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Seeing some talk about "built in Japan": This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. AFAICT, pride is a main constituent. Th

Seeing some talk about "built in Japan": This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. AFAICT, pride is a main constituent. There is a strong desire for Japanese to have accomplishments to be proud of to the world, to stand out on a crowded world stage. Another is this phrase particularly signals to other Japanese: Hey, choose this software, because it was made by our kind (pride), and its operation might mesh better with your cognitive patterns. oh, and the Japanese localization is bound to be 1st class (a small rarity). One more: Japanese like to judge things after getting the thing into their hands and evaluating it (物で判断する), and word-of-mouth is mighty powerful in Japan. So "built in Japan" means it's pre-vetted by Japanese, and that is in turn a powerful seal of quality. Oh, and if there are some flaws, we can overlook them knowing that someone will eventually get round to dealing with them. It's a civil and respectful community-minded approach that mirrors Japanese culture in the large. If you are so inclined, there is a whole multi-faceted Made in Japan movement. Outside of the context of Japan or being of a Japanese mind, the value of this statement depends greatly on the context. For medicine, semiconductors, industrial equipment? Made in Japan is often a solid choice. For software? Japan is an advanced nation, plenty of highly-skilled knowledge workers, and has a very long history with software development; this software is probably competently done. On the other hand, it might mean the software is designed a little .. mysterious .. to non-Japanese eyes due to those aforementioned cognitive patterns but also a differing cultural context. For example using the color blue to signify "build successful" in Jenkins instead of green.

