6 ms·

Yea, what's up with that, actually? Why are they so good at making pretty much anything over there? Writing utensils: 毛笔 - "maobi," the brush one uses to writ

Yea, what's up with that, actually? Why are they so good at making pretty much anything over there? Writing utensils: 毛笔 - "maobi," the brush one uses to write calligraphy. Brought to Japan by the Chinese thousand years ago or so, now they make the best Paper. Midori and Mio. Nigh untouchable. The only people that come close are Leuchtturm, IMO. And it's cheap! Fountain Pens. Actually the Taiwanese do well here as well, but nobody can take on the behemoth, Pilot. Cars: Toyota. Honda. Well regarded as the most repairable, built-to-last cars in the world. Mitsubishi, Nissan, Mazda coming out with excellent sports cars. Motorcycles: Suzuki tops the line when it comes to dependability, repairability, durability, and quality. Spend a week pulling apart and putting together an SV650, then do a Ducati Monster, you'll see what I mean (if you can even find the tools to start unbolting shit off the Ducati) Construction equipment: Komatsu, Hitachi. Some prefer Caterpillar but not for me. Extraterrestrial Equipment: Walk through the full-size model of the ISS in the Johnson Space Center, Houston. You've got the Russian model, carved out of solid blocks of aluminum. The American one, which feels like being inside of a tricked out Ford f150, cheap panels and all. Then you step in the Japanese one, an over-engineered masterpiece in interior design. Everything has a little cubby, space, place. So organized, so perfect. How do they do it??? Edit: I'm genuinely trying to think of something I trust some other country to make better than the Japanese and having a hard time. Maybe bicycles - can't beat the Taiwanese with Giant... but then again everyone uses Shimano components. Uh, phones? Samsung I guess? Laptops, I generally go for Lenovo, so there. That's all I can think of.

