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The Japanese/American Tech Deficit
Why do the Japanese get all the coolest gadgets, while the U.S. is left with the second-tier, less-innovative ones? The San Francisco Chronicle delves into this age-old mystery and provides a few explanations for those of us who don't live near Akihabara.
...USA lags behind Europe too. Europe was quicker to adopt the digital mobile world with SMS and e-payment. USA has been the leader in big iron, Japan and Europe leaders in small, creative and applied tech.
watch in 5 minutes someone will submit the story
"Japan beta-tests U.S. consumer goods"
frankly i rather they do... they spent the money on crap while we get the working model
At least we can import Japanese technology. Customs won't confiscate something for not complying with FCC regulations, but they will confiscate food!
In Europe you're allowed to make and sell things that contain non-pasturized dairy products. In the US, you're not. Apparently americans aren't allowed to determine for themselves what is or isn't an acceptable risk. So the best European young cheeses and chocolates have poor substitutes as their namesakes in the US.
To make matters worse, they've convinced people here that "ultra-pasturized" means "better", even though it just means they used extra high temperatures to get it done more quickly and save money at the expense of flavor. That means the milk here doesn't taste nearly as good as it could under the current regulations. All this in the name of safety, yet at the same time, you can't get irradiated beef...
Sigh.
My wife is Japanese so we get to go to Japan once a year or so. Last year we got a 'Meowlingual' which really is very accurate on translating a cat's needs/wants/and moods. My wife mentioned that Taraka is making a handheld Universal Translator - when you speak into it - it will translate what you said into different languages or will translate what someone says into your language. Anyone heard about that?
Still Mud? Try www.phoenixmud.org!
Check out Dynamism for import gear with US warranties and support. Compact Impact has some cool gear to show off, and also has a showroom in the East Village (this store was previously named TKNY). If you are a New Yorker, the showroom is worth a visit, because the owner is a wacky guy who makes custom computers without moving parts.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
money quote:
""The way business works here is simple," says David J. Farber. "In America, if you have a potential product, you do research, you try to figure out the size of the potential market. And if it's a totally new, totally innovative thing, where no one has any idea of the size of the market, and there's no guaranteed return on a large investment, well, forget it. No American company will touch it. In Japan, it's usually quite the opposite: manufacturers know that the home market loves new stuff; they'll take risks there, hoping that something will catch fire and take off. The only U.S. company that's doing that is Apple, and, honestly, I don't think that even Steve Jobs, in all of his infinite wisdom, thought that the iPod was going to take off the way it has.""
how about that? who knew that I, with my ibook/ipod toting ways, was such a technological zeitgeist?
sig my booty, check my website
The statistics say that most Americans don't save much money, no matter how much they make. The US has one of the lowest savings rates of any industrial nation.
Want proof? Add up your own figures, its easy. Take your account balances, and subtract the amount outstanding on your house, your cars, your toys, and your plastic. OK, lets be fair. If we call your home a long term asset, and unrealistically assume that its value will continue to increase, or stay where it is now (it won't, not once the interest rate correction hits, and removes all demand for 15% mortgages, not to mention the flood on the market as current owners find they can't afford the payments when they renew their mortgage at current rate +8%), just look at your short term debt.
Your worth negative how much? Much of the US has an odd way of looking at money, the focus is on "affording the payment" rather than "affording the purchase". This is fine, so long as nothing changes, like your job status, or the interest rates. I'm not saying it is stupid to borrow to finance large items, but Americans seem to borrow to finance everything. Groceries, consumer electronics, clothes, lunches, anything and everything. I love watching people do the "credit shuffle" as they try to decide which CC is still in good standing, or has enough room left for that 100 dollar purchase.
You can laugh at my car, but at least it is paid for. If I sell it today, its cash in my pocket. If you sell your 70% financed car, you will give all that money to the bank, and probably still owe more monthly payments, on an asset you no longer even posses.
So the answer is , No, the concept of "saving money" hadn't been invented yet. You can not expect your children to act much differently than you do yourself.
I think, more than anything, it is a matter of cost. I remember when MD Players first came out in Japan. Everybody had one. They had MD Car Stereos, MD Walkmans, MD portable stereos, and MD breakfast cereal.
