[asiachick]

I like all the rebuttals but the top still strikes me as mostly unsubstantiated claims

> That (gerontocracy) in turn has caused Japanese companies to fall behind foreign rivals as they miss technological revolution after revolution — microprocessors, smartphones, semiconductor foundries, battery-powered cars, etc.

smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft. Japan didn't lose here because of anything unique to Japan.

Battery-powered cars: Same as above. Tesla won (for a while) and everyone else Ford, Chevy, BMW, Mercedes, etc all lost. Japan arguably led for years with the Prius. But again, looking at the all car companies there's nothing special about Japan here

Microprocessors: Is this even market? There's 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don't get what makes Japan's "failure" here special.

semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country? Is it just because they're in Asia and Taiwan, Malaysia, and China have been the winners?

There's also this idea that there's a lack of startups. I have no idea about the numbers but living in Tokyo before the pandemic there was no shortage of startup meetup and incubators. Yahoo Japan has an open cafe with lots of people "starting up"

https://lodge.yahoo.co.jp/

Amazon and Google both have places (I know, not Japanese companies but they are targeting Japanese entrepreneurs)

https://www.campus.co/tokyo/

https://aws-startup-lofts.com/apj/loft/tokyo

And the Mercari meetup

https://www.meetup.com/ja-JP/MercariDev/

Of course it's my anecdotes vs someone else's, I have no numbers but I went to tons of startup meetings, trade show like events, etc.... I watched several large bitcoin startups um, startup. I saw what must have been 11 different payment system appear (PayPay, D-Pay, ...), as just 2 categories.

[com2kid]

> Microprocessors: Is this even market? There's 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don't get what makes Japan's "failure" here special.

Japan used to be on the leading edge of microprocessor design. They aren't anymore.

> semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country?

Because they used to be a contender.

> smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft. Japan didn't lose here because of anything unique to Japan.

Japanese cellphones were literally what defined a Galapagos technology (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome), they were designed in country and only ever intended for the domestic market.

[jeffbee]

> Because they used to be a contender.

Yeah and it's easy to forget. Every big Japanese company used to make their own silicon. It was easy for them to make knock-off 6502s and the entire Texas Instruments product line at half the price (See: Nintendo). Japan had almost the whole global DRAM market by the end of the 1980s. Americans, in a panic, formed a quasi-governmental bailout scheme called SEMATECH to re-establish the competitiveness of the moribund domestic computer industry. People seriously feared Japan was going to eclipse the American economy. Their kids, after all, were good at math tests.

[com2kid]

> People seriously feared Japan was going to eclipse the American economy.

California is the only thing that keeps America competitive.

Without doing any research to back it up, I'll gladly claim that Silicon Valley (along with Microsoft[1] throughout the 90s/early 2000s) has driven the majority of the world's GDP growth in the last 30 years. The VC funding model for companies, the willingness to take risks, and the insane (over)work ethic, is why technology has exploded and impacted every aspect of life.

[1] Love it or hate it, a single unified target for business and consumer computer applications was a huge boon to the world. Just look at all the massive efficiency losses having to support 2 smartphone platforms, and that is with each having addressable markets in the billions. Now imagine if there had been 5 different PC platforms in the 90s to write for, with only hundreds of thousands of users on each one worldwide.

[rippercushions]

Japan peddled its own tech like PDC, i-Mode etc pretty hard overseas, and at one point Sony, Panasonic etc were serious contenders in the mobile phone business. It's kind of striking how they completely managed to fail.

[lmm]

> Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country?

30 years ago Japan was world-beating, today it isn't. You could say that to not be excelling is the norm, and the causes of success 30 years ago are the things to be investigated; nevertheless, this feels like a decline.

> I watched several large bitcoin startups um, startup. I saw what must have been 11 different payment system appear (PayPay, D-Pay, ...), just as 2 categories.

Japan has dozens of payment systems but how many of them are competing outside Japan? How many are even trying? NFC-F is still technologically better than Visa/Mastercard contactless, but I bet the latter is going to win out, because it's the international standard; even in Japan new cards come with that.

[asiachick]

Japan was world-beating in what categories 30 years ago (1993)? It wasn't computers. Cars? Toyota is still #1 in the world. What else? Phones (no).

> Japan has dozens of payment systems but how many of them are competing outside Japan?

Why would they? Japanese companies speak Japanese and make things for Japanese. The exceptions are just that, exceptions.

