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Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

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I made a very small and highly defensible claim.

You argued that this article (by David Oks) is an example of "how Westerners idealize Japan." I argued that this article does not idealize Japan, and that, if you interpreted Oks' article that way, then you didn't understand the article.

I didn't say that Japanese business culture is more "horizontal" than Western business culture, or that Japanese business culture is better in any particular way. I didn't even say that the article is right or wrong about anything.

All I did was to restate the thesis statement of the article, to clarify what the article actually says.

I don't harbor any particular affinity for Japan, or Japanese business culture. I know very little about it. I'm not an authority to speak on it, and I didn't.

You assumed what I believe without understanding what I wrote. You did exactly the same thing to me that you did to David Oks.

You say you know very little about it, but that didn't keep you from posting? This isn't what HN is about.

> In Japan, mobility is fundamentally expensive, and relocating to a different region is much harder than outsiders realize.

Unless said mobility is paid for by the company.

As part of the job rotation mentioned in the article, larger Japanese companies are also notorious for reassigning job locations, often at short notice and with zero care for family dynamics. Hence the tanshin-fu'nin phenomenon, where the husband is sent off to work at some factory or regional branch in the sticks for years while the wife brings up the kids elsewhere.

You seem to understand this deeply, perhaps even better than I do. When I worked in Japan, experiencing the corporate culture firsthand was much harder than I had anticipated. They even provided a translator for my boss and me during our business trip, but it was still incredibly tough. I do remember that, at the time, they were conducting suicide prevention training for employees in the wake of the Toyota new-hire suicide incident.

Anyway, you clearly know a lot about Japan, and I apologize if it came across as me just badmouthing the country. My original intent was simply to point out how drastically different things look from an East Asian perspective compared to a Western one. I didn't mean to keep painting Japan in a negative light—every system obviously has its pros and cons. I actually have fond memories of the unique, close-knit, family-like atmosphere that Japanese companies have

How does the "concentration" of gamedev jobs look like ? In US and I think in most of EU countries that have noticeable gamedev it is usually concentrated in very few cities, so changing job does not necessarily consist a move. But other industries similarly usually have a niche and sometimes whole towns that rose around it.

I think main difference is that there is very little tradition of company thinking they own something to the workers, and (I think) far more of companies just buying out their competition and then gutting any tradition and institutional knowledge within

> (Moving in Japan involves massive upfront rental fees like shikikin (deposit) and reikin (key money), making the physical act of relocating extremely prohibitive.)

I don't think that part is all that different? While we don't have "key money" it's still a big deal to take your life and move it somewhere else

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