[ChrisMarshallNY]

That point might be valid, but it could be simpler than that. It just might be too expensive to design and document for the world.

Documentation is often very complete; but at an extremely technical level, and not always translated. Japan is a nation of engineers. I think that they expect users to have a certain level of proficiency, and that is reflected in their UX and documentation.

I find that Japanese equipment can be very polished and aesthetically designed, but can be quite intimidating. They produce pretty space shuttle cockpits.

Translation is a fearsomely expensive and fraught process. I have done a lot of localization work. Chinese companies have a similar affect, where their customer documentation is often quite sparse. It's quite possible to get detailed documentation, but it will be in Chinese, from the company. I found that out while I was working in ONVIF (surveillance stuff). The docs that came with the cameras were terrible, but the engineers would be quite helpful, if I could track them down and ask questions.

[noirbot]

Yea, I don't mean it to say there's no reason for it. That underlying issue tracks with what I'd expect.

This comes back to another point that's been made elsewhere in this thread - it's always going to be easier to design and build things for a community that's smaller and more homogeneous. A lot of the countries we think of as being good at building things are also fairly small.

There's probably a term for it, but it's almost the inverse of Economies of Scale. It's easier to make good country-wide standards when most of your country wants the same thing.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Well, my experience is that some (not all) Japanese companies are quite good at making high-quality stuff at enormous scale.

The company I worked for is renowned for making really nice cameras, and have been doing it for 100 years. People all over the world have wrapped their entire careers around the products of this company (I don't call them out by name, because I don't really want my social media rants to end up on their radar).

As noted above, however, I found that their production magic didn't really work so well for software. As I was one of their software managers, this was challenging.