You could also go down to any number of rental stores and rent CDs and buy blank MD discs to record them on (now THAT would never go over in the US). Most people did this because it was cheaper than buying the CD for $25 - $30.
When I returned to America, however, nobody was using MD players, even though they were available. The problem, I think, was the cost. MD players were around $400 dollars at the time. Nobody in America would spend $400 for a portable Walkman type device, so MD players never caught on. Couple that with the fact that America tried to sell MD versions of commercial CDs instead of just selling the blanks so people could copy CDs; which is what was done in Japan.
I think this is the case with a lot of the tech gadgets that you can buy over in Japan. The cost of these items is always too high for the American market so Americans won't buy the stuff. Therefore, nobody bothers importing it anymore.
The market is also different in Japan. You can do things there that you can't do here, so some of the gadgets just don't make sense in America (MD players being one example).
I mean, DDR? Perfect example.
On the contrary, that's one of the worst examples you could possibly think of. Go into a Fry's Electronics or some other store with a DDR display, and you will almost always see some teenager dancing on it. And there's no one as fashion-conscious or worried about being "uncool" as a teenager.
I'm not even sure tech in general is dorky anymore here (now take this with a grain of salt, this is a Slashdotter talking about tech). Even building one's computer from parts, once a pastime strictly confined to nerds, is now a Vin-Diesel-esque affair of snapping together neon-colored parts that reminds one more of ricing out a Honda than building a computer. Video games now boast celebrity appearances, product placements, and midnight openings.
Let's face it. The guys who stuffed us in lockers and stole our lunch money back in the 80s came back, and this time they stole our nerdy hobbies. What was once geeky is now cool. Even here in the US.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
I don't accept the premise of this /. article on its face. The main point rests on the idea that Japan gets the coolest gadgets before they reach the US, or else they never get here at all, which I don't see. This makes me want to get in my way-back machine and remember a time when I first came out the California, a simpler time when people were much more humble and thoughtful...all the way back to the year 2000...
I worked for a startup then whose business model was based on the idea of location-based offerings. (This sounds like spam, but it isn't.) As a customer, you'd go to their portal on the web and register an account. Then, later, you'd log in and enter information that you were going to be in the city on Saturday night, and you're looking to eat Italian food. You'd specify how you want to be contacted by the automated call system: cell, PDA, home phone, etc...and the hours, number of calls, etc.
Then, on Saturday night, let's say an Italian restaurant owner is looking at a half-empty restaurant. He might subscribe to the service...so he'd log in on his end and enter in a 2-for-1 entree special. The site would match up your preferences with the business offering and call you to book a reservation.
Surprisingly, this startup didn't fail (at least not right away...it lived several years). However, it did move...to Hong Kong. The funding source did some market research and discovered that we were likely never to make a go of this business by marketing it in the US. Americans get one or two calls that don't interest them from an automated service and turn the service off, saying they don't want to be contacted again. In Tokyo and Hong Kong, they found in their research that people will oftentimes walk around in public with the cell phone to their ear even though they're not on a call...it's a social status thing. They can't get enough calls over there.
So, they packed it up and moved to HK. The point of this story is that, though by and large people are more or less the same the world over, there are cultural differences that manifest in surprising and unexpected ways. Americans tend to want technology that serves them, is quick and easy to use, and isn't too intrusive. Japanese, from what I can see, tend not to care about intrusiveness and are more interested in projecting a message about themselves through the use of personal technology devices. The more these devices intrude on their daily lives, in fact, the more they view it as a sign of being needed or desirable to others. (They even let technology make matchmaking decisions--have you heard about the pager-like device that they have over there? They enter their preferences for a perfect mate in it, and when they get within 25 feet of someone that meets their criteria, if that person has one too, they light up and buzz so the people can choose to meet each other. Again, this would never work in the US.)
