com

185 pointsbholdr51 comments

I had a chat with a Japanese coworker some time ago.

Some of the Japanese addiction for work was to distract themselves from the destructive effects of WW2.

By working, they thought they would gradually turn their homeland into a better place and become a better society.

Now we can see some of the side effects of the excess work, like a reduced birth rate, increased suicide rate, growing debt, death from overwork (karoshi), people doing secret nap meetings or sleeping in their desks (inemuri), etc.

>people doing secret nap meetings

Haha that's one way to solve the problem

Previous discussion with 300+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8573992

> The Japanese economy is roughly 1/3rd the public sector, 1/3rd low-productivity firms like restaurants or traditional craftsmen, and 1/3rd high-productivity household-name megacorps.

Why are restaurants and traditional craftsmen considered “low-productivity?” That really strikes me as odd, I have the opposite connotation. I.e. the former being only sustainable as long as they serve a direct demand, while the latter spends most of the time for leviathan’s sake, and is more focused on generating demand (advertising budgets) than solving problems (leviathan can’t be sustained when there are no problems left).

He's presumably using the economics definition of productivity, not the common English meaning.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/productivity.asp

Well, the average McDonald's makes something like 40k profit per employee year, and Apple makes something like a million bucks per employee year... So the salary of the two tends to reflect that.

(Numbers made up but I bet they Aren't that far off)

That is what productivity means here. Not how hard or socially useful the product is. If we all have service jobs, we all would make the same pay. Productivity is why software developer can make good pay.

$1.8M per employee for Apple

http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per...

That's revenue. While Apple is hugely profitable, I'm pretty sure it has great manufacturing costs and per-employee profits are a fraction of that (the first google result says $0.4M).

Profit includes employee cost though. It seems those should be excluded.

Depends if you're calculating gross or net.

That's a pretty useless comparison between sectors, as you're excluding the manufacturing workforce for Apple, but only partially excluding McDonalds (most workers are franchisee employees).

Or look at a waitress in a restaurant. The math will be similar. A service job can't pay you a 6 fig salary outside of a few niche roles. That is why the "it's ok, we can all get service jobs" is a lie. That's a pretty crappy life.

Way off topic from the original article but "we can all get service jobs" implies a reality where the cost of any manufactured good and food is approaching 0. In that reality, you would only ever need to spend the money from your service job in other services.

Because they are not suitable for many of the tricks used in high-productivity environments. Traditional craftsmen cannot be automated, else they not be traditional craftsmen. Restaurants cannot enjoy the same economies of scale and still provide the same personalized service out of a tiny shop across from a train station.

By another metric, they are low-productivity in that the require many man hours of labor per unit. One can make a carpenter more efficient, but one cannot get away from the need of a person spending hours inside someone's house nailing things together. He;ll never be as productive as an Ikea factory worker churning out flat-pack tables inside a megafactory.

It is a good set of observations.

A little steeped in stereotypes and I would be surprised if the numbers are right in regards to breaking the economy into rough 3rds - SMEs make up a large part of the economy - and when I say SMEs - I mean pretty small companies.

I enjoyed the way he translated Japanese - it is very stiff and just about British - which goes well with Japanese formal polite language (丁寧語) which is a fair part of the business persona - depending on who you are talking to.

Marries reasonably well with some of my observations and complaints I hear from mates who are Japanese salarymen.

Well, from a programmer's perspective, a restaurant worker or craftsman has a job that does not scale at all. That's probably what he's referring to.

What do you mean by scale in this case?

One restaurant serves 100 customers per night. Ten restaurants serve 1000 customers per night.

That's exactly the point, restaurants don't scale well. Ten restaurants need almost ten times as many workers as one restaurant. Apple does not need nearly ten times as many workers to sell ten times as many iPhones.

If headcount grows linearly with your business size, your business has some issues with scaling that you need to solve.

Not sure if it was his point but certainly I noticed most restaurants hand washed rather than use a dishwasher and other inefficiencies.

I often wonder if much of the automation that does exist in Japan is more about not dealing with people.

Energy efficiency is a higher priority in Japan when it comes to dishes, laundry, etc. Why pay for electricity when you have a perfectly good pair of hands?

> ruthlessly capitalist racists

actually, these people are not racists. the racists are the ones not hiring outside their race, even if it's cheaper. the ruthlessly capitalist is an equal opportunity discriminator.

I have always thought that capitalism is the grim reaper of other ism's like racism, sexism, ageism, etc. If a society underprices a group of people for irrational reasons then a capitist will recognise this and solve the problem.

This description of how business is done on Japan makes me sad. It can't be all true, I really hope I didn't get the jokes and the author is exaggeration facts more than he described.

I've been living and working in Japan for almost a decade; if there are parts you're wondering if are exaggeration, feel free to comment here and I'll try to give you a second viewpoint. :)

This text makes me curious about some points on Japan's economy:

- How do be innovative without taking risks? Is Japan innovative? (May the answer is: they developed techniques to innovate without taking risks)

- How Japan is wealthy if "risk and returns" are co-related? (May the reason is because they are the country with most robots per inhabitant what makes them very very productive and wealthy)

I wonder: how is it being an artist in Japan? How does working part-time work? How is the culture for people working in academia?

