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I agree with @dwc, and would call it a fluke, possibly human error. In any case, there's no need to single out Japan on software. After Russia, US, and China, Japan has the most satellites in orbit. China which is always called on its quality control went 16 for 16 launches, and they launch other countries satellites too. They also landed on the moon in 2013. Ironically, they still can't make a ballpoint pen as good as the Japanese,Swiss or German ones due to consumer spending habits [1]. Somebody mentioned South Korea as a comparison. Well they only have 16 compared to Japan's 153 satellites. Japan's space program is scientific, while there are military launches in the US, Russia and China with those budgets hidden to develop such capability. Japanese robotics are amazingly performant,so they must be doing something right there both hardware and software-wise. Realtime sensor data coupled with mechanics, mechatronics. Funny, anime has robots with rockets, and yet Japan produces the world's top humanoid robots vs. the military and seemingly menacing robots from Boston Dynamics (Alphabet, Google). Although, Atlas is giving Asimo a run for its money. A lot of satellites were launched off of Soyuz (Russian) rockets too.
The UK launched one satellite on its own rocket in 1971, and now piggybacks or rents time on satellites. Space launches are expensive, technically challenging, and still risky. SpaceX lost the 8 cubesats on the June 28th launch failure. Mechanical, not software, but it shows the risks involved are not isolated to a single country over another, software or hardware. [1] http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/10/world/why-cant-china-make-good-ballpoint-pen
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