[singiht34-02]

I think a big big part of this is that English is hard and Japan is just large enough that they get away with doing everything in Japanese (compared to something like.. Estonia). They have their own Physics and Engineering journals, their own textbooks on everything, their own programming world. In the tech sphere they basically don't really have to learn English at all to be successful and so they end up being incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. They put in a lot of resources in getting people to learn English and yet it doesn't seem to pay off (I don't know what the solution is)

The horrible web design to me can only be partly explained by that though. As a people with an special eye to detail and design this is simply incomprehensible to me...

[gleenn]

I worked over there for a year. Dropped right into a RoR and Android shop and coded with them just like an American style one so at least anecdotally, they don't really have a different programming world.

[jpatokal]

Ruby was built in Japan. But shops like yours are rarity: in patio11's words, "Metropolitan Nagoya has literally thousands of people who can write assembly code that you’d literally trust your life to (you have before and will again, unless your sole method of transportation is bicycles), and probably only a few dozen who you’d want working on a web application."