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Why Japan Gets the Cool Stuff
haahr writes "Good article about why the coolest electronics products are available first in Japan and may never make it to the U.S., in Slate."
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The Japanese are experts in small
Sony. Because caucasians are too damn tall.
If you take a trip to Japan and buy some electroncs, etc, be sure and carry your passport with you to the store and you will be exempted from paying the 5% sales tax.
They will fill out a little card, put a stamp on it, and staple it into your passport. When you exit the country, they will take the little card out of your passport.
Some of the the electronics stuff is labelled to run on 100V AC, but it works fine over here. And remember, don't buy a DVD player unless you really want the region 3 encoding!
In the end it all boils down to money.
We have too many conglomerates that won't spend to produce "cool" gizmos unless they can make huge returns.
They aren't interested in providing a service because it would be useful, rather only to make money.
No sig for you!!
The reasons for Japan's preeminence in consumer electronics is simple, and completely absent from this article. The major reason is plain: kaizen.
Japan has a different system of product development. It dates back to ancient methods of production of artworks like lacquerware. Specialists in certain production methodologies allow the tasks to be separated. Many specialists were hereditary lineages, some families had practiced and continuously improved their techniques over hundreds of years.
And THAT is kaizen. Each product builds on the strengths of the previous generation, and eliminates weaknesses (or at least tries another approach). The Western approach is to build a product (or the packaging, at least) from scratch each time. Kaizen products are frequently updated, with minor incremental improvements. In many ways, it is a predecessor to Open Source methods like "release early and often" or "many eyes make bugs transparent."
The other factor is the short lifetime of fads in Japan. Fads like the Tamagotchi build to hysterical intensity in mere weeks. I still have an ad from the Asahi Shimbun with an apology from the President of Bandai. He apologizes at the inadequate supply of Tamagotchi, and promises Bandai is building new plants and within 2 months they will be able to produce 2million units a month. Unfortunately the fad was over long before the plants got up to speed, and Bandai ended up with millions of units they couldn't even give away. Bandai lost billions of yen and the President had to resign. So you've got to be nimble to keep up with quick-moving fads.
So anyway, how come complete idiots with NO knowledge of Japan get paid to write crap like that article? Jeez, the stuff I just wrote is far more informative than Slate's rubbish. I wonder if the author has evern BEEN to Japan.
I estimate that the average American porn star's penis is 7" inches in length, compared with the average American man's 5.5" penis. If Japanese porn features an equivalent 40% increase, then that means that the average Japanese man's penis is just over 3.5" long.
Even considering that the average Japanese women has the figure of a scrawny monkey, 3.5" is barely enough to get past the butt cheek, let alone up some chick's ass.
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I like to watch.
The Japanese electronics companies, (and many american ones), use the US military AAFES and NAVEX stores overseas to test market a LOT of stuff.
Certain lines, or models, or even entire formats get a testdrive at the larger military stores. They have a captive, technoid, consumer group. if it flies there, you may see it in BestBuy.
Anyone remember the ElCassette? Mid '70's cross between a cassette deck, and a reel to reel. Fidelity of a reel, with the pop-in convienience of a cassette. I had a Technics model. Of course, they didn't sell that well, so it never showed up in the States.
Weekly charts (updated every... weeks)
:
http://www.asahi.com/tech/rank/weekly.html
This week, Apple's iMac G4-800 SuperDrive is #1 and eMac G4-700 with CD-RW Drive is #5.
Here's the monthly charts
http://www.asahi.com/tech/rank/monthly.html
That's what I want to know: did Dynamism.com pay Slate for this infomercial, or did they just pay the "journalist" directly?
So the Japanese are a trendy people in a crowded country? That's news? Here's some more news: Americans are big cowboy-looking folks, constantly pioneering the next frontier. Brits keep a stiff upper lip, and they have to, too, because their food is so horrid! Germans are big on punctuality and order....
Here's some more news: you read Slate, so clearly you're not up to buying a laptop in Japan or on eBay, and figuring out where to get the right drivers! Oh no! You read Slate, you use Microsoft OSes, and you need your hand held when it comes to those daunting techie questions!
That's why it's so much MORE cost effective for you to PAY 30% ABOVE RETAIL for Dynamism.com to take care of it for you. After all, those trendy Japanese will pay almost anything to get it one inch smaller! Aren't YOU that trendy? You're not a LOSER are you? Prove it by giving Dynamism.com $500 bucks for installing an OS and shipping Airmail from Japan. Did we mention that all the cool kids get their toys at Dynamism.com?
By the way, it's Dynamism.com. Did we mention Dynamism.com?
Admittedly, the author concludes he won't pay the mark-up, so I'm probably going overboard. But I don't buy the pop-sociology, and it still reads like an infomercial.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Akihabara is to electronics what Las Vegas is to gambling!
This is the ONLY point on earth where you will find the newest products at reasonable prices (prices depend on item).
I purchased an MD player there in 97 for 25,000 yen (at the time roughly $200 US). The same MD player came out in the US 4 years later and cost $700 US. That is an extreme example but there are lots of good bragains for things like plasma TVs, and cameras etc...
Remember Akihabara is electronics store after electronics store in a 5 square block area. Most stores have 5-8 floors and are very competitive. Don't even think of comparing the US's biggest electronics stores to this place.
His original name was David Oldwinkle, I think. He was U.S.-born, not Canadian. The reason he was refused entry was because the public bath had had trouble with Russian sailors (whether that's an excuse or not is debatable, of course).
Japanese companies keep their staff employed for more than six months at a time.
That, unfortunately, is why Japan has been in recession for the last 20 years. The Japanese have very tight relationships between banks, NGOs, government departments and corporations. Americans and Brits are outraged when corporations get to close to governments (and vice versa) but in Japan, the boundaries between the public and private sectors are much less clear. Government will frequently underwrite corporate financing, grant monopoly licences, engage in mercantilist protectionist policies, and government planners will work along side corporate strategists, it would be unthinkable for a Japanese corporation to undertake a large project without a nod from the government.
The basic problem with Japanese industry is that they have a massive, systemic overcapacity. In Britain or the US, there would have been mass layoffs, corporations would go bankrupt, and stock markets would plunge in a similar situation. But in the West, a recession typically lasts 12-18 months and is followed by a period of economic expansion: our boom-bust cycle is like a regular spring cleaning of the economy, on approximately a 10-year cycle. During the expansion, the stock market goes up, and the unemployed from the last bust are re-employed. But in Japan, the government will not permit banks to call in loans or write off bad debt. Corporations cannot raise capital to finance expansion, and investors cannot get a return on their capital. So the Japanese economy is held in limbo, it cannot expand, it cannot collapse, and is stuck in a permanent slow decline.
What Japan really needs is to bite the bullet: let the technically insolvent banks and corporations collapse, suck up the pain of a Western-style recession, then Japan can get back on the track of economic expansion that was once the envy of the world.