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One thing he didn't mention that I've noticed is that many Japanese companies, particularly in the consumer electronics space but in other industries as well, m

One thing he didn't mention that I've noticed is that many Japanese companies, particularly in the consumer electronics space but in other industries as well, maintain completely separate product lines outside Japan vs. what they sell here. This is (or was) especially striking with phones where you simply couldn't buy made-for-Japan mobile phones outside Japan, and likewise you couldn't find non-Japanese phones in Japan. This is why it was such a shock that the iPhone was a success here, and the entire emerging smartphone market caught Docomo and AU completely flat-footed. There is a particularly irritating component of Japanese nationalism which holds that Japanese are unique, as in physiologically unique, among the world's population (down to having different immune systems, in fact). In seems natural for a Japanese company that it would essentially have to act as two companies, one for exported products and another for domestic ones. It's very inefficient. It's also remarkably stupid as the iPhone demonstrates - what sells anywhere else will also sell here, and vice versa (I would always get comments on my phone when I went overseas and had to tell people the model was only available in Japan, to their disappointment). Contrast this with most other large manufacturers where they will have more-or-less the same products globally, with some localization. Actually the solution for Japan is rather obvious and I suspect many know it: stop acting as though you're an alien race crash-landed on planet Earth a thousand years ago. Start treating the global market the same as the domestic one, and Japanese the same as Korean, Swedish, Canadian, whatever. This will be a hard lesson for the Japanese national psyche to digest, and I don't know that they're up for it. It's entirely plausible they'll spend the next 50 years making stunning breakthroughs in the fields of (nursing home) robotics and new delivery mechanisms for god-awful Japanese broadcast television.

paperwork 15y ago
So why would an international company have separate product lines like you mention? It is hard to believe that international businessmen would forgo the opportunity to profit abroad, simply because something is made for the local market. Could it be that Japan only products are more experimental, and when the prove successful, they are rolled out to rest of the world?
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  In the case of mobile phones, if they were in fact experiments they must have considered every experiment a failure, as virtually none of what you saw in the Japanese domestic market informed the design of overseas products. Yet they continued with the same basic design principles year after year. Look some of them up if you like, and you will see what I mean. They don't see themselves missing out on any opportunity, because they are already certain that their domestic market is fundamentally quite different than every other market in the world, and must be treated as such. This is something fully within the sphere of consensus for them. They aren't behaving like rational actors, but rather like normal humans whose cultural attitudes prevent them from even examining many of their beliefs. Bring it up and you will likely be treated to an expert display of confabulation and rationalization. You can do this with any people on Earth depending on the topic, but the Japanese happened to have picked an unfortunate one. This is why people think Japanese are xenophobic. They're not, not really. Not any more than most other cultures. But they do tend to think they are very different from everyone else in the world, for better and for worse. This essay is itself a good example, being more nihonjinron navel-gazing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron

paperwork 15y ago

So why would an international company have separate product lines like you mention? It is hard to believe that international businessmen would forgo the opportunity to profit abroad, simply because something is made for the local market. Could it be that Japan only products are more experimental, and when the prove successful, they are rolled out to rest of the world?

bluedanieru 15y ago
In the case of mobile phones, if they were in fact experiments they must have considered every experiment a failure, as virtually none of what you saw in the Japanese domestic market informed the design of overseas products. Yet they continued with the same basic design principles year after year. Look some of them up if you like, and you will see what I mean. They don't see themselves missing out on any opportunity, because they are already certain that their domestic market is fundamentally quite different than every other market in the world, and must be treated as such. This is something fully within the sphere of consensus for them. They aren't behaving like rational actors, but rather like normal humans whose cultural attitudes prevent them from even examining many of their beliefs. Bring it up and you will likely be treated to an expert display of confabulation and rationalization. You can do this with any people on Earth depending on the topic, but the Japanese happened to have picked an unfortunate one. This is why people think Japanese are xenophobic. They're not, not really. Not any more than most other cultures. But they do tend to think they are very different from everyone else in the world, for better and for worse. This essay is itself a good example, being more nihonjinron navel-gazing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron