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The emphasis in Japan on teamwork and consensus decision-making also helps prevent the accumulation of valuable proprietary knowledge inside any one head, which

by quant18 17y ago

The emphasis in Japan on teamwork and consensus decision-making also helps prevent the accumulation of valuable proprietary knowledge inside any one head, which would then have excessive leverage to extract wealth ... Lifetime employment also gives companies an incentive to invest in giving their workers expensive technical training, since they know the workers won’t just jump to a competitor once they have it. Since a highly-trained workforce is one of the absolute keys to success in any advanced sector of the economy, this is very important. This probably plain old doesn't work in a globalised world. If your best talent feel they're being undercompensated in relation to their knowledge (and they don't have much use for social status), then they'll emigrate. At the margins, this is precisely what seems to happen --- most famously in the case of Shuji Nakamura. (To put the icing on the cake, I've read an even more conspiratorial theory than Robert Locke's: that the Japanese government deliberately sabotages their school system's ESL classes by overemphasizing translation work and underemphasizing conversational skills, to make it hard for people to emigrate successfully. [1]) [1] http://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/07/16/is-a-national-lack-of-english-skills-japans-berlin-wall/ http://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/07/16/is-a-national-lack-of-e...

hga 17y ago
I don't know about the conspiracy theory but it's pretty well established that Japan does the absolutely worst job of teaching ESL in the world. What they teach is required for the all important exams but is otherwise pretty much useless. It's hard to imagine this is entirely accidental and that no one has ever thought it should be changed. From what I've read the current financial crisis has pretty much started the end of the lifetime employment model. It should also be noted that in the "good old days" jobs were dividing to high gain low risk (e.g. the lifetime ones) and low gain high risk. Those in the latter category are the ones who's pension records were lost by the prefectures. Other observations: a lot of Japanese techies spent weekends in Korea on the QT helping Samsung etc. get up to speed on producing DRAMs. Leaving Japan for very long has traditionally been a form of permanent exile. Those who come back aren't viewed as "Japanese" anymore. In the dozen or so years I spent in and around the MIT community, I knew of exactly two undergrads from Japan, which is pretty remarkable given how attractive you'd think it would be to study there. Then again, to a great degree the Japanese model for lifetime jobs was a total focus on the college entrance exam. That's all that really mattered, e.g. if you wanted to work for the Finance Ministry you'd get into e.g. Tokyo University, partly chill out for four years, and then enter the "real world" (such as it is). Doctors do a 3? year vocational college program (no liberal arts), but I don't know how much engineers and scientists learn their stuff in college. For scientists it hardly matters, if they want to do real work in their prime they've got to emigrate since seniority rules in academia. It's telling that until last year or so every Japanese Nobelist had to emigrate to do the work that won him the prize.

by quant18 17y ago

hga 17y ago

I don't know about the conspiracy theory but it's pretty well established that Japan does the absolutely worst job of teaching ESL in the world. What they teach is required for the all important exams but is otherwise pretty much useless. It's hard to imagine this is entirely accidental and that no one has ever thought it should be changed. From what I've read the current financial crisis has pretty much started the end of the lifetime employment model. It should also be noted that in the "good old days" jobs were dividing to high gain low risk (e.g. the lifetime ones) and low gain high risk. Those in the latter category are the ones who's pension records were lost by the prefectures. Other observations: a lot of Japanese techies spent weekends in Korea on the QT helping Samsung etc. get up to speed on producing DRAMs. Leaving Japan for very long has traditionally been a form of permanent exile. Those who come back aren't viewed as "Japanese" anymore. In the dozen or so years I spent in and around the MIT community, I knew of exactly two undergrads from Japan, which is pretty remarkable given how attractive you'd think it would be to study there. Then again, to a great degree the Japanese model for lifetime jobs was a total focus on the college entrance exam. That's all that really mattered, e.g. if you wanted to work for the Finance Ministry you'd get into e.g. Tokyo University, partly chill out for four years, and then enter the "real world" (such as it is). Doctors do a 3? year vocational college program (no liberal arts), but I don't know how much engineers and scientists learn their stuff in college. For scientists it hardly matters, if they want to do real work in their prime they've got to emigrate since seniority rules in academia. It's telling that until last year or so every Japanese Nobelist had to emigrate to do the work that won him the prize.