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."

Comments

Don't pay sales tax when shopping in Akihabara

[marhar]

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!

Not very in depth

[aztektum]

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.

Balderdash

[sakusha]

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.

Re:Balderdash

[sakusha]

Okay-- you keep using the word 'kaizen', but you don't even bother to translate it into English-- me thinks you may not even know the translation "improvement".

Kaizen does not just mean "improvement," although most dictionaries only have that simple definition. Kaizen is a process of continuous incremental refinement. It incorporates many similar philosophies, such as Drucker's Quality Circles. Kaizen is widely enough known as a philosophy, many books have been written on this subject, so it is common to use just the term kaizen instead of getting into all this stuff.
Kaizen has nothing to do with fundamental innovation, as has been commented by you and others. Kaizen is merely a system of putting those innovations into the market. The best example I can think of is GPSS. The US put up the satellites, but consumer GPSS devices appeared in Japan long before the USA.

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[BJH]

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).

Re:Left one out

[sql*kitten]

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.