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Comment by jrs99 | Hacker News Reader

Article is VERY accurate. Japanese, especially, hate imperfection and believe that everything should be perfect, without any asymmetry or irregularity.

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It's a bit more nuanced than that… Fukinsei (asymmetry or irregularity) is considered one of the core principals of arts like bonsai or ikebana. Compare a Japanese zen garden to a perfectly symmetrical english-style hedge garden.

So while I would agree that there is high value placed on things being 'perfect', I would disagree that Japanese culture sees symmetry as the ultimate expression of perfection… I would say they see 'asymmetrical yet balanced' as perfection.

A hardware company I used to work for had a sister company in Japan. We'd send over our product and they'd run it through another set of production tests before sending it on to customers. If something wasn't right, no matter how trivial, they'd troubleshoot the issue (including pulling the thing apart) leave big stickers pointing to the issue, and send it back with a report.

How trivial can they get? One item came back with 'dirt on screen', with an arrow-sticker pointing at it. The tech here picked it up and touched the dirt with his finger... and it fell off. Nothing else was wrong with the unit. For this, the unit had a return-trip journey across an ocean...

Totally. Reminds me of Apple. Man, those fools were perfectionists. And they were bureaucrats too. Same thing happened. Dirt on screen? Just send it back. Let them deal with the clean up. Bureaucracy at its finest.

as a consumer, i would never return an item that was dirty. that's just too extreme.

How does that jive with wabi-sabi (which I've come to understand as roughly "rustic grace and worldliness")?

Well, the article says that almost everyone in Japan will say that quality = perfection. But wabi-sabi is definitely the aesthetic of imperfection. Maybe that is something older people and the ancient japanese people believe in?

wabi-sabi doesn't even really need to have anything to do with quality.

If Japanese hated asymmetry then why was Yumi - an asymmetrical bow the choice weapon for he world famous Samurais

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumi

Generalism may help paint ourselves into nice little circles for easy digestion by our brains but let's at least give it a fight :-)

Everyone in Japan would say quality was equal to perfection, so I'd probably say nobody in Japan is a Samurai anymore who needs a bow.

So you do agree that people keep changing and at any point cannot be generalized

I don't think it's a generalization if someone did the research and everyone in Japan says that perfection = quality.

Then that would be a fact, not a generalization.

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