The upshot is, Americans get what we think is cool, and Japanese get what they think is cool. The Japanese philosophy tends to be oriented more towards the flashy whiz-bang type of stuff, like digital toilets and Internet-enabled refrigerators, whereas Americans would consider these devices as putting too much emphasis on activities we'd rather not think about, and definitely don't want hackers to have access to. (I'm convinced a good part of this cultural divide comes from the differences between Americans and Japanese opinions about personal privacy rights and expectations. Also, the anti-intellectual attitude in America doesn't help ingratiate technology into our daily lives either...think about it. In this country, one of the stock insults in grade schools and high schools is "you're a nerd". In other countries, like Japan, the insult would be "you're stupid".) This, combined with the fact that Americans always expect to have the latest, greatest, bestest, etc, means that we tend to look at the flashy whiz-bang stuff over there, which we don't want, and say, hey, how come we don't have that here?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
My observation is that Japanese companies tend to use their domestic market as their paying beta testers. What this means is that the latest gears will go through revisions/improvements base on domestic market feedback before being unleashed on North America. The gest of it is that we'll always be a year or two slower than Japanese domestic market.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Litigation-happy is the right word. Here in Japan, companies can release really cool, but buggy and defective, technology without the fear of customers returning it in droves. It's just too difficult to return any product in Japan that people give up and buy new ones. Contrast that with the US where you can sometimes return a book to the store even after obviously reading it, or returning clothing. Inconceivable in Japan, sometimes even when the defect is the company's fault -- the army of lawyers in the US would never allow such a state of affairs.
Your vehement rejection of cell phone technology does not make you a charismatic iconoclast, a trendy counter-culture hero, or a beautiful and unique snowflake. It makes you that guy your co-workers all hate because they can never reach you if they need help.
0 1 - just my two bits
I have a cliché and I can't refrain from posting it: the japanese obsession with technological gadgetry even pervades their sexuality. Not that their sexlives are technologized, but they're "fetishized". The fetish is in sexuality, what a gadget is in economic behavior.
Now ask any h**ker who's ever worked in Japan, and she'll tell you that the Japanese are into things such as sniffing feet, touching zippers, cutting toenails and making origami from panties. Everything is fragmented, the person is reduced to an assemblage of sexual gadgets.
There must be something very deeply anthropological about this fetishization of ordinary life. You can't explain Japan's gizmobsession simply by referring to demographics, social space-time factors or other such sociological schemes. There must be something deeply ritualistic in all this, stemming from the traditional mind of the Japanese.
Ah well, maybe it's too much of a cliché and maybe it says more about our Eurocentric obsession with the East. We will never really know.
so what happens to all these phones every 6 months?
Ok, i can't suppress the urge to reply to this.
"Why, for crap's sake, is it not okay for the government to provide free wirless broadband access in Philadelphia?"
Because that's not their job. Their job is to provide essential emergency services, maintain the transportation infrastructure and provide defense. They should no more be building wireless
The definition of "emergency services" and "infrastructure" should be allowed to evolve. We may very well be at the beginning of a process where continual connectivity is indeed a part of critical infrastructure that is the legitimate role of government. To legislate this out of existence seems a bit presumptive and smacks of protecting corporate interests.
of how cool it sounds, have you ever seen the government do any long-term project right? Most Pennsylvania governments have a hard time keeping the potholes down to non-fatal sizes, and you want them to run your ISP? I grew up near Philly, I wouldn't trust them with tin cans and string.
Many cities have functioning water supplies, sewer systems, electicity grids. No all function optimally but we get the water, we don't get sick from it, and our poo goes by by. Yes, government can function and this government hating mantra so common these days is vastly overdone.
"Im pretty sure there are not many people in Philly who would not like to have free wireless internet"
It's not "free", the government raises taxes to pay for it, which means a lot of folks who don't want or need it still have to pay for it, and that's not fair.
Excellent point. There are parts of the city that I never go in, why the hell am i paying for street lights there. I never use the damned things. Its unfair people, blatantly unfair!. Do you ever stop to consider, just once, the possibility that you may derive indirect benefits from things and that government isn't about benefiting just YOU, its about the community. I think that a reasonable argument could be made that there might be benefits to the community. At least its not obvious that this is completely inappropriate for government.
This is off topic, but the parent post got me thinking.
I moved out of my home when I was 18. I wasn't kicked out, but I was told it was important to go and encouraged by my parents to do so. The thought being that the sooner I learned how to make it on my own the better off I would be.
