Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

The Japanese seem to make really good writing instruments in general.

My daily driver for writing is a Mitsubishi uni-ball eye. Only costs a few bucks and it's miles better than a 10 cent Bic.

I'm not some kind of pen snob who knows all about different pens, but I know a good pen when I use one. I've found that it makes my (usually unintelligible) handwriting a lot better too.

I guess it's maybe a cultural thing, I've heard that the Japanese still place a lot of emphasis on handwriting letters and notes. Meanwhile there's people in my office who haven't touched a pen in weeks.

View on HN

Yea, what's up with that, actually? Why are they so good at making pretty much anything over there?

Writing utensils:

毛笔 - "maobi," the brush one uses to write calligraphy. Brought to Japan by the Chinese thousand years ago or so, now they make the best

Paper. Midori and Mio. Nigh untouchable. The only people that come close are Leuchtturm, IMO. And it's cheap!

Fountain Pens. Actually the Taiwanese do well here as well, but nobody can take on the behemoth, Pilot.

Cars: Toyota. Honda. Well regarded as the most repairable, built-to-last cars in the world. Mitsubishi, Nissan, Mazda coming out with excellent sports cars.

Motorcycles: Suzuki tops the line when it comes to dependability, repairability, durability, and quality. Spend a week pulling apart and putting together an SV650, then do a Ducati Monster, you'll see what I mean (if you can even find the tools to start unbolting shit off the Ducati)

Construction equipment: Komatsu, Hitachi. Some prefer Caterpillar but not for me.

Extraterrestrial Equipment: Walk through the full-size model of the ISS in the Johnson Space Center, Houston. You've got the Russian model, carved out of solid blocks of aluminum. The American one, which feels like being inside of a tricked out Ford f150, cheap panels and all. Then you step in the Japanese one, an over-engineered masterpiece in interior design. Everything has a little cubby, space, place. So organized, so perfect.

How do they do it???

Edit: I'm genuinely trying to think of something I trust some other country to make better than the Japanese and having a hard time. Maybe bicycles - can't beat the Taiwanese with Giant... but then again everyone uses Shimano components.

Uh, phones? Samsung I guess?

Laptops, I generally go for Lenovo, so there. That's all I can think of.

I didn't realize that cars, motorcycles and spaceships were writing utensils!

Quality is part of Japanese culture. You really see it when you walk around on the streets there. Our grandparents' lamentations of 'things used to last longer and be higher quality' would make no sense to a Japanese person because their culture never underwent the same cheapening that we did. (Assuming our grandparents were being completely honest)

In my experience, things in Japan tend to be higher quality, cleaner, and much more expensive. The three things I think of when I think about my time there are the clean streets, the old, clean, and eerily on-time public transportation, and the individually wrapped perfectly shiny apples at the grocery store.

What do you mean by “you can see it when you walk around the streets in here”? Did you spend all your time in central Tokyo? Because all i see around me when i go for a walk are buildings no one seems to care enough to renovate them and honestly it amazes me. All those amazing products you see that come from japan are usually made in a buildings that look like makeshift houses and are built in the middle of a nowhere.

I could never imagine japan being what it is by just from walking around in here.

Homes and condo buildings in Japan aren't supposed to last more than 40 years. It's supposed to keep the national economy in a constant state of development (sort of good) but it also means most people can't make a good long term investment off home ownership (which is bad). Either way, yeah, there's no incentive to renovate, because they won't be up for too long. On top of that, a lot of them need to be refurnished or rebuilt to be quake-proof, but it's not affordable, so they may opt to wait until the next big one brings it down.

> it also means most people can't make a good long term investment off home ownership (which is bad)

There’s a theory that homes being a good long-term investment is incompatible with homes being affordable. If true, then I would argue that it’s good, not bad.

Why should homes be a good long-term investment? They do not produce anything and it costs to maintain one.

Under a rising population in a region, demand increases, which should increase the per sq. foot cost of housing, reflecting the need for denser living.