hammock 7y ago
I didn't realize that cars, motorcycles and spaceships were writing utensils!
drawnwren 7y ago
Quality is part of Japanese culture. You really see it when you walk around on the streets there. Our grandparents' lamentations of 'things used to last longer and be higher quality' would make no sense to a Japanese person because their culture never underwent the same cheapening that we did. (Assuming our grandparents were being completely honest) In my experience, things in Japan tend to be higher quality, cleaner, and much more expensive. The three things I think of when I think about my time there are the clean streets, the old, clean, and eerily on-time public transportation, and the individually wrapped perfectly shiny apples at the grocery store.
- asutekku 7y ago
  What do you mean by “you can see it when you walk around the streets in here”? Did you spend all your time in central Tokyo? Because all i see around me when i go for a walk are buildings no one seems to care enough to renovate them and honestly it amazes me. All those amazing products you see that come from japan are usually made in a buildings that look like makeshift houses and are built in the middle of a nowhere. I could never imagine japan being what it is by just from walking around in here.
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    Homes and condo buildings in Japan aren't supposed to last more than 40 years. It's supposed to keep the national economy in a constant state of development (sort of good) but it also means most people can't make a good long term investment off home ownership (which is bad). Either way, yeah, there's no incentive to renovate, because they won't be up for too long. On top of that, a lot of them need to be refurnished or rebuilt to be quake-proof, but it's not affordable, so they may opt to wait until the next big one brings it down.
    - amluto 7y ago
      > it also means most people can't make a good long term investment off home ownership (which is bad) There’s a theory that homes being a good long-term investment is incompatible with homes being affordable. If true, then I would argue that it’s good, not bad.
    - agent008t 7y ago
      Why should homes be a good long-term investment? They do not produce anything and it costs to maintain one.
      - dgacmu 7y ago
        Under a rising population in a region, demand increases, which should increase the per sq. foot cost of housing, reflecting the need for denser living.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> The only people that come close are Leuchtturm Lechtturm recently moved production to China, with the expected drop in quality. > But then again everyone uses Shimano components. Manufacturing of nearly all Shimano components these days is now done in China or Malaysia. Sure, there is Japanese firm overseeing that manufacturing, but modern Shimano is a different beast than those classic Japanese bicycle-component brands like Nitto that are still made in Japan.
- nextos 7y ago
  I think Leuchtturm was not a particularly good paper. Midori is very good, but they are not a paper mill. And they don't disclose who produces their raw sheets. An example of a good Japanese paper mill is Tomoe River, who perhaps also supply Midori. In my opinion, the best paper out there comes from Fabriano, which has additional advantage of being totally chlorine free and pulp has been sourced from biologically controlled crops in Italy. Regarding pens, Pilot is very good. But if talking about Japan, we should also mention Platinum (and more importantly their sister company Nakaya) plus, at least, Sailor. There are also exceptionally good non-Japanese pen manufactures out there. One example is Conid. Or Romillo. I also love Japanese goods, but it's nice to keep a balanced perspective. Some Western brands are on the same level of quality. In fact, if you go to Japan, they will worship some Western brands.
kragen 7y ago
In modern Japanese factories, master craftsmen are referred to as kami-sama, gods. Not, you know, monotheistic or Olympian gods with pretensions to universality, but Shinto gods, the kind of god that might belong to the huge old tree that sticks out above the top of the forest. It's not a sarcastic title; the respect is real. Japanese companies are run by businessmen, just like companies in the US, but they still have to treat the makers with respect. Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs. Karoshi is still a bigger problem than precarización, which is what we call the gig economy here in Argentina.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs. Could be. Didn't stop the USSR from churning out heaping mounds of hot garbage, though.
  - p_l 7y ago
    It was more a result of bad planning and bad incentives. Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one. Good companies mix both long term planning and reactive processes
    - nordsieck 7y ago
      > Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one. The fundamental advantage of corporations over centrally planned states is not their time horizon, but our tolerance to allow them to go bankrupt. Markets out perform voting by concentrating power in the hands of those who make good decisions (where "good" is defined by the market).
      - Retra 7y ago
        Arguably, that advantages companies that can hack that metric -- as anything they do to survive (politics) is treated as a reverse proxy for the value they bring to the market. This is why "too big to fail" and "job creator" became mantras.
joewee 7y ago
My guess. Japanese have long valued mastery and specialization. Historically a cast society, people were expected to dedicate their entire lives to the line of work their biological or adopted family was known for. The country also went to great pains to isolate themselves so this system continued for much longer than other parts of the world where sources of wealth were more diversified. In Japan wealth came from being known as the best at your craft, which fostered a culture of continuous improvement. In much of Asia perfection of art was seen as a sign of sophistication for the wealthy. But the cultural revolution in China really dampened that for much of China’s sphere of influence. After WW-II Japan was forced to modernize. Western manufacturing and improvement processes came in. The manufacturing was new but the culture of continuous improvement and mastery was already well established in Japanese culture but didn’t exist in the West where modernization was really a battle between the use of slave labor / child labor vs machines and the concept of continuous improvement was a new thing. But I wonder, can we say the same about German engineering vs Russian engineering?
- nextos 7y ago
  I love Japanese high quality items, but I think we worship them a bit due to the fact that they are foreign imports from a different culture. For some categories mentioned by the OP, some non-Japanese items are superior. In the same way, the Japanese worship even more some Western goods and have gone out of their way to copy and sometimes improve them. For example, there is a whole subculture in Japan that adores old American tees and denim. They create exceptionally high quality reproductions using original equipment [1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204542404577157290201608630 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204542404577157...
  - joewee 7y ago
    There are plenty of areas where Japanese have lost to competitors. Their sweet is making things that are hard and expensive do well. The most important components of our iPhones can only be made in Japan because of their attention to detail. They still make pretty good swords and knives!
- barry0079 7y ago
kazinator 7y ago
Speaking of fountain pens and Japan; in Japan you can find these compact-sized cartridge fountain pens for ￥200. E.g. at LOFT. They are decent; just the handle is simple transparent plastic.
msravi 7y ago
Different people/cultures are good at different things. The Japanese are really good at taking an existing product and making it much better in terms of quality, durability, finish, etc. However saying that the Japanese are better at everything does injustice to western society - which incidentally has had a stellar record inventing everything from cars to planes to cameras. Sure, the finish and panache of the final product may be lacking a little, but without the fierce can-do attitude and i-dont-care-for-authority attitude that is a hallmark of western society, none of these might have come to be. PS: I'm neither Japanese nor western.
alasdair_ 7y ago
Malcolm Gladwell has a chunk of one of his books devoted to this. The theory he uses is that growing rice in paddies is painstaking and meticulous work, where attention to detail and constant refinement are necessary for a good crop, whereas wheat or soybeans don’t need this level of work.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  This would predict the same attention to quality and continuous improvement in all rice paddy reliant cultures. China disproves this hypothesis. Even very, very expensive apartments in Shanghai often have terrible quality finish. It looks great when new but even a couple of years later things start to fall apart in most places. And it isn’t confined to accommodation. It’s amazingly difficult to get people to actually follow a maintenance schedule for equipment, even extremely expensive manufacturing equipment. When most of the workforce is at best two generations removed from peasants and most aren’t even one an attitude of “Fuck it, it’ll do.” is pervasive.
- ballooney 7y ago
  Gladwell has made something of a career out of exactly this sort of tenuous, facile nonsense.
silly_yote 7y ago
On cars you missed Subaru, a favorite of mine. My favorite all time car was my 2001 Legacy L wagon.
Beldin 7y ago
For bikes (bicycles) I'd say it depends. For daily commutes and leisure trips, you can't beat Gazelle. But then again, maybe you're thinking of racing bikes and using bikes for sports.
jchw 7y ago
Hakko soldering irons and Japanese capacitors also come to mind.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sooheon 7y ago
Missing category to think about: software craftsmanship?
biztos 7y ago
Hammers. The Germans make better industrial hammers. What ever happened to Japanese laptops anyway? I used to have a little bitty Fuji and I loved it, back then Sony also had super great industrial design, really offering an alternative to Apple that was at least as cool-looking. Is that just not a thing anymore?
- asark 7y ago
  All I can figure is Sony got a taste of that sweet sweet BS money (that made from IP and online services rather than products per se, that is) and got lost in it.
MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
Gotta be honest here, Apple still makes the best computer hardware. Its what Sony aspires to, but can't really touch.
- komali2 7y ago
  Unless you want to use your laptop to type, of course ;) Nobody can beat Lenovo, IMO. The Thinkpad x1 carbon as an example. Lighter than a MacBook pro. More ports. A keyboard that not only isn't defeated by a single grain of sand, but is also just a delightful keyboard. Put whatever OS you want on it. Far cheaper.
bluGill 7y ago
They are good at making quality because they learned how and started doing it. In the 1960s "make in Japan" was synonymous with cheap junk - what China is today (perhaps worse?). There are complex reasons why most countries go through this, I can list some of the factors but I don't know them all (I doubt anyone does)
kwillets 7y ago
>Japanese made products used to be synonymous to 'cheap' and 'poor quality.' It was not until July 1950 when Dr. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) introduced SQC to the Japanese industry audience, using the trademark colored-beads experiment. >Eizaburo Nishibori, one of the country's post-war quality pioneers, describes in a book* the humble initial encounter to modern quality concepts that preceded Deming's historic 8-day seminar. >It was during American occupation of Japan (1945- 1952) when GHQ (offices of the Allied occupation) placed an order of vacuum tubes to Toshiba. Nishibori recalled the American officers wanted to see a 'control chart' from the manufacturing process being used to produce their order. No one at Toshiba knew what it was. "You don't know a control chart? How do you plan to manage quality?" Nishibori remembers replying, "If we, engineers at Toshiba, don't know it, most likely no one in Japan knows." http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html
cmod 7y ago
What about software? I can't think of a single piece of Japanese software I use as part of my everyday, core compute kit.

