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Japan has a long and storied tradition of pumping immense amounts of government cash into failures. Off the top of my head, there's hydrogen fueled vehicles, fa

Japan has a long and storied tradition of pumping immense amounts of government cash into failures. Off the top of my head, there's hydrogen fueled vehicles, fast breeder reactors, and more or less every Japanese attempt ever at exporting its own computing standards.

leoc 2y ago
The Fifth Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... was another notable failure. OTOH MITI did also organise the Japanese VLSI project https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-rise-and-peak-of-japanese-semiconductors https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-rise-and-peak-of-japanese-... https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/47985/fromimitationtoi00saka.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/47985/fromimi... , which was apparently a smashing success. (I am not an expert on anything.) On the third hand, according to Johnstone https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/bob-johnstone/we-were-burning/9780465091188/ https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/bob-johnstone/we-were-burn... the success of Japanese consumer electronics had very little to do with MITI and government industrial policy, as MITI despised the consumer-electronics firms and doted on the "real" computer companies. Right at the moment I assume that the Japanese government is probably still kicking itself for not spending whatever it took to keep Nikon's EUV-machine development going: apparently Nikon wasn't that far behind ASML. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_OOta7Y6Ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_OOta7Y6Ik Likely it's determined not to make that mistake again; and it's not as if the US is in any position to complain about Japan having an activist industrial policy in semiconductors at the moment.
nnm 2y ago
The projects might fail, but knowledge accumulated and scientists / engineers created from them can bring success to other areas
- roenxi 2y ago
  If you define failure as a form of victory then success is inevitable. However, in the spirit of some vague sense of accountability, it seems like an unreasonable position.
  - Epa095 2y ago
    > If you define failure as a form of victory then success is inevitable. No, you can also do just enough to slumber away in mediocracy forever.
  - zombiwoof 2y ago
    If failure is defined and victory and one succeeds do they actually fail
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >knowledge accumulated and scientists / engineers created from them can bring success to other areas Japanese companies and institutions hate sharing knowledge (read: trade secrets) with each other.
Hilift 2y ago
I wouldn't classify hydrogen as "failed" yet. Much of today's industry runs on natural gas. However after many large companies converted to using natural gas in the 1990's, it was almost a disaster due to the price of gas rose dramatically, peaking around 2005 several times today's price. That's ancient history now, but at the time it looked like natural gas was doomed. Then fracking blew the economics away. If the price of gasoline or diesel did what happened to natural gas, there would have been riots. https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historical-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historic...
- Tade0 2y ago
  Hydrogen is already the cheapest it will ever be, as it's made primarily from natural gas. There's of course so-called white hydrogen: https://hydrogeneurope.eu/excitement-grows-about-natural-h2-as-huge-reserves-found-in-france/ https://hydrogeneurope.eu/excitement-grows-about-natural-h2-... But known reserves are really small compared to those of natural gas.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Hydrogen is just greenwashing for natural gas. No CO2 at the point of use .. but it's dumped into the atmosphere somewhere else when the hydrogen is made from natural gas. You can make it from electrolysis, but it's much more expensive to do so, so that won't happen.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Already happening and underway with plans to scale up to current non-green hydrogen global production levels and then beyond. * Central Queensland Hydrogen Project (CQ-H2) A large-scale project that aims to produce 200 tonnes of green hydrogen per day by 2029 and 800 tonnes per day by 2031. The project will supply hydrogen to an ammonia production facility in Gladstone and may eventually export it to Japan * Project Yuri A commercial-scale hydrogen electrolyser project at Yara's Pilbara fertilizer plant that is currently under construction. * Arrowsmith Hydrogen Project-HP1 * ATCO-Hydrogen-Blending-Project * Australian Renewable Energy Hub * Boolathana Project. See: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/hydrogen https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/hydrogen
tomlockwood 2y ago
And to think, all America has is the banks.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  The US’s most valuable bank is only #12 by market cap, and worth an order of magnitude less than the top companies. The second most valuable is #25 by market cap.
tokioyoyo 2y ago
At least they’re trying?
m463 2y ago
lol. Reminds me of the story of the couple that went to vegas. The husband gets mad when he finds out his wife spent $200 on the slot machines. She points out that he lost $3000 last year's trip, but he retorts "Yeah, but I know how to gamble!" So... they have working bullet trains.
starspangled 2y ago
Japan has a much lower government expenditure as a proportion of GDP than many European countries like Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Austria, etc., and has much better public infrastructure and services like transport and healthcare than USA. Governments by nature are wasteful, corrupt, and incompetent, sure, but is Japan really particularly bad? You could point to spectacular high speed rail failures in USA or a healthcare system which costs double per-capita as other developed countries for much worse outcomes in most objective measures of public health, incredibly expensive violent and ultimately failed attempts to "export democracy" to places like Afghanistan, and on and on. So... yes maybe it does, but it seems misleading to make a comment like that unless you can say how it's particularly worse than any other government's waste and failure.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - starspangled 2y ago
    > It's not that their government is particularly bad, it's their culture that is particularly bad. Well we were talking about the government being bad, so are you agreeing with me here or disagreeing? > To give you some idea: Japan still thinks metaverse is the bleeding edge of tech and wants to become its leader. Also more fundamentally, Japan thinks they can become the leader in the "AI" industry despite literally only being a consumer and not a producer. When you say "Japan thinks", do you mean government, bureaucrats, and some dinosaur corporations? Because I assure you western governments and non-US corporations all over the world think they can become leaders in "AI". It was only a few years ago that incompetent bureaucrats in major western cities finally gave up talking about using blockchain technology to make their cities run better. > Note: I'm Japanese(-American), I will take every justifiable opportunity to shit on my fellow people because they deserve it. You're looking specifically at the computer technology field where USA is an outlier that does well, so I'm not sure you have the necessary perspective. Though even USA has big failures there, the loss of semiconductor manufacturing leadership and attempts by government to prop it up, for a topical example. > Japanese persons are some of the most clever, skilled, innovative bunch of gentlemen that humanity has ever known, but Japanese people are some of the most closed-minded, incompetent, bass ackwards bunch of misfits that humanity has ever known. I assure you this is what many westerners (including or probably I should say particularly Americans) think about their government and people at large.
gkanai 2y ago
In this case, semiconductors are a segment which Japan was leading back in the 80s. And Japanese inputs have been continuously critical for even today's leading edge semis from TSMC as well as for others like from Samsung or AMD. So if the Japanese govt. is going to 'bet' on anything, then betting on a segment where Japanese inputs are critical, and where Japanese companies had led the world previously, is a safer bet than a segment where there is no history or inputs.
numpad0 2y ago
This reads like a lossy compression of METI and Sangyo Saisei Kiko("Industry rejuvination body") project criticism. The METI(ministry of economy, trade, and industry) had attempted to intervene to revitalize multiple major Japanese corporations over the past few decades, very few of which saw successes. Bureucratic and indecisive nature of managing government employees are often brought up as a contributing factor, which applies to every government decisions ever, so this assertion do need citations to be a valid point in a discussion.
makeitdouble 2y ago
These are failures that they can't afford to not have. Hydrogen fuel is strategic because if it has even any chance to succeed it means a huge escspe route from China's influence, as the whole EV stack relies on them (getting rid of petroleum fuel is of course the same deal, Japan has no oil). That's basically a low risk high return bet. We're seeing how hybrids are still fairing better that full EVs and Tesla hasn't displaced Toyota either. Computing standard is the same: they've been stuck with US standards for eternity now, up to iOS and android eating the national market when they had a decade long lead. Not pouring money into any half viable bet would be crazy.