It costs a lot to build a new home or refurbish an unmaintained one. So if you're saving someone those costs, you are generating value for them.

I remember seeing a documentary about one of the top handmade Japanese knives. I was amazed that it's literally made in the craftsman's falling down house, on a normal street in a normal rural village. I wish I remembered the name of the brand. It's quite well known. The knives are beautiful, but the workshop is function over form to put it mildly (I seem to remember he didn't even have a floor in his workshop -- which makes a lot of sense, but still surprising).

Before a first moved to Japan a friend warned me that Japanese cities are generally ugly. You've got power and telephone wires everywhere. The buildings are old, rusting, and falling apart. There are weeds growing in cracks everywhere. But if you go inside a person's home, there is this amazing transformation. It's usually beautiful. Even in an old falling down home, the interior is often wonderful (of course everyone is different and especially elderly people often have difficulty cleaning their houses). This is often true of izakayas (bar/restaurants) as well. From the outside it looks utterly uninspiring, but it's often really amazing on the inside (although, not always ;-) ).

I never really had any expectations when I came here, so I was never disappointed. I know a lot of expats, though, who were crushed when they discovered that not everything in Japan is beautiful.

Santoku knives, perhaps?

I lived there for 4 months. Hokkaido, Tokyo, and Osaka mostly. I feel like I got enough of a sampling.

They have old buildings, sure. But the streets are clean and well kept, it's a night and day difference b/t the U.S. and comparably dense Japanese regions.

> The only people that come close are Leuchtturm

Lechtturm recently moved production to China, with the expected drop in quality.

> But then again everyone uses Shimano components.

Manufacturing of nearly all Shimano components these days is now done in China or Malaysia. Sure, there is Japanese firm overseeing that manufacturing, but modern Shimano is a different beast than those classic Japanese bicycle-component brands like Nitto that are still made in Japan.

I think Leuchtturm was not a particularly good paper.

Midori is very good, but they are not a paper mill. And they don't disclose who produces their raw sheets. An example of a good Japanese paper mill is Tomoe River, who perhaps also supply Midori.

In my opinion, the best paper out there comes from Fabriano, which has additional advantage of being totally chlorine free and pulp has been sourced from biologically controlled crops in Italy.

Regarding pens, Pilot is very good. But if talking about Japan, we should also mention Platinum (and more importantly their sister company Nakaya) plus, at least, Sailor.

There are also exceptionally good non-Japanese pen manufactures out there. One example is Conid. Or Romillo.

I also love Japanese goods, but it's nice to keep a balanced perspective. Some Western brands are on the same level of quality. In fact, if you go to Japan, they will worship some Western brands.

In modern Japanese factories, master craftsmen are referred to as kami-sama, gods. Not, you know, monotheistic or Olympian gods with pretensions to universality, but Shinto gods, the kind of god that might belong to the huge old tree that sticks out above the top of the forest. It's not a sarcastic title; the respect is real. Japanese companies are run by businessmen, just like companies in the US, but they still have to treat the makers with respect.

Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs. Karoshi is still a bigger problem than precarización, which is what we call the gig economy here in Argentina.

> Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs.

Could be. Didn't stop the USSR from churning out heaping mounds of hot garbage, though.

It was more a result of bad planning and bad incentives. Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one.

Good companies mix both long term planning and reactive processes

> Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one.

The fundamental advantage of corporations over centrally planned states is not their time horizon, but our tolerance to allow them to go bankrupt.

Markets out perform voting by concentrating power in the hands of those who make good decisions (where "good" is defined by the market).

Arguably, that advantages companies that can hack that metric -- as anything they do to survive (politics) is treated as a reverse proxy for the value they bring to the market. This is why "too big to fail" and "job creator" became mantras.

My instinct here is that master craftspeople need a certain amount of autonomy to do good work, and if they are working for bosses, that requires high trust for the craftspeople on the part of the bosses. That trust was not present either in Fordism nor in the vulgar Soviet imitation of Fordism, but I think it is widespread in Japan. (I have never been inside a Japanese factory, though, so that is hearsay on my part.)

