The big difference is capital markets, as SK along with other Asian countries became more attractive for Japanese capital than Japan during the 2000s.
This shows that even on HN, all you have to do is sound confident.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time residing in both countries could tell you this is not true. English proficiency levels are significantly higher in Korea, to the extent that this difference has a societal and business impact on each country.
In both countries I found English levels to vary widely based on which industry and location you were in. I think Korean society in general has higher English skills among younger people especially due to the number of Koreans that have spent significant time in the US. But among IT industries and top graduates I'm not sure there's a big difference.
Of course this difference disappears at the top 1% level, but this holds pretty much anywhere in the world. China might be an exception because it's so big, not sure, but elsewhere you're not going to be at the forefront of things if you can't participate in the international community.
And this isn’t limited to IT, it’s pretty much the case in most departments.
Decent written English skills are not as rare though.
I will say they come out with some dank video games like Lineage, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, PUBG
The software Samsung puts on their phones may just be a layer on top of Android but is still very influential by being run on billions of end-user devices.
The country's definitely low on internationally impactful SaaS, though they do exist e.g. Sendbird and Moloco.
This strategy of pretending to be a Japanese app has worked for a decade but now seems to be coming to an end, with the JP government looking to force Softbank to somehow broker a deal with Naver to reduce their share to less than 50%.
The EU should do similar with Whatsapp.
I would know, I literally worked there.
There has been an entire scandal about Line's data having been hosted in Korea all this time for more than a decade, after which the servers finally got moved to Japan. You're hardly going to place all physical servers in country A and then do all backend and infra development in country B.
[1] https://careers.linecorp.com/ko/jobs?ca=Engineering&ci=Bunda...
And if you think that’s preposterous you don’t know the least of it. For example, the designers in the company decided to boycott meetings.
Basically conglomerates grew so big through foreign investments that they control large parts of the legislative and executive body. The families regularly get threatened by some aspiring/greedy politicians, then they threaten to fire a lot of people, and then they get spoken free.
I'd argue that this was the inspiration for the Mr.Robot series (apart from enron group), as it's portraying a similar disfunct democracy that's effectively owned by oligarchs or is effectively an oligopol.
Or do you just mean it came from Korea? I guess I should have been more clear that I was talking about software that is known internationally.
Sure, most of it is Android, but even, like, using the darn thing needs more software proficiency than average
Though Nintendo and Sony kinda do a good job (a lot of development is done outside Japan though - same for Samsung)
To put this in a more relatable way: Most people will invent apple peelers to peel apples, and make better peelers to make peeling easier. Some will just be lazy bastards and eat the apple skin and all. Japanese peel the apple with just an ordinary kitchen knife, their cutlery technology thus never advances beyond kitchen knife because "Why?".
Japanese simply cannot grasp the appreciation of good tools made for purpose because they can do everything with their bare hands, they can't understand WTF good software is because they don't need it and don't use it.
And no matter how much vi(m) might be a plugin-bloated mess that never really gelled for me, it also never lagged out or randomly failed to do things like autocomplete or formatter running to nearly the extent VS Code does daily. And it didn't use half my CPU just sitting there.
Autotools, now, that's some real self-flagrllation.
Here's a good start to compile Inform. And, yes, inform could be surely compiled with a literal
'cc -o inform src/*.c'
It isn't until very recently that new houses in Japan were built with insulation. Why? Wearing a bunch of layers, slippers, sitting in front of a kerosene heater or under a kotatsu... It works, so why fix it? Maybe it's a lack of creativity, critical thinking, or suppliers.. but it doesn't matter. If it kinda works, don't fix it.
Which is interesting, because hundred of "keep warm in your house" little junky products have come out in the past decade like USB warmers and whatnot.
And yeah, there are some arguments (other than the status quo) against insulated houses: more cost, when houses are seen as a one-type-thing and not a long-term investment. No basements for a furnace for central heating. Earthquake standards. But really, it's mostly just the same "Why" from your comment.
Or look around your typical supermarket. Instant noddles, pre-made curry mixes, pre-cut meat and vegetables, instant miso soup, precooked side dishes and so on. It’s not like this stuff cannot be prepared at home. It sells well because it’s convenient.
P.S. the skin is the best part of a good apple.