leoc 2y ago

The Fifth Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... was another notable failure. OTOH MITI did also organise the Japanese VLSI project https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-rise-and-peak-of-japanese-semiconductors https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-rise-and-peak-of-japanese-... https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/47985/fromimitationtoi00saka.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/47985/fromimi... , which was apparently a smashing success. (I am not an expert on anything.) On the third hand, according to Johnstone https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/bob-johnstone/we-were-burning/9780465091188/ https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/bob-johnstone/we-were-burn... the success of Japanese consumer electronics had very little to do with MITI and government industrial policy, as MITI despised the consumer-electronics firms and doted on the "real" computer companies. Right at the moment I assume that the Japanese government is probably still kicking itself for not spending whatever it took to keep Nikon's EUV-machine development going: apparently Nikon wasn't that far behind ASML. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_OOta7Y6Ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_OOta7Y6Ik Likely it's determined not to make that mistake again; and it's not as if the US is in any position to complain about Japan having an activist industrial policy in semiconductors at the moment.

nnm 2y ago

The projects might fail, but knowledge accumulated and scientists / engineers created from them can bring success to other areas

roenxi 2y ago
If you define failure as a form of victory then success is inevitable. However, in the spirit of some vague sense of accountability, it seems like an unreasonable position.
- Epa095 2y ago
  > If you define failure as a form of victory then success is inevitable. No, you can also do just enough to slumber away in mediocracy forever.
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  If failure is defined and victory and one succeeds do they actually fail
Dalewyn 2y ago
>knowledge accumulated and scientists / engineers created from them can bring success to other areas Japanese companies and institutions hate sharing knowledge (read: trade secrets) with each other.

Hilift 2y ago

I wouldn't classify hydrogen as "failed" yet. Much of today's industry runs on natural gas. However after many large companies converted to using natural gas in the 1990's, it was almost a disaster due to the price of gas rose dramatically, peaking around 2005 several times today's price. That's ancient history now, but at the time it looked like natural gas was doomed. Then fracking blew the economics away. If the price of gasoline or diesel did what happened to natural gas, there would have been riots. https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historical-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historic...