I suggest that perhaps one factor that makes this trust hard to achieve in the US today is the greater misalignment of incentives that comes with making the principal–agent relationship so temporary. But clearly that is not the only situation where trust could be low. I think we can agree that, despite Stakhanovite rhetoric, trust and autonomy was very low for most workers in the USSR, no?

(Also, the USSR did remarkably well at producing products considering the impoverished capital and skill basis it started from, and also considering the destruction of the German invasion. From the October Revolution to Sputnik was only 40 years: in two generations of bloody genocide, from a backward peasant society to world technological leadership.)

My guess. Japanese have long valued mastery and specialization. Historically a cast society, people were expected to dedicate their entire lives to the line of work their biological or adopted family was known for.

The country also went to great pains to isolate themselves so this system continued for much longer than other parts of the world where sources of wealth were more diversified. In Japan wealth came from being known as the best at your craft, which fostered a culture of continuous improvement.

In much of Asia perfection of art was seen as a sign of sophistication for the wealthy. But the cultural revolution in China really dampened that for much of China’s sphere of influence.

After WW-II Japan was forced to modernize. Western manufacturing and improvement processes came in. The manufacturing was new but the culture of continuous improvement and mastery was already well established in Japanese culture but didn’t exist in the West where modernization was really a battle between the use of slave labor / child labor vs machines and the concept of continuous improvement was a new thing.

But I wonder, can we say the same about German engineering vs Russian engineering?

I love Japanese high quality items, but I think we worship them a bit due to the fact that they are foreign imports from a different culture. For some categories mentioned by the OP, some non-Japanese items are superior.

In the same way, the Japanese worship even more some Western goods and have gone out of their way to copy and sometimes improve them. For example, there is a whole subculture in Japan that adores old American tees and denim. They create exceptionally high quality reproductions using original equipment [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204542404577157...

There are plenty of areas where Japanese have lost to competitors. Their sweet is making things that are hard and expensive do well. The most important components of our iPhones can only be made in Japan because of their attention to detail. They still make pretty good swords and knives!

An interesting thing I remember reading about Japan was that post war it rapidly industrialised with massive success in a very short amount of time. Something which brought great pain and poor conditions to many countries that tried to do the same.

Speaking of fountain pens and Japan; in Japan you can find these compact-sized cartridge fountain pens for ￥200. E.g. at LOFT. They are decent; just the handle is simple transparent plastic.

Different people/cultures are good at different things. The Japanese are really good at taking an existing product and making it much better in terms of quality, durability, finish, etc.

However saying that the Japanese are better at everything does injustice to western society - which incidentally has had a stellar record inventing everything from cars to planes to cameras. Sure, the finish and panache of the final product may be lacking a little, but without the fierce can-do attitude and i-dont-care-for-authority attitude that is a hallmark of western society, none of these might have come to be.

PS: I'm neither Japanese nor western.

Malcolm Gladwell has a chunk of one of his books devoted to this. The theory he uses is that growing rice in paddies is painstaking and meticulous work, where attention to detail and constant refinement are necessary for a good crop, whereas wheat or soybeans don’t need this level of work.

This would predict the same attention to quality and continuous improvement in all rice paddy reliant cultures. China disproves this hypothesis. Even very, very expensive apartments in Shanghai often have terrible quality finish. It looks great when new but even a couple of years later things start to fall apart in most places. And it isn’t confined to accommodation. It’s amazingly difficult to get people to actually follow a maintenance schedule for equipment, even extremely expensive manufacturing equipment. When most of the workforce is at best two generations removed from peasants and most aren’t even one an attitude of “Fuck it, it’ll do.” is pervasive.

Gladwell has made something of a career out of exactly this sort of tenuous, facile nonsense.

On cars you missed Subaru, a favorite of mine. My favorite all time car was my 2001 Legacy L wagon.

For bikes (bicycles) I'd say it depends. For daily commutes and leisure trips, you can't beat Gazelle. But then again, maybe you're thinking of racing bikes and using bikes for sports.