I work for one of Japan's largest tech companies and somewhat fit the salaryman description he provides (although I put in no where close to the hours he mentions). The bit about what happens to those who move companies stopped me cold. Is this really accurate for what might happen if somebody jumped from one of these companies to a startup?

as a 32, english bachelor holder, current CS student with mainly experience in linux and scripting, this was some of the most terrifying prose i've read.

this will give me many a sleepless nights.

thank you.

It shouldn't. As a 35 year old who never got a CS degree but currently works in a tech company in Osaka, the whole article scanned like it was mostly relevant 10 years ago to me.

Yeah, I think the article's description of working hours is a bit extreme. In my time in Japan, I noticed two distinct rush hours on the trains and expressways in major Japanese cities: one around 8-9am, and another around 5-6pm. That seems like a pretty normal working day to me. If everyone was putting in 8 hours of overtime, the evening rush hour would start a lot later. (And it's not like the employees are going home and continuing to work for many more hours. Remote work is not common in Japan.)

I agree about the rush hour on the trains in the cities. I also live in a large city in Japan and have to battle to get on the train around 8am and 6:30pm. The guys that are working all the over time tend to work in the really big name companies (Toyota, Honda, Mitsui, etc.) which have their main working centers outside of the big cities. We have a lot of engineers who work at these locations and it seems that the minimum amount of paid overtime is 40hr/month for our employees (I have interviewed engineers here who have reported working 110hr+ of overtime in a month, which is illegal here). The problem is, these are all reported paid overtime hours for contract employees. Patrick is talking about lifetime employees of the large firms, who do a lot of service overtime, which is unreported and un-paid. When I was an English teacher I was often hired by these firms to do 6 month intensive courses for employees who were moving to an English speaking country for 3-5 years. These guys had an unbelievable amount of work for that six months and often slept at the office (which has showers and changing rooms) for their 3 or 4 hours of downtime.

So I think you're right, that not everyone is doing this, but there is a certain circle where it is highly expected.

Why will it give you sleepless nights? Are you planning on moving to Japan and you're worried about that now?

It shouldn't, it's not true. The Japanese do have a different workers ethos than westerners do, but the "lifetime employment" ideal mostly died with the lost decade.

90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment

I don't believe it. 90+ is absolutely insane. If you are working this much, you seriously have to reevaluate your life choices - living under a bridge is probably healthier for you.

There's a reason that Japanese has a convenient word for "working oneself to death": karoshi.

Being that women may have a harder time adapting to salary man position, perhaps they would be better hires for Japanese startups?

Did you read the full article? This is explicitly mentioned:

"Anyhow, this is an opportunity for startups here: since college-educated women are tremendously underused by the formal labor market, startups can attract them preferentially."

is there speculation that Japan might be, in the future few years, a promising place to establish startups and source promising talent? intuitively, i feel like there should be an amount of young engineers/designers/marketers and other professionals disinterested in typical salaryman positions at large corporations

Unlikely. Population is declining precipitously. The rate of reproduction has plummeted in Japan. There aren't nearly as many young people as there used to be. Why would they want to stay in a declining country rather than go to places where conformity is not prized, being an entrepreneur is prized, and there is a growing market?

Irrelevant. There's no link between population decline and startup culture. There are still millions of young people growing up over there. There are multiple reasons not to go to the US, with language and atrocious visas at the top of the list.

Err, is too. As one simple example, when the electorate is heavily skewed towards older people (and in Japan, and this skew is further exacerbated by how low-density rural areas have higher weight in the Diet), politicians will enact policies that favor the elderly at the expense of the young, Japan's increasingly Ponzi-like public pension scheme being a prime example.

The pension scheme is a bad example as it was put in place in 1961[1] long before Japan experienced it current population decline. Furthermore recent government actions have been towards weakening the yen which will adversely effect the elderly and pensioners (who are on fixed incomes).

Unlike the US, there does seem to be a recognition that people are part of the economy of the country and that there are mutual shared interests in making things work. The issue seems to be more in the speed and adeptness at which changes are made.

That being said, the biggest obstacle to start-ups in Japan is the Japanese aversion to risk. The most talented people would rather work for peanuts in large Corporations or in secure Government jobs rather then risk failure in a start-up.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Pension

What kind of policies would better favour the young?

There seems to be a lot of "don't give old people this" whenever the question of age-based rules comes up.

Policies that encourage internships and entry level recruitment of young workers. Policies that encourage the supply of child care, schools, university access and other services to support families. Access to family medical insurance.

I met expats, immigrants, students from all over the world in Europe, but I didn't ever met one from Japan. Anecdotal, I know, but maybe Japan is so special that emigrating from there feels like leaving Earth.

Nitpick: emigrating means moving away for good, and relatively few people from developed countries emigrate in that sense. Perhaps you mean living abroad for study or work, being an expat or something similar.

I think there are 2 big reasons why you won't find many Japanese expats in Europe. One is the real or perceived language barrier. The level of English education in Japan is pretty low, and even people who speak passable English tend to be not confident about it.

The other reason is outlined in the article. Going abroad for college isn't prized as it is in (say) China. You're deviating from the path that society expects you to follow. You might even get strange ideas about life/work balance. Going abroad for a "skip year" sounds even worse.

You're overestimating the attractiveness of the USA to other cultures ^^

How do the work/startup cultures in other Asian nations compare ?

Gee an article about Japan written by a foreigner is incredibly bigoted and factually incorrect, who would have thought?

Can you point out any specific problems?

[2014] for those getting déjà vu.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com