Razengan 3y ago
Even in other countries "Made In Japan" still automatically implies quality.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
But is it written in Rust?
brabel 3y ago
> This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets: * those who normally favor their own country's products. * those who almost universally loathe their own country's products. I was born in one of the latter types of countries. Where I am from, the word "imported" was absolutely synonym with "better quality". It didn't even matter where it came from, as long as it was not local. This was due to 1970's and 80's protectionist/socialist policies which wanted to make the national industry protected from foreign competition - which it did, but had the side effect of making such industries completely non-competitive with the rest of the world. Then I moved to a country in the more nationalist group: Australia. The "Australian Made"[1] logo is proudly used by anyone who produces even a tiny bit of their products in Australia (I think there's a minimal threshold for that to be allowed, but didn't really check it)! The most popular car there was the Holden Commodore for decades (recently, Holden closed down production in Australia - so now it's all Toyota), proudly Australian made - even if the mother company, GM, was not Aussie. After traveling around in a few countries, I came to the conclusion that most countries that actually have a competitive industry tend to be more like that. Japan is of course in that category, but so are most developed nations: USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, even more recent "arrivals" to the upper league, like South Korea. Poorer countries tend to be in a paradoxical position where their people will swear they love their nation and will be extremely irritated if any foreigner dares to criticize them, but in private they consider their own industry a joke, will go to great lengths to buy "imported" products, even if they're more expensive (given the high tariffs for imports), have almost zero trust in their compatriots (specially politicians and business people) and totally expect them to be dishonest without further evidence to the contrary, and so on... things that just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is not at all particular to Japanese people :). [1] https://australianmade.com.au/ https://australianmade.com.au/
- dilawar 3y ago
  > those who almost universally loathe their own country's products. In Indian rural side, "desi" (native) is almost always synonyms with bad quality, not cheap which is implied, but bad quality. I heard that desi in many foreign country means Indian?! Desi or swadesi (home made) had a special emotional appeal to urban upper middle class leadership during freedom struggle. I don't know how they feel about it. Chandrayaan from ISRO was a very significant moment in this regard. Done by desi engineers educated in desi schools. I am one of those.
  - finite_depth 3y ago
    American here: I've only heard "desi" used as a self-descriptor by South Asian people, usually Indian (but I think Pakistani sometimes as well?). It doesn't carry a negative connotation here that I know of, though I might have missed one that does exist.
    - Conan_Kudo 3y ago
      As an Indian-American, I've heard variations of this to describe first-gen American born Indians in a negative fashion. Sometimes, the shorthand "ABCD" is used (meaning American Born Confused Desi) to insult American Indians. This is principally used by Indians who either live in India or emigrated to the US and encounter American Indians. (As an aside, it's rather difficult to accurately describe my ethno-national status given the regular confusion with people of the First Nations...)
      - samatman 3y ago
        There's no need to worry about confusion, Indian-American always means ancestry or origin in India. Native American is the usual term in the US for the indigenous, although many of them call themselves Indians and prefer it, a generation ago it was American Indian, but it's never been the other way around, hyphen or otherwise.
  - sfink 3y ago
    As a white, vanilla American, I have always understood desi to be very similar to "hick" or "country bumpkin", but from the subcontinent. (And usually applied to people who have never been anywhere near the countryside.)
rjh29 3y ago
It's just a country like any other, most of us are proud of the things our country has done.
- cassepipe 3y ago
  Well I must be part of the exception then. I am not proud of anything I have not directly contributed to. Feeling proud for other people achievements is very strange to me.
  - rjh29 3y ago
    I assume you don't feel shame for things your fellow humans have done either? Anyway everyone is different, but I'm talking about neurotypical people mostly.
    - zaphirplane 3y ago
      Interesting, I’m surprised that you think the average person feels shame over the actions of bad people. I would have said sadness in sympathy to the victims and disgust for the bad person
      - taeric 3y ago
        I would be surprised if most people don't feel some shame when a sibling or other close relative does something bad? Heck, most of us are effectively different people than we were in the past. And we very much feel some shame when we find out something bad we did back when.
        zaphirplane 3y ago
        The statement that I was replying to was about feeling shame for actions by other humans anywhere, anytime. I think there is goal post movement in your response. Do you feel shame when you read about someone stealing a bike in a far country whose capital you wouldn’t know ? You must be in despair over all the crimes committed by humanity every hour
lloeki 3y ago
> Japanese localization Shift-JIS or whatever 0x5c shenanigans were immediately brought back to mind. https://web.archive.org/web/20061208222907/http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20061208222907/http://blogs.msdn... Still makes ripples to this day: https://superuser.com/questions/1167662/why-is-windows-10-displaying-as-¥-on-the-command-line https://superuser.com/questions/1167662/why-is-windows-10-di...
- pezezin 3y ago
  Shift-JIS is still a pain in the ass. I recently encountered two applications that only work properly in Japanese Windows, and in any other locale will just display mojibake. And these are modern applications, made in the last year. How is that even possible in 2023?
  - ranger_danger 3y ago
    Because most (esp. Japanese) people don't know how to use Unicode properly, or don't care. They just build without defining UNICODE and naively assume your local codepage to be CP932 because 99% of their target audience is exactly this (and hence seemingly unaffected).
    - KingMob 3y ago
      Well, Unicode's Han unification process kind of screwed Japan, so that's somewhat understandable. It makes it hard to use Unicode for historical documents with older variants, documents using more than one CJK language (like talking about Chinese in Japanese), and worst of all, a lot of theoretically-compatible CJK fonts look wrong because they chose Chinese glyphs. There's many ways Unicode is an improvement over what came before, but they screwed up with Han unification.

Razengan 3y ago

Even in other countries "Made In Japan" still automatically implies quality.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

But is it written in Rust?

brabel 3y ago

> This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets: * those who normally favor their own country's products. * those who almost universally loathe their own country's products. I was born in one of the latter types of countries. Where I am from, the word "imported" was absolutely synonym with "better quality". It didn't even matter where it came from, as long as it was not local. This was due to 1970's and 80's protectionist/socialist policies which wanted to make the national industry protected from foreign competition - which it did, but had the side effect of making such industries completely non-competitive with the rest of the world. Then I moved to a country in the more nationalist group: Australia. The "Australian Made"[1] logo is proudly used by anyone who produces even a tiny bit of their products in Australia (I think there's a minimal threshold for that to be allowed, but didn't really check it)! The most popular car there was the Holden Commodore for decades (recently, Holden closed down production in Australia - so now it's all Toyota), proudly Australian made - even if the mother company, GM, was not Aussie. After traveling around in a few countries, I came to the conclusion that most countries that actually have a competitive industry tend to be more like that. Japan is of course in that category, but so are most developed nations: USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, even more recent "arrivals" to the upper league, like South Korea. Poorer countries tend to be in a paradoxical position where their people will swear they love their nation and will be extremely irritated if any foreigner dares to criticize them, but in private they consider their own industry a joke, will go to great lengths to buy "imported" products, even if they're more expensive (given the high tariffs for imports), have almost zero trust in their compatriots (specially politicians and business people) and totally expect them to be dishonest without further evidence to the contrary, and so on... things that just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is not at all particular to Japanese people :). [1] https://australianmade.com.au/ https://australianmade.com.au/