Hakko soldering irons and Japanese capacitors also come to mind.

Missing category to think about: software craftsmanship?

Hammers. The Germans make better industrial hammers.

What ever happened to Japanese laptops anyway? I used to have a little bitty Fuji and I loved it, back then Sony also had super great industrial design, really offering an alternative to Apple that was at least as cool-looking. Is that just not a thing anymore?

All I can figure is Sony got a taste of that sweet sweet BS money (that made from IP and online services rather than products per se, that is) and got lost in it.

Gotta be honest here, Apple still makes the best computer hardware. Its what Sony aspires to, but can't really touch.

Unless you want to use your laptop to type, of course ;)

Nobody can beat Lenovo, IMO. The Thinkpad x1 carbon as an example. Lighter than a MacBook pro. More ports. A keyboard that not only isn't defeated by a single grain of sand, but is also just a delightful keyboard. Put whatever OS you want on it. Far cheaper.

They are good at making quality because they learned how and started doing it. In the 1960s "make in Japan" was synonymous with cheap junk - what China is today (perhaps worse?). There are complex reasons why most countries go through this, I can list some of the factors but I don't know them all (I doubt anyone does)

>Japanese made products used to be synonymous to 'cheap' and 'poor quality.' It was not until July 1950 when Dr. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) introduced SQC to the Japanese industry audience, using the trademark colored-beads experiment.

>Eizaburo Nishibori, one of the country's post-war quality pioneers, describes in a book* the humble initial encounter to modern quality concepts that preceded Deming's historic 8-day seminar.

>It was during American occupation of Japan (1945- 1952) when GHQ (offices of the Allied occupation) placed an order of vacuum tubes to Toshiba. Nishibori recalled the American officers wanted to see a 'control chart' from the manufacturing process being used to produce their order. No one at Toshiba knew what it was. "You don't know a control chart? How do you plan to manage quality?" Nishibori remembers replying, "If we, engineers at Toshiba, don't know it, most likely no one in Japan knows."

http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html

What about software? I can't think of a single piece of Japanese software I use as part of my everyday, core compute kit.

>there's people in my office who haven't touched a pen in weeks.

After I realized in my second year of university that I cannot read my own notes, I switched to the laptop as my primary note-making tool. That's been... almost two decades ago.

I'll take a dry marker to architect and brainstorm on whiteboard any day of the week; but I touch pens very very little (and if I have to make notes, I'll do block capitals; I can do cursive of course... I just never do. I had an interesting conversation with a school principal who insisted cursive is a core skill that should never be omitted. I view it as calligraphy - a historically relevant and necessary mechanism that today is a quaint way of expressing your uniqueness and artistic prowess, but certainly not a mandatory aspect of modern living)

If I don't take hand-written notes, I don't hear what a lecturer is saying.

If I type them, I don't hear it either.

I almost never go back to notes. The process of writing them, however, is critical for me. Maybe it's my ADHD, dunno.

For what it's worth though, I'm usually taking notes on a surface device of some kind, rather than pen and paper.

I need the notes too. I rarely refer back to them but writing them is an art for me. It almost functions as a memory palace of sorts. I’ve done notes on an iPad Pro but I prefer pencil, colored pens, and paper.

I agree in principle that note-taking can enhance memory and retention; but I've found that today, typing my notes does the trick for me - especially because I use indented/hierarchical lists frequently, and update/re-org them as I go; so they help me build a mental model of material or actions we covered. By the end of note-taking session, my OneNote file will have notes organized in the way which makes sense to me and in which way I want to remember them - whereas hand-written notes would (for me) be inherently more sequential. As yourself therefore, I retain the list of key points or actions far better than if I didn't take those notes - even if I don't refer to them later.

(as well, I'm a touch-typist, so I can look at the person or whiteboard/screen while typing, which again I personally couldn't do while hand-writing).