Tade0 2y ago
Hydrogen is already the cheapest it will ever be, as it's made primarily from natural gas. There's of course so-called white hydrogen: https://hydrogeneurope.eu/excitement-grows-about-natural-h2-as-huge-reserves-found-in-france/ https://hydrogeneurope.eu/excitement-grows-about-natural-h2-... But known reserves are really small compared to those of natural gas.
pjc50 2y ago
Hydrogen is just greenwashing for natural gas. No CO2 at the point of use .. but it's dumped into the atmosphere somewhere else when the hydrogen is made from natural gas. You can make it from electrolysis, but it's much more expensive to do so, so that won't happen.
- defrost 2y ago
  Already happening and underway with plans to scale up to current non-green hydrogen global production levels and then beyond. * Central Queensland Hydrogen Project (CQ-H2) A large-scale project that aims to produce 200 tonnes of green hydrogen per day by 2029 and 800 tonnes per day by 2031. The project will supply hydrogen to an ammonia production facility in Gladstone and may eventually export it to Japan * Project Yuri A commercial-scale hydrogen electrolyser project at Yara's Pilbara fertilizer plant that is currently under construction. * Arrowsmith Hydrogen Project-HP1 * ATCO-Hydrogen-Blending-Project * Australian Renewable Energy Hub * Boolathana Project. See: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/hydrogen https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/hydrogen

tomlockwood 2y ago

And to think, all America has is the banks.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
The US’s most valuable bank is only #12 by market cap, and worth an order of magnitude less than the top companies. The second most valuable is #25 by market cap.

tokioyoyo 2y ago

At least they’re trying?

m463 2y ago

lol. Reminds me of the story of the couple that went to vegas. The husband gets mad when he finds out his wife spent $200 on the slot machines. She points out that he lost $3000 last year's trip, but he retorts "Yeah, but I know how to gamble!" So... they have working bullet trains.

starspangled 2y ago

Japan has a much lower government expenditure as a proportion of GDP than many European countries like Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Austria, etc., and has much better public infrastructure and services like transport and healthcare than USA. Governments by nature are wasteful, corrupt, and incompetent, sure, but is Japan really particularly bad? You could point to spectacular high speed rail failures in USA or a healthcare system which costs double per-capita as other developed countries for much worse outcomes in most objective measures of public health, incredibly expensive violent and ultimately failed attempts to "export democracy" to places like Afghanistan, and on and on. So... yes maybe it does, but it seems misleading to make a comment like that unless you can say how it's particularly worse than any other government's waste and failure.

Dalewyn 2y ago
[flagged]
- starspangled 2y ago
  > It's not that their government is particularly bad, it's their culture that is particularly bad. Well we were talking about the government being bad, so are you agreeing with me here or disagreeing? > To give you some idea: Japan still thinks metaverse is the bleeding edge of tech and wants to become its leader. Also more fundamentally, Japan thinks they can become the leader in the "AI" industry despite literally only being a consumer and not a producer. When you say "Japan thinks", do you mean government, bureaucrats, and some dinosaur corporations? Because I assure you western governments and non-US corporations all over the world think they can become leaders in "AI". It was only a few years ago that incompetent bureaucrats in major western cities finally gave up talking about using blockchain technology to make their cities run better. > Note: I'm Japanese(-American), I will take every justifiable opportunity to shit on my fellow people because they deserve it. You're looking specifically at the computer technology field where USA is an outlier that does well, so I'm not sure you have the necessary perspective. Though even USA has big failures there, the loss of semiconductor manufacturing leadership and attempts by government to prop it up, for a topical example. > Japanese persons are some of the most clever, skilled, innovative bunch of gentlemen that humanity has ever known, but Japanese people are some of the most closed-minded, incompetent, bass ackwards bunch of misfits that humanity has ever known. I assure you this is what many westerners (including or probably I should say particularly Americans) think about their government and people at large.

gkanai 2y ago

In this case, semiconductors are a segment which Japan was leading back in the 80s. And Japanese inputs have been continuously critical for even today's leading edge semis from TSMC as well as for others like from Samsung or AMD. So if the Japanese govt. is going to 'bet' on anything, then betting on a segment where Japanese inputs are critical, and where Japanese companies had led the world previously, is a safer bet than a segment where there is no history or inputs.

numpad0 2y ago

This reads like a lossy compression of METI and Sangyo Saisei Kiko("Industry rejuvination body") project criticism. The METI(ministry of economy, trade, and industry) had attempted to intervene to revitalize multiple major Japanese corporations over the past few decades, very few of which saw successes. Bureucratic and indecisive nature of managing government employees are often brought up as a contributing factor, which applies to every government decisions ever, so this assertion do need citations to be a valid point in a discussion.

makeitdouble 2y ago

These are failures that they can't afford to not have. Hydrogen fuel is strategic because if it has even any