hammock 7y ago

I didn't realize that cars, motorcycles and spaceships were writing utensils!

drawnwren 7y ago

Quality is part of Japanese culture. You really see it when you walk around on the streets there. Our grandparents' lamentations of 'things used to last longer and be higher quality' would make no sense to a Japanese person because their culture never underwent the same cheapening that we did. (Assuming our grandparents were being completely honest) In my experience, things in Japan tend to be higher quality, cleaner, and much more expensive. The three things I think of when I think about my time there are the clean streets, the old, clean, and eerily on-time public transportation, and the individually wrapped perfectly shiny apples at the grocery store.

asutekku 7y ago
What do you mean by “you can see it when you walk around the streets in here”? Did you spend all your time in central Tokyo? Because all i see around me when i go for a walk are buildings no one seems to care enough to renovate them and honestly it amazes me. All those amazing products you see that come from japan are usually made in a buildings that look like makeshift houses and are built in the middle of a nowhere. I could never imagine japan being what it is by just from walking around in here.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  Homes and condo buildings in Japan aren't supposed to last more than 40 years. It's supposed to keep the national economy in a constant state of development (sort of good) but it also means most people can't make a good long term investment off home ownership (which is bad). Either way, yeah, there's no incentive to renovate, because they won't be up for too long. On top of that, a lot of them need to be refurnished or rebuilt to be quake-proof, but it's not affordable, so they may opt to wait until the next big one brings it down.
  - amluto 7y ago
    > it also means most people can't make a good long term investment off home ownership (which is bad) There’s a theory that homes being a good long-term investment is incompatible with homes being affordable. If true, then I would argue that it’s good, not bad.
  - agent008t 7y ago
    Why should homes be a good long-term investment? They do not produce anything and it costs to maintain one.
    - dgacmu 7y ago
      Under a rising population in a region, demand increases, which should increase the per sq. foot cost of housing, reflecting the need for denser living.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

