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Comment by mkii | Hacker News Reader

Is it truly mysterious though? I find it interesting whenever HN has a strong fascination with all things related to "Japanese-ness". For example, there have been links to wikipedia pages of some Japanese term, and it will make front page with comments. I can't think of any other nation that has this kind of cultural representation on here.

And yet, the myth of Japanese "uniqueness" is largely the product of Japanese national propaganda, serving many useful purposes for the state, for example increasing tourism and limiting permanent immigration. I find it quite fascinating in modern times this propaganda still lives on strongly throughout the world, as people say "things are so different in Japan."

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There is a lot of propaganda about Japan's culture, but there is no mistaking that it is indeed different and quite unique, not always in good ways. It is quite common for island or peninsula countries to have strong, unique cultures, and Japan certainly sits at the exceptional end of that in terms of how strong the culture is.

What specifically are you balking at?

not the person you're replying to, but seemed pretty obvious they were rejecting the idea that Japanese programmers are somehow unique in being good in some cases and bad in other cases

Japanese organizations are different, and that makes the skills and behavior of their programmers different.

They reward tenure and respecting the hierarchy. Wonder what kind of positive (from western pov) skills and behaviours are fostered in that environment.

Regarding hierarchy, I have an anecdote about India. A manager told me that western teams are more likely to challenge a ticket than Indian teams, who hesitate to do that and are more likely to power through. His theory is that the culture makes it disrespectful to question the upper hierarchy, given its caste system, and causes a clash with western culture.

His solution was to communicate much more actively with the Indian team, to try to squeeze more feedback that they would hesitate to give at first.

Tenure could induce creating respectable code that one has to deal with for a lifetime of work. Just a guess.

It's not just HN.

You'd probably enjoy this meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thing-japan

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2554429-thing-japan

Haha, that's a funny meme. But the main picture sort of is different, no? In Tokyo, you'd wander through the streets and see all sorts of interesting things in that melange of billboards: model train stores, little book stores, an indoor hydroponics farm, a teppanyaki place. I've got nothing against truck stop off-ramps looking like they do (they provide great utility on road trips) but it's qualitatively different and I can see someone liking the former and not the latter.

It's kind of the same to me. There's videos on YouTube of Japanese tourist or exchange students in America, gawking and having fun over the most mundane American things.

Huh, I suppose we're different. I wasn't born American, and both the truck stop stuff and the Japanese city are wondrous to me. But they're obviously different experiences because of how many novel things I can experience in a short amount of time.

As a non-American the skyscrapers in NYC as well as the architecture in LV were mind blowing to me. I guess the US also has good nature.

But Japan is a condensed WTF/sqm if you ever visit you will see that it’s truly a special country.

One thing that Japanese did really well is keeping their language identity. In particular, they don’t translate their words. They give us gyoza instead of dumplings. They give us ramen instead of some lame-ass noodle. They give us Sudoku instead of number puzzles. So much so that Japanese words have some kind of zen-like connotation to many people. In contrast, mainland Chinese always translate words to English. Ironically, gyoza is literally Chinese word 饺子，and Ramen is really the Chinese word 拉面。

Japanese has a lot of loan words from Chinese, which isn’t surprising. They aren’t even written in katakana. Japanese are more likely to adopt phonetic translation of new things (like computer) whereas Chinese will make a new word diannao (electric brain). Of course Chinese not having an auxiliary phonetic writing system (unlike Japanese or Korean) makes this necessary, although that’s probably by design (not completely true, some non-Chinese languages use Chinese as a phonetic writing system!).

Electric brain sounds cool! In Hungarian we say ‘számítógép’, which is literally computing/calculating machine.

Is this something that's happening because of something Japanese people are doing or because of the perception of Japanese culture where foreigners like Japanese words and thus don't translate it?

To me names of things are like pronouns, why would you change it? Feels weird to me.

Though I guess it's weird we didn't do that a lot of Chinese dishes. Soup dumplings instead of Xiao long bao. Idk how to even properly pronounce that.

    > Idk how to even properly pronounce that.

And there's your reason why we say dumplings and not xiao long bao! :)

I think a big part is that Japanese is a lot easier to pronounce for westerners. We won't get it fully right but there are no tones and it transliterates to English pretty well, compared to pretty much every other Asian country.

The "X" in general is like a "chi" with a lisp.

Sounds like you're describing how English speakers treat Japanese loanwords, which sounds more relevant to the identity of English rather than Japanese.

From what I've heard, the Japanese has no qualms about importing English words or just making up "nonsensical" new English words to suit their needs.

Yes, but I thought it was Japanese culture that drives such adoption. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain why English vocabulary does not include many modern Chinese words in similar fashion, but does include a number of Cantonese words.

