[sersi]

One thing I noticed back when I worked in Japan 15 years ago is that, because a lot of software engineers there don't speak English (or at least not well enough), there was a big market for translations of English technical books. It was rather striking compared to what I had seen in France.

So, while I agree with your point, at least 15 years ago, there were a lot of resources for Japanese programers to read in their native language. Of course, another problem was the terrible, terrible state of education in Japan and the fact that good students would study Electonic engineering and that Software engineering was seen as being an unattractive choice.

[marcan_42]

The problem with books is that they're invariably obsolete, and almost always third party information (and thus usually at least a little bit wrong). I've never found the need to get my software engineering knowledge from books; online documentation is always more up to date and usually written by the authors of the project directly. In addition, only a tiny fraction of the knowledge you can find online in English will be collected in books, and it is much, much harder to search for.

Books are good for abstract knowledge (if you're that kind of learner) and to get an introduction to a particular technology, but not having access to the latest up to date information and a search engine over all the accumulated knowledge in the Internet is a major handicap.

This is one of the causes of a common pattern in SWE in Japan: always being behind the curve on tech, best practices, etc. There's just an inherent delay added by having to wait for information to be available in your native language. Add to that Japanese bureaucracy that discourages change (especially in big companies, but by no means exclusively), and it's even worse.