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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Japan's business and bureaucratic culture continues to fascinate me. On the one hand, they're well known for agile lean manufacturing that can adapt, like you said. Also construction costs, extremely advanced trains, etc etc.. On the other hand, they're very resistant to change. See fax machines, website aesthetics, personal stamps (there's a Japanese word for these that I'm forgetting), tons and tons of paperwork, not leaving until your boss does, companies being run by families, the list goes on. I don't know if I really have a conclusion, it's just that I don't get how it all works together. And given their GDP growth, I'm not sure if "works" is really the right term either.

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> And given their GDP growth, I'm not sure if "works" is really the right term either.

Japan's GDP growth is actually good for an advanced economy, when you index it to the size of the working-age population.[1]

Japan's working-age population has been shrinking for quite a while now.

(China's is peaking about now, so it can expect total growth to slow down. Hence the measures taken by the CCP to try to increase fertility: lifting the one-child policy to three children, introducing tax breaks, limiting for-profit tutoring, and most recently cracking down on alternatives to making babies: video games and on-line shopping and social media.)

1. Japan's working age population peaked in 1997: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S

One reason I've seen explained in very high detail in a reputable article I unfortunately can't recall the name of now, is that a lot of what they do that seems incredibly tedious (and well, is) somewhat acts as a type of gigantic social safety net in terms of not only income, but also socialization and for feelings of self-worth or that you're otherwise still contributing to your society (even though, as we are now discussing, it's likely holding some parts of societal advancement back).

Basically, if you for whatever reason become/are somewhat disabled, cognitively impaired, lose your family, are simply getting quite old and losing the ability to do what you used to, etc, there will always be some sort of job, often falling under the bloat of what you've listed after "on the other hand", that you'll be able to do if you want to, that will give you a stable income (even if small) and get you out of the house or whatever else and somewhere that you'll have a routine form of socialization amongst your co-workers and such.

Which is not so far from Germany if you think about it, apart from the GDP part.

> personal stamps (there's a Japanese word for these that I'm forgetting)

Hanko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usag...

A short explanation is that they set it up once after WW2 by copying from the US and Europe, but since then the countries they copied from got wise to the IP theft and copycat manufacturing and blocked the transfer of later tech and processes. So Japan is forced to keep up the old thing because it's the only way the know how to run. They couldn't modernise from within. The Japanese economy has many traits of a cargo cult. Their culture around office work, the suits, the drinking, the smoking, the "entertaining your clients with prostitutes", the over hours doing "dara-dara" (grunting and head-scratching in front of an open Excel sheet) just for show, etc. is all straight from the Mad Men era as well.

US working culture is a cargo cult. Cover letters, anodyne non-descriptions of "challenges", "going offline" and "touching base", cookie-cutter Scrum methodologies... hence why we just call it "culture".

They also have a lot of insanely passionate and smart people, a few of which I know, but the culture can really stifle them at times which is a shame.

Of course! Especially in the "knowledge worker" departments, but the majority of white-collar employees and their families still kind of believes the "Japan #1" pipe dream. Japanese products are automatically "the best™", quality is highest in the world, and anyone who argues differently is a "Japan basher". It's a strange mixture of arrogance with an inferiority complex, but it still works as sort of a mantra which I guess Japanese office workers are holding on to, in order to be able to keep on churning despite evidence that it's not working.

>A short explanation is that they set it up once after WW2 by copying from the US and Europe, but since then the countries they copied from got wise to the IP theft and copycat manufacturing and blocked the transfer of later tech and processes. So Japan is forced to keep up the old thing because it's the only way the know how to run.

LOL, that's not even wrong.

Agree for some department, but don't agree for car industry in Japan.

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