And to be clear, my point is why is Japan called out for this? Where's the article that Germany is a failure because they don't have a global payments competitor? How about France? India? China? Why is only Japan that gets this special "you're a failing country because you don't have a global payment offering"

[lmm]

> Japan was world-beating in what categories 30 years ago (1993)? It wasn't computers.... Phones (no).

Japan was top or near-top in most of the portable electronics markets that mattered at the time, the ancestors of today's phones. Digital cameras, portable music players, PDAs/personal organizers, video game consoles, heck even the pedometer. So why are they barely competitive on the portable electronics of today (phones, but also smartwatches and the like)?

> Cars? Toyota is still #1 in the world. What else?

One of the big worries about the Japanese economy is a sense that Toyota has massively missed the bus on electric cars. Especially after building the first really successful hybrid, how have they fallen so far behind the likes of GM or Mercedes/BMW/Audi? Why are they still pushing hydrogen decades after everyone else has realised it's a failure?

> Why would they? Japanese companies speak Japanese and make things for Japanese. The exceptions are just that, exceptions.

It didn't feel like it 30 years ago. And for internet businesses, it's not going to be good enough.

> And to be clear, my point is why is Japan called out for this? Where's the article that Germany is a failure because they don't have a global payments competitor? How about France? India? China? Why is only Japan that gets this special "you're a failing country because you don't have a global payment offering"

I think insular startup cultures in those countries absolutely do get called out. German and French companies tend to try to at least serve the whole EU if not more. India and China are bigger markets than Japan. Even so, companies from those regions that lack global ambition absolutely do get called out for it; there's no shortage of articles in the European press worrying about how few European companies are playing on the global stage.

[quartesixte]

>One of the big worries about the Japanese economy is a sense that Toyota has massively missed the bus on electric cars. Especially after building the first really successful hybrid, how have they fallen so far behind the likes of GM or Mercedes/BMW/Audi? Why are they still pushing hydrogen decades after everyone else has realised it's a failure?

But are lithium-ion skateboard cars a success? People are rightly fretting about the lithium supply chain and the sheer weight of these cars raise eyebrows for many observers. We’re not completely in established territory yet — it’s still a frontier out here.

[linguae]

Consumer electronics from Sony, Canon, Nikon, Sharp, etc. immediately come to mind. They were dominant in the 1990s, but have since faced heavy competition.

[elefanten]

There might be no reason Japan should have led / captured the current iteration of those markets… but it doesn’t paint a great picture that they got NONE of them after building up into a very competitive position by the 90s, when they were global leaders of quite a few categories / product areas.

By your own account, they led gen1 smartphones, but have ended up with 0% of gen2.

They led EVs but dont have a top 5 maker now (all us, germany and china).

They have innovated some product designs more recently (eg- in social and messaging), but gave up or never tried much to fight for global share.

Startups… sure there are many but have any succeeded globally in the last 10-15 years? Is there a Spotify (Sweden), Shopify (Canada) or TikTok (China)? Off the top, the most successful global consumer launch recently from Japan was Nintendo Switch… but no startup comes to mind.

The point isn’t to beat up on Japan here, but it’s global absence is noticeable after a looming presence for decades.

[astrange]

> By your own account, they led gen1 smartphones, but have ended up with 0% of gen2.

Japan still manufactures/designs a lot of components used in phones (flash, RAM, LCD displays, cameras), just not the final product or the software.

[astrange]

Startups being accepted in Japan is a very recent US-influenced phenomenon. In an earlier wave they were called "venture companies" and were completely distrusted - you were not considered proper members of society.

Similarly they have "indie games" in Japan now, even though they always had that (doujin games), but now they're more respectable.

(Of course, if you're doing a bitcoin startup you shouldn't be considered a proper member of society, more like a phone scammer.)

[hinkley]

And it’s not like the iPhone is made without Japanese parts. Sharp has featured heavily in a number of iterations of the phones.

Also Teslas were made with Panasonic batteries before the gigafactory was created, thank you very much, and I’m not so sure the thin film they are using isn’t still sourced from Japan and they’re just doing assembly.

[jeffbee]

Every battery that has ever come out of "the gigafactory" if you mean Gigafactory Nevada is a Panasonic battery. All the equipment in the factory belongs to Panasonic. All the money to build the factory was invested by Panasonic.

[hinkley]

Right, so it's a bit like the rich kid bitching about his parents and how financially independent he is when he's had one job.

[gkanai]

> semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country?

Japan did have a thriving semiconductor industry early on but key Japanese companies made wrong choices wrt technologies and obviously TSMC ran away with the market. Nikon was a competitor to ASML until the EUV revolution, etc.

see:

https://asianometry.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-peak-of-japa...