[sharedptr]

Well I think I have some experience to talk about Japan. Not so much about Korea.

My experience is that English in Japan isn’t really spoken outside of big tech firms and even there the quality isn’t great.

I have tried organizing an event on the same topic in Japanese and in English, almost no one showed up in English but it was full in Japanese.

They have their own alternatives to some services and stack overflow, qiita.

The thing is that they don’t really need to speak English and for the cases they need English they bite a foreigner.

[manxman]

So there’s clearly stuff being done to train a younger generation to speak English better than was the case previously.

The problem is that even with that, the mindset still appears to preserve the notion of Japanese supremacy over everything irrespective of data to the contrary. So improvement isn’t happening.

Take the Shinkansen as anotherq example. Impressive if you look at the train specs and reliability/punctuality. What isn’t seen so readily is the manual process of booking seats at stations with limited options for booking online. That manual process is often so inefficient that you might as well travel by a slower train given the loss of time involved.

Similar inefficiencies are observable throughout Japan. The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things. True of the younger English speakers as well from what I’ve seen. Not entirely sure if that’s blind deference, fear of conflict/group judgement or the result of brainwashing into a collaboration over competition mindset. Maybe it’s a mix of all of the above.

So I see very narrow examples of personal excellences where that obsession and perseverance doesn’t involve getting others on board. But innovation or improvement involving groups is more dysfunctional than anything I’ve seen elsewhere by a wide margin.

[throwaway2037]

You can book Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen tickets online now. The lines owned by JR Central all have online booking now. You can also connect your IC card to your ticket, so no paper ticket is required.

    The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things.

If you speak with Japanese people in a private, psychologically safe setting, they will open up about all sorts of things, including continuing to use fax machines!

[numpad0]

It's not just we have alternatives for some services, the entire Internet looks like "our" thing from this side. Everything is either perfectly localized, or built and run by local entities, or dominated by local users. In rare cases that none of above are true, social graph of users are still completely closed off from the outside world.

I mean, it's even the case offline. Have anyone seen or used the omnipresent NCR made ATM, with transparent green card slot? There are lots of Ingenico Lane/5000 lately, but that green plastic cover still isn't a thing here. I think there are very few regions that you could live without ever seeing one in life. We're isolate as that.

[vidarh]

> Everything is either perfectly localized, or built and run by local entities, or dominated by local users.

People who are tied to the English-speaking net are often totally unaware of how many areas are dominated by local companies even in markets that are linguistically much closer and more used to using English.

And that's not really a criticism - it's hard to keep up when you're not immersed in it.

I'm Norwegian but live in the UK, and I keep being surprised by Norwegian or Scandinavian online services I was unaware of when I go home to visit family, for example, despite following Norwegian news, and visiting twice a year. It's not that they're necessarily more advanced (though sometimes they are) or better, but just that often you find local companies better entrenched than you'd expect.