> The only people that come close are Leuchtturm Lechtturm recently moved production to China, with the expected drop in quality. > But then again everyone uses Shimano components. Manufacturing of nearly all Shimano components these days is now done in China or Malaysia. Sure, there is Japanese firm overseeing that manufacturing, but modern Shimano is a different beast than those classic Japanese bicycle-component brands like Nitto that are still made in Japan.

nextos 7y ago
I think Leuchtturm was not a particularly good paper. Midori is very good, but they are not a paper mill. And they don't disclose who produces their raw sheets. An example of a good Japanese paper mill is Tomoe River, who perhaps also supply Midori. In my opinion, the best paper out there comes from Fabriano, which has additional advantage of being totally chlorine free and pulp has been sourced from biologically controlled crops in Italy. Regarding pens, Pilot is very good. But if talking about Japan, we should also mention Platinum (and more importantly their sister company Nakaya) plus, at least, Sailor. There are also exceptionally good non-Japanese pen manufactures out there. One example is Conid. Or Romillo. I also love Japanese goods, but it's nice to keep a balanced perspective. Some Western brands are on the same level of quality. In fact, if you go to Japan, they will worship some Western brands.

kragen 7y ago

In modern Japanese factories, master craftsmen are referred to as kami-sama, gods. Not, you know, monotheistic or Olympian gods with pretensions to universality, but Shinto gods, the kind of god that might belong to the huge old tree that sticks out above the top of the forest. It's not a sarcastic title; the respect is real. Japanese companies are run by businessmen, just like companies in the US, but they still have to treat the makers with respect. Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs. Karoshi is still a bigger problem than precarización, which is what we call the gig economy here in Argentina.

nordsieck 7y ago
> Probably helps that you can't fire anybody, and if you get a job, that job is likely the one you'll have to live in for life. Workers aren't disposable, and neither are jobs. Could be. Didn't stop the USSR from churning out heaping mounds of hot garbage, though.
- p_l 7y ago
  It was more a result of bad planning and bad incentives. Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one. Good companies mix both long term planning and reactive processes
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > Corporations are similarly centrally planned, but the quarter plan is in many ways as bad as 5 year one. The fundamental advantage of corporations over centrally planned states is not their time horizon, but our tolerance to allow them to go bankrupt. Markets out perform voting by concentrating power in the hands of those who make good decisions (where "good" is defined by the market).
    - Retra 7y ago
      Arguably, that advantages companies that can hack that metric -- as anything they do to survive (politics) is treated as a reverse proxy for the value they bring to the market. This is why "too big to fail" and "job creator" became mantras.

joewee 7y ago

My guess. Japanese have long valued mastery and specialization. Historically a cast society, people were expected to dedicate their entire lives to the line of work their biological or adopted family was known for. The country also went to great pains to isolate themselves so this system continued for much longer than other parts of the world where sources of wealth were more diversified. In Japan wealth came from being known as the best at your craft, which fostered a culture of continuous improvement. In much of Asia perfection of art was seen as a sign of sophistication for the wealthy. But the cultural revolution in China really dampened that for much of China’s sphere of influence. After WW-II Japan was forced to modernize. Western manufacturing and improvement processes came in. The manufacturing was new but the culture of continuous improvement and mastery was already well established in Japanese culture but didn’t exist in the West where modernization was really a battle between the use of slave labor / child labor vs machines and the concept of continuous improvement was a new thing. But I wonder, can we say the same about German engineering vs Russian engineering?

nextos 7y ago
I love Japanese high quality items, but I think we worship them a bit due to the fact that they are foreign imports from a different culture. For some categories mentioned by the OP, some non-Japanese items are superior. In the same way, the Japanese worship even more some Western goods and have gone out of their way to copy and sometimes improve them. For example, there is a whole subculture in Japan that adores old American tees and denim. They create exceptionally high quality reproductions using original equipment [1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204542404577157290201608630 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204542404577157...
- joewee 7y ago
  There are plenty of areas where Japanese have lost to competitors. Their sweet is making things that are hard and expensive do well. The most important components of our iPhones can only be made in Japan because of their attention to detail. They still make pretty good swords and knives!
barry0079 7y ago

kazinator 7y ago

Speaking of fountain pens and Japan; in Japan you can find these compact-sized cartridge fountain pens for ￥200. E.g. at LOFT. They are decent; just the handle is simple transparent plastic.

