Declining As A Manufacturer, Japan Weighs Reinvention
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The headline is agitprop. The Yen has increased in value against the US dollar greatly in the past decade, yet Japan still manages to manufacture and export. It's defending the myth that currency devaluation is required to have a positive balance of trade.
ouch
In other words, "Do we want to compete with America or Germany?"
Maybe they need to find another option.
I think it has the potential to find original ways, but going head to head with Germany wouldn't put it in a bad place either. Still i'd hope the shift to a more software oriented business culture occurs.
I didn't mean to be flippant. I was just noting the difficult position they're in.
Software engineers and designers are already in high demand. Robotics are getting close to having wider industrial/consumer applications. Once Korea and China's factory wages go up high enough and the price of automation lowers, they'll start to invest heavily in robotics (ala Foxconn).
For a long time more than half the industrial robots in the world are in Japan.
Foxcon recently announced plans to build 1 million industrial robots, which will essentially double the number in the world[1].
I've noticed some people in the thread saying the Japanese programmers aren't good enough to program robots. That simply isn't the case - they lead the world in industrial robotics.
[1] http://www.gizmag.com/foxconn-gears-up-to-build-industrial-r...
Software's an uphill battle with the culture they have- although perhaps embracing advanced robotics, and the accompanying sophisticated software demands, might help change that.
Japanese companies usually suck at software. The emphasis has always been on the hardware -- one of the most obvious examples is the cellphones, which have always had extremely good hardware but very poor software and almost no applications to speak of. My 3-year-old phone has an 8MP camera, infrared transmission, TV, and I can use it as a train ticket, but the browser is so bad I can't even use Reddit's mobile version and it can't render HN comment pages with more than 100 or so comments.
Youtube and Facebook are not Japanese companies, after all. The local equivalents, Mixi and Niconico, are Japanese-only and have zero interest in internalization. Some companies like Rakuten are trying to reach overseas, but it's not an easy fight...
Imagine an old-fashioned craftsman who takes immense pride in working with his hands on something like blades, clockwork or fine jewelry. That sort of mentality is built into their culture.
In short, I'd not write them off because of perceived cultural mores. It's more than likely that your view is either wrong, or misjudged.
You are right though that as things grow dire, folks will be more willing to take risks.
1) massively ageing population 2) technology infra is 1st class
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio/worldbiz/worldbiz_...
The last twenty years in Japan look to have been abject
grey economic failure. It seems that successive attempts
to restart he economy have not worked. But if you look
around Tokyo it's a country that still appears very rich.
So what is going on here?Japanese manufacturing has always had a strong reputation with continuous improvement in their factories. This supposedly leads to lowered costs through efficiency. I am assuming that even with the decades of improvements, the lower wages of the other countries are still able to bring down the overall cost.
I'm pessimistic that this will happen any time soon in Japan, or any other country in the Far East, or pretty much every country except a select few. That kind of innovation is almost universally looked down upon in those cultures. You're supposed to be employed in a large corporation that makes tangible goods, not sit in front of a screen and churn out intellectual property.
Yes, they would love to make a billion dollars, too. But no, the sight of a bunch of college-dropout geeks doing what American startups typically do would be abhorrent enough to drive all investors a thousand kilometers away. You would be a shame to everyone around you. Your parents will not know how to explain themselves to their neighbors. Your high school teachers will deny that they ever taught you.
I seriously hope that somebody somewhere will say "F U" to all of that and just build something. Don't even target people in the same country, just sell it directly to everyone around the world. But even then, the sight of you straddling your MacBook in T-shirts and underpants like a hikikomori would be considered a shame to everyone around you. At least until you buy a sports car with your hard-earned foreign currency.
However, the exposure they get is very limited. It seems to be somewhat shut-off, mainly caused by a language barrier. Nearly everything is in Japanese, with little incentive to go international. Also, many people do not understand english well enough to participate in international communities or do not feel the urge to.
For example, look at mixi (it's a social network with roughly 15m members in japan, exists for i think 7 years+, mixi.jp), they had a huge userbase before facebook was popular in japan, even before facebook was really popular anywhere. however, their website is still only in japanese and to sign-up, you have to have a japanese cell phone email-address (for account confirmation). They are artificially locking people out and considering that japanese people increasingly go abroad/have friends outside of Japan, they migrate to facebook. Still, mixi does not move.
What I think is missing, is obviously the acceptance, as you mentioned, but also the incentive to go international(, unless the service involves billing). It's the internet and not a local sweets shop. By the way, there are also Japanese investors looking for startup and there are websites where they exchange ideas and whatnot, but it is all in Japanese.
Unfortunately, many Japanese seem to regard foreigners not as potential colleagues and a reservoir of ideas, but as mere cash cows for exporters to milk, and as "Gaijin" who somehow deserve less respect than the Japanese. The same happens in South Korea. There's an incredible amount of contempt for foreigners and foreign things, mostly among demographics that do not interact regularly with outside cultures.
By contrast, in America, YC founders come from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds. It's common to see names that are obviously not English in origin. Diversity is one of the major strengths of a country like America, and one which relatively homogeneous countries like Japan cannot easily replicate. When your CTO is from Poland and your CFO is from India, you are kinda forced to think on a global scale.