The chief example are mobile phones, the poster child of Galapagos Syndrome[1]. Once Japan figured out mobile phones they stopped moving. They kept reiterating and ended up with the craziest mobile phones known to man, but they got 1HKO'd in broad daylight by the invention of the smartphone and haven't been relevant since.
Another is the Mitsubishi Regional Jet. With expertise building licensed F-15s and the pride of restarting Japanese domestic aviation manufacturing since the YS-11, they built one of the best regional jets ever and failed to sell a single one because they couldn't figure out how to document how the thing was made and thus the required certifications from the FAA and other authorities.
Both examples are of Japan simply not understanding what a good purpose made tool is, because they don't need to. Why would anyone want a smartphone? Why do we need to explain how this jetliner is made? Of course they realize why once they're crashed in the dirt, but by then it's way too late.
While not immune (eg: the ancient state of US banking), the rest of the world and the United States in particular on the other hand respect good products that shake the markets, people and companies who don't (eg: Boeing and Intel for recent examples) are tarred and feathered for their insolence.
I think these are good examples of Japanese corporate culture being quite insular, often not just of the world outside Japan, but often of the world outside the same company. Product design often stumbles because it focuses on the needs of the company not the customers (not a uniquely Japanese problem; cough Google).
It’s not a problem of people not appreciating good products - e.g. smart phones rapidly displaced the old “garakei” feature phones in Japan. Japanese consumers clearly appreciated them, just like they clearly appreciate fruit peelers..
Rather the mobile makers that reached market dominance became complacent. They failed to innovate, failed to expand overseas and were disrupted by innovative products.
The problem is they need a Steve Jobs selling them on iPhones more than anyone else on the planet, and they almost never get their own "Steve Jobs" especially these days.
For a software example, consider LINE: The most popular instant messaging platform in Japan. It's owned and operated by a Japanese company today (LY Corporation, or the LINE Yahoo Corporation), but LINE is originally a South Korean piece of software engineering by Naver. Japan couldn't make their own product because "Why?", email and texting are fine they say; South Korea had to show them why.
A particularly egregious example is Toshiba putting the inventor of NAND flash (Fujio Masuoka) out to dry and claiming the technology was invented by Intel, because they so utterly hated the idea of creating an entire new market and needing to answer "Why?" when hard drives and floppies and tapes were just fine.
Japanese people are too capable for their own good, arguably they are so capable they are incapable.
Incidentally, Japan is still trying to make the metaverse and NFTs a thing. That should tell you all you need to know about how stagnant the Japanese can be once they're satisfied.
They were motivated to claim that Masuoka was not the inventor of NAND because they would have owed him millions in inventors rights on the patents. Masuoka eventually sued and settled out of court.
Line wasn’t particularly innovative. It’s basically a WhatsApp clone. It was mostly developed in Japan, by a team of mostly Japanese engineers, working at the subsidiary of a Korean company. It succeeded because of good timing and execution, not because it was innovative.
The Mitsubishi Jet project had many problems. It was massively overtime and budget. Its design didn’t match the needs of foreign carriers. They didn’t have the right team in place to navigate the certification process. Seriously read the Japanese wiki page on it. It’s a good summary of where the project went wrong.
I don’t see how any of this supports the conclusion that Japanese people are “too capable for their own good” and “so capable they are incapable”, or “incapable of recognising good tools”.
There’s plenty of counter examples where Japanese companies have been innovative and pivoted. Look at Kodak vs Fuji Film.
Kodak invented much of the underlying technology for digital cameras but failed to capitalise. Instead their business was disrupted by Japanese digital camera makers, eventually driving Kodak to bankruptcy. Meanwhile Fuji Film saw the writing on the wall and successfully pivoted.
Especially when the politicians are well paid by the makers of those products. /s
I don't agree with this, I have researched English proficiency across the world and South Korea consistently ranks quite a bit higher than Japan. Here is one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index
I also regularly talk with many people from both Japan and South Korea (being that I learn the languages), with those people having wildly varying degrees of English literacy... but in talking to all of them, the one consistent thing everyone has agreed on is that Koreans by-and-large definitely speak better English than Japanese.
I'm not sure if any other countries than Japan do that, but I smell something similar might be going on in public education in rural China; it's a somewhat usable alternative where immersive training is not available.
Japanese people aren't that serious about moving out (at least my generation. Your people look a bit different though.)
This is mirrored in Europe where countries using subs (Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, etc) have better English language skills than dub countries (France, Germany, Spain).