msravi 7y ago

Different people/cultures are good at different things. The Japanese are really good at taking an existing product and making it much better in terms of quality, durability, finish, etc. However saying that the Japanese are better at everything does injustice to western society - which incidentally has had a stellar record inventing everything from cars to planes to cameras. Sure, the finish and panache of the final product may be lacking a little, but without the fierce can-do attitude and i-dont-care-for-authority attitude that is a hallmark of western society, none of these might have come to be. PS: I'm neither Japanese nor western.

alasdair_ 7y ago

Malcolm Gladwell has a chunk of one of his books devoted to this. The theory he uses is that growing rice in paddies is painstaking and meticulous work, where attention to detail and constant refinement are necessary for a good crop, whereas wheat or soybeans don’t need this level of work.

barry-cotter 7y ago
This would predict the same attention to quality and continuous improvement in all rice paddy reliant cultures. China disproves this hypothesis. Even very, very expensive apartments in Shanghai often have terrible quality finish. It looks great when new but even a couple of years later things start to fall apart in most places. And it isn’t confined to accommodation. It’s amazingly difficult to get people to actually follow a maintenance schedule for equipment, even extremely expensive manufacturing equipment. When most of the workforce is at best two generations removed from peasants and most aren’t even one an attitude of “Fuck it, it’ll do.” is pervasive.
ballooney 7y ago
Gladwell has made something of a career out of exactly this sort of tenuous, facile nonsense.

silly_yote 7y ago

On cars you missed Subaru, a favorite of mine. My favorite all time car was my 2001 Legacy L wagon.

Beldin 7y ago

For bikes (bicycles) I'd say it depends. For daily commutes and leisure trips, you can't beat Gazelle. But then again, maybe you're thinking of racing bikes and using bikes for sports.

jchw 7y ago

Hakko soldering irons and Japanese capacitors also come to mind.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sooheon 7y ago

Missing category to think about: software craftsmanship?

biztos 7y ago

Hammers. The Germans make better industrial hammers. What ever happened to Japanese laptops anyway? I used to have a little bitty Fuji and I loved it, back then Sony also had super great industrial design, really offering an alternative to Apple that was at least as cool-looking. Is that just not a thing anymore?

asark 7y ago
All I can figure is Sony got a taste of that sweet sweet BS money (that made from IP and online services rather than products per se, that is) and got lost in it.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

Gotta be honest here, Apple still makes the best computer hardware. Its what Sony aspires to, but can't really touch.

komali2 7y ago
Unless you want to use your laptop to type, of course ;) Nobody can beat Lenovo, IMO. The Thinkpad x1 carbon as an example. Lighter than a MacBook pro. More ports. A keyboard that not only isn't defeated by a single grain of sand, but is also just a delightful keyboard. Put whatever OS you want on it. Far cheaper.

bluGill 7y ago

They are good at making quality because they learned how and started doing it. In the 1960s "make in Japan" was synonymous with cheap junk - what China is today (perhaps worse?). There are complex reasons why most countries go through this, I can list some of the factors but I don't know them all (I doubt anyone does)

kwillets 7y ago

>Japanese made products used to be synonymous to 'cheap' and 'poor quality.' It was not until July 1950 when Dr. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) introduced SQC to the Japanese industry audience, using the trademark colored-beads experiment. >Eizaburo Nishibori, one of the country's post-war quality pioneers, describes in a book* the humble initial encounter to modern quality concepts that preceded Deming's historic 8-day seminar. >It was during American occupation of Japan (1945- 1952) when GHQ (offices of the Allied occupation) placed an order of vacuum tubes to Toshiba. Nishibori recalled the American officers wanted to see a 'control chart' from the manufacturing process being used to produce their order. No one at Toshiba knew what it was. "You don't know a control chart? How do you plan to manage quality?" Nishibori remembers replying, "If we, engineers at Toshiba, don't know it, most likely no one in Japan knows." http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html

cmod 7y ago

What about software? I can't think of a single piece of Japanese software I use as part of my everyday, core compute kit.