So I worked some crappy jobs, went over my head in debt to pay for school, got my diploma and got a job. Things where very tight, all I did was live in crappy conditions and pay off debt. Fast forward 6 years things are better. I was finally able to get a house, and I have a little bit of savings.
Compare that to some of my friends that never had to move out and face the real world. Most of them still live at home, make more money then me, and have enough in the bank to buy a large house with cash. They are generally happier, and have less stress. Also since they have never had to have a job to survive they have been able to take risks with there careers, which has enabled them to make more.
Is there any point to going out and living on your own? What's the upside of leaving before your 21, or even 30?
Not saying that all those on school boards should be, as with any elected office, but the fact that these are typically locally elected members means that the community can still kick them out if they do a bad job. Ever try to fire anyone in the Federal Government? Or better yet, has any burocrat ever listened to you? Federalize the system and the very same people that control policy now, aka the lobby groups with money, will control the schools as well. Is that really what you want? One lobby gets powerful enough and poof, evolution is gone from the biology books. Probably a bad example, but...
My gradfather served on his local school board just after consolodation from one room country schools to larger districts. He was a farmer, but they fired bad people and did the best that they could. Many of that generation, like my parents, were the first in the family to attend college. What made school boards, and many other organizations back then, more effective was that people in the community gave a damn about the community. They didn't run for school board to hold an office, they did so because of a genuine desire to make sure their kids and others' kids got the best education that was possible with the resources.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
So much great tech gets thrown into the garbage in Japan they have a name for the people who seek out the trash - Master of garbage. Gomi no sensi is a Japanese term for people who "find" great working stuff in the garbage. People in Japan will buy a new tv simply because their tv is 1 or 2 years old. Novelty (new) means something different there, it's closer to "original" than "trendy". It drives the culture and the economy - newer = better. Very far from the cliché of the Japanese as "copycats". I've lived there and I recommend it highly.
In America people say "if it aint broke don't fix it". That attitude is why "early adopter" (ie: trendy bastard, yuppy scum, geek) has a borderline negative connotation here.
We have an agricultural attitude here about almost everything - "built to last". As a culture, most Americans yearn for a fictional "leave it to beaver" past and will not buy a new anything until the old one is dead. Most Americans are simply more conservative than they/you think they are. Look at how most Americans choose whom to vote for for president. (I'm a New Yorker, I'll skip that one for now...) Something most slashdotters forget - you are not typical Americans.
I am not saying its perfect in Japan and bad in America, far from it. But I will say travel anywhere, anytime you can, broaden your mind. Its all good.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(look it up: vehicle fuel economy peaked in the 80's, and has been going down ever since)
This sounds like bullshit, but I'll follow your advice and look it up.
(minutes later)
Wow, you're right! This is OT, but for those interested, read through this report from the EPA.
A short quote: "Since 1975, the fuel economy of the combined car and light truck fleet has moved through several phases: (1) a rapid increase from 1975 to the mid-1980s, (2) a slow increase extending into the late 1980s, (3) a decline from the peak in the late 1980s, and (4) since then a period of relatively constant overall fleet fuel economy. Viewing new cars and trucks separately, the three-year moving average fuel economy for cars has increased 1.0 MPG since 1991, but that for trucks has been relatively constant."
Maybe the anti-SUV crowd has a point, after all.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
That problem only gets worse when you centralize school boards. Just look at the mess California and Texas have with regards to textbooks. Because California and Texas are each basically one stop shopping when it comes to purchasing text books they tend to set the standard for all text books across the nation simply because of their size. Break those two up into their constituent, local school boards and you would immediately dilute the power of small fringe groups. (That is, it is a lot harder to, say, replace evolution with creationism when the battles have to be fought at every school.)
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
Actually, that's not all that bad of an idea.
The concept of a professor who has to "teach" you misses a fundamental basis of universities... namely that the students were originally there to learn from acknowledged leaders in a field.
Now, however, University is often just regarded as an extension of the rest of your mandatory schooling. Instead of a bunch of mature, studious, and engaged people who earnestly enrolled in order to study under a master, you've got a bunch of near-children who are at "college" so they can get a degree in order to get a better job than working in McD's (maybe).