Mainland China is behind on cultural exports in the last few decades, but Hong Kong is not.

On the other hand, the amount of foreign (english) words 'katakanized' and used everyday is astounding.

Oh please. Look and see some example Mandarin and Cantonese words loaned to English. [1] They also have your Japanese examples in there.

Want more counterexamples? Probably literally every Italian food: spaghetti, pizza, ravioli...

To me, this is just more evidence for how strong this meme of Japanese uniqueness, coolness, "sugoi kawaii desune~~ ^-^" is. I'm not bashing people who think Japan is cool. But I do think it's weird how they can't recognize it's just a meme, to the point of fetishization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Chine...

Did you notice that most of the words, if not all, are based on Cantonese. Hence I was careful to say "mainland Chinese". The early immigrants were mostly from Guangdong and Fujian. They didn't translate their words but to use phonics directly and I wish the mainland Chinese did the same. A good example could be the Japanese word katana。If it were from mainland Chinese, you'd bet the word would be "Chinese sword" instead of "jian" or "dao".

I mean, those are not new words. Languages more often than not take the foreign name of a new discovery/item/concept, and Japanese is no different. As sibling commenter mentions, they have a huge amount of English words written with katakanas.

Some languages had periods where they tried finding a new, “pure” name for a foreign concept/item, but these have varied success rates, and often sound idiotic to native speakers, and they don’t see the point.

I never met a Brazilian who went to Japan and didn’t spontaneously say that things there are so different. I don’t think it’s solely propaganda (if any at all).

They’d probably have the same reaction to America or much of Europe considering you’re talking about two countries with quite different levels of development and standards of living.

No, that’s not it. These people are used to go to the US and Europe and it’s not the same reaction.

It is a mix of development, very different culture (Brazil has a lot of European and US cultural influence), but also safety, institutional efficiency, traditions. Idk, there is a lot of different aspects and things.

> Brazil has a lot of European and US cultural influence

That’s the core point. Of course Asian culture is more different. Probably a better example would be for a Brazilian to visit some African tribe.

African culture also has a lot of influence in Brazilian culture. But anyway, there is another uniqueness aspect aspect, which is the urban development of Japan.

I visited African tribes, and of course it is different than a big city in Brazil, it is just as different as an indigenous tribe here in Brazil, or a more rural village.

Japan uniqueness, I believe, comes from its urban development. Rich, clean, polite, functional big cities is the uniqueness that I see in Japan that it’s not common in any other place in the world. I didn’t find that in LA, NY, Paris, London, Dakar.

Maybe Copenhagen (from the ones I visited) would match some aspects of it, but then it’s not as big as Tokyo, nor it is blended with the tradition as in Japan (or I am used to Nordic traditions more than Japanese)

I am convinced that Japan has some unmatched uniqueness which make it more different of other countries than other countries are among them.

I mean I would figure it would be extremely different, much more so than say visiting the USA or Europe since our heritage all comes from the same parts of the world (minus indigenous which USA and Brazil also share to an extent)

I hear you. Having studied Japanese seriously it takes a lot of the magic out of jargon that’s just common Japanese nouns. But it is still alien to most of our ways of working (though I think that has more to do with nonprogrammers programming than anything about the Yamatodamashii).

Indeed! I recently learned about an aspect of this which is named and tied to national brand strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan

I feel like China could really gain by taking a page or two from this playbook.

Not arguing against your point, but there's an active element in America media that's very anti-Chinese. When's the last time you saw a story that was cool or innocent related to China in HN (because MSM's totally out of the question)?

The MSM had a far more negative view of Japan not too many years ago.

If you fed Americans Chinese news stories from Chinese media directly, they would have an even lower opinion of China. Give an American a copy of global times or China daily (you can find them at the airport) and watch them wonder if this is satire or real!

There were a lot of pro-China articles and comments on HN about 5 or so years ago, China’s popularity has just taken a huge nosedive since then. Sexy Cyborg makes China look cool until the government shuts her down, making China look very uncool.

Definitely. Unfortunaly, the people who are currently enjoying the benefits of being China's leaders would only lose. So they have decided to take a different path, esp. in the recent years.

> the myth of Japanese "uniqueness" is largely the product of Japanese national propaganda, serving many useful purposes for the state

Is the Consumer Reports that we're commenting on also Japanese propaganda?

Japan definitely has their own business culture, which has pros and cons (e.g. it is very seniority-aware, but that’s also a negative).

It seems to fit well engineering, but it is not that good of a fit for software development - as they are generally not too great at the latter. I have only heard these things, so not even first-hand experience, but due to a senior people basically “have to be” at a higher position, there are software companies where the higher ups don’t know shit about what is even a computer.

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