dilawar 3y ago
> those who almost universally loathe their own country's products. In Indian rural side, "desi" (native) is almost always synonyms with bad quality, not cheap which is implied, but bad quality. I heard that desi in many foreign country means Indian?! Desi or swadesi (home made) had a special emotional appeal to urban upper middle class leadership during freedom struggle. I don't know how they feel about it. Chandrayaan from ISRO was a very significant moment in this regard. Done by desi engineers educated in desi schools. I am one of those.
- finite_depth 3y ago
  American here: I've only heard "desi" used as a self-descriptor by South Asian people, usually Indian (but I think Pakistani sometimes as well?). It doesn't carry a negative connotation here that I know of, though I might have missed one that does exist.
  - Conan_Kudo 3y ago
    As an Indian-American, I've heard variations of this to describe first-gen American born Indians in a negative fashion. Sometimes, the shorthand "ABCD" is used (meaning American Born Confused Desi) to insult American Indians. This is principally used by Indians who either live in India or emigrated to the US and encounter American Indians. (As an aside, it's rather difficult to accurately describe my ethno-national status given the regular confusion with people of the First Nations...)
    - samatman 3y ago
      There's no need to worry about confusion, Indian-American always means ancestry or origin in India. Native American is the usual term in the US for the indigenous, although many of them call themselves Indians and prefer it, a generation ago it was American Indian, but it's never been the other way around, hyphen or otherwise.
- sfink 3y ago
  As a white, vanilla American, I have always understood desi to be very similar to "hick" or "country bumpkin", but from the subcontinent. (And usually applied to people who have never been anywhere near the countryside.)

rjh29 3y ago

It's just a country like any other, most of us are proud of the things our country has done.

cassepipe 3y ago
Well I must be part of the exception then. I am not proud of anything I have not directly contributed to. Feeling proud for other people achievements is very strange to me.
- rjh29 3y ago
  I assume you don't feel shame for things your fellow humans have done either? Anyway everyone is different, but I'm talking about neurotypical people mostly.
  - zaphirplane 3y ago
    Interesting, I’m surprised that you think the average person feels shame over the actions of bad people. I would have said sadness in sympathy to the victims and disgust for the bad person
    - taeric 3y ago
      I would be surprised if most people don't feel some shame when a sibling or other close relative does something bad? Heck, most of us are effectively different people than we were in the past. And we very much feel some shame when we find out something bad we did back when.
      - zaphirplane 3y ago
        The statement that I was replying to was about feeling shame for actions by other humans anywhere, anytime. I think there is goal post movement in your response. Do you feel shame when you read about someone stealing a bike in a far country whose capital you wouldn’t know ? You must be in despair over all the crimes committed by humanity every hour

lloeki 3y ago

> Japanese localization Shift-JIS or whatever 0x5c shenanigans were immediately brought back to mind. https://web.archive.org/web/20061208222907/http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20061208222907/http://blogs.msdn... Still makes ripples to this day: https://superuser.com/questions/1167662/why-is-windows-10-displaying-as-¥-on-the-command-line https://superuser.com/questions/1167662/why-is-windows-10-di...

pezezin 3y ago
Shift-JIS is still a pain in the ass. I recently encountered two applications that only work properly in Japanese Windows, and in any other locale will just display mojibake. And these are modern applications, made in the last year. How is that even possible in 2023?
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  Because most (esp. Japanese) people don't know how to use Unicode properly, or don't care. They just build without defining UNICODE and naively assume your local codepage to be CP932 because 99% of their target audience is exactly this (and hence seemingly unaffected).
  - KingMob 3y ago
    Well, Unicode's Han unification process kind of screwed Japan, so that's somewhat understandable. It makes it hard to use Unicode for historical documents with older variants, documents using more than one CJK language (like talking about Chinese in Japanese), and worst of all, a lot of theoretically-compatible CJK fonts look wrong because they chose Chinese glyphs. There's many ways Unicode is an improvement over what came before, but they screwed up with Han unification.