So it may be whatever works for any given person - or, whatever people get used to. It'd be curious to see if typed notes would provide same benefit to you after, say, a few months commitment? Or it may be that I switched early enough in life; or, to quote Lady Gaga, maybe I was just born that way :->

There’s a lot of research that backs this up. The process is far more important than the document you are creating.

I've taken to Muji pens, 0.38mm. I love the finer point to them--hard to find anything smaller than 0.5mm in the US.

I bought some 0.18s back in the early 00s. Most were too scratchy.

0.25 to 0.3 tends to be okay. Very handy for writing very small. The thinner traces save ink, too.

Muji has US stores. And their gel pens I think must be OEM by Zebra. The Zebra Sarasa has a different clip, but the parts are interchangeable, I took one of each apart and made two hybridd.

Muji 0.38mm gel pens are my favourite cheap good pens (they're about $1.50 AUD in Australia).

I may press too hard, but I've had a few packs of them and ~50% would break on me and start leaking ink like a squid. Great pens otherwise though.

> a Mitsubishi uni-ball eye

Uni-balls will forever be my favorite pens. The right amount of flow and resistance. Clear, strong lines that don't bleed and smear. I've tried so many other pens and they just making writing misery. Uni-ball for life.

> I guess it's maybe a cultural thing, I've heard that the Japanese still place a lot of emphasis on handwriting letters and notes.

Sorry to be this guy, but, nope. It's quite opposite. Old generation, yes, they do. New generation, especially smartphone generation, are not writing anymore. And to the point that they have problems with handwriting some kanji characters. Most of the stuff is printed, now, or written on the keyboard slash phone. It's just much faster for them. OTOH it's hard to blame them. Kanji characters require much more effort to write properly and there's much more of them to remember than Latin letters.

It's definitely cultural, but I think this is something different. Obviously it's generalization and my opinion, but I deeply think there is something to it.

Like any other nation I know, Japanese tend to master things they do. I've experienced this first hand. They can perform a single task whole life, improving it, until they become exceptionally good at it. It may seem to be a tedious everyday chore, but through all repetition and improvement they are raising it to the level of art. Often, they even put an additional effort for something that doesn't directly pay off financially but increase esthetics, comfort and overall experience. I love them for that and I hope they'll never change, for the sake of the whole world drowning in a sea of ugly, cheap and minimal effort products.

I agree. I use a Kuru Toga pencil that rotates the lead to keep it from becoming wedge shaped. Definitely my favorite pencil of all time.

I listed after those for a couple years before getting a few. I found that without realizing it I had already been rotating my pencil between every few strokes and that made them not work so well. I can't seem to break the habit so I have gone back to wood pencils.

I think it is because of Zen, most people in Japan don't actively practice Zen anymore but the influence is still there. Think of the tea ceremony, Bonsai trees, sword making etc, everything should be perfect, clean, minimalism that is how one reaches Satori, the Japanese are very self conscious. Same principles of zen applied to the modern world.

Yesssss! I regret not having brought back more. I can't for the life of me find the same quality uni ball pens anywhere in the US or online.

They definitely take handwritten notes far more seriously in Japan. The have Stationary stores everywhere there and they literally just sell writing utensils and paper/notebooks.

> I can't for the life of me find the same quality uni ball pens anywhere in the US or online.

Here's the mother lode: https://www.jetpens.com/

Reviews: https://www.jetpens.com/reviews

I like Pigma Micron pens: https://www.jetpens.com/blog/sakura-pigma-pens-a-comprehensi....

Jetpens is a marvelous site if you like pens.

Is it Japanese or Mitsubushi especially? They're pretty much synonymous with high quality work vehicles but very few of the other products they make seem to get exported. I had a great Mitsubishi TV once, but when it had to be replaced they'd disappeared from the market.

Yes, yes, yes! I refuse to use anything except Mitsubishi UB157 for handwriting for years now.

I have a set of Mitsubishi Pencil Hi-Uni 10B to 10H pencils and I love them.

Me too! Have used it for 10 years now. Changed only 3 of them

Reply on news.ycombinator.com