Love japanese and japan but their work culture is horrific - Japanese are inefficient and the veneer of looking to work "hard" is more important than the hard work itself. People often stay until ridiculously late just to show they "put in the effort" which is more important than outcome.
Then again that happens in many other countries as well ...
I haven't directly experienced Japanese work culture (just language and traveling) but it seems like they value hard work above all else, which makes innovation almost a threat. You might take away someone's opportunity to show "hard work" if you removed a difficult task.
This is the root of a lot of busywork and bullshit jobs as well. People work hard producing something of little and often negative value.
Think of all the effort that goes into making competitive products, from life insurance and cellphone plans to airline tariffs difficult to compare. Compound that with advertising campaigns that don’t inform about the product or service they are selling. All that consumes colossal resources and deliver effectively negative value for society, for a market to be maximally efficient it needs informed consumers that can compare offerings.
Yeah I wonder about that sometimes, the maximal balance between efficiency and inefficiency. Some things are clearly a waste (like advertising as you mentioned) but then other stuff is part of innovation, and it's sometimes a bit fuzzy between the two. On paper it's wasteful that Mazda, Toyota, Ford, etc. all had to independently develop a sedan, yet it would be far worse if we only had one car company to choose from (far worse because of how monopolies inevitably stagnate).
Unregulated monopolies do, but regulated ones can be forced to innovate, both according to a plan, or through a process that internalises competition at the places where impact would be maximised (instead of multiple groups arriving at the same solution in secrecy, multiple groups exploring different possibilities while communicating between them and coordinating their efforts to avoid duplication).
For example some countries that have regulated monopolies can allow in small amounts of foreign products to motivate their own state sponsored companies, but without that and assuming its not something relatively straightforward like a utility or an oil company, I'm not aware of any that innovate effectively.
And easily demonstrable when meeting someone in a social setting:
"Hi, what's your name?"
Then the very next question: "What do you do for a living?"
I think it's a shame because Japan is going through a massive tourism boom at the moment. There's surely a huge number of incredibly smart and talented people who would like to bring their skills in and help lift Japan out of its economic slumber. But Japan is still very closed off and shows no signs of wanting to modernise.
Moving between very different cultures is a challenge, but the rewards are accordingly nicer, but it really sucks when the new culture doesn’t welcome and integrate you into it.
Between Hungary and Turkey, something similar happened with the pogacza. I brough some cheese pogacza to the office and a Turkish colleague immediately recognized what it was. We couldn't really figure out which culture it comes from, but we agree it's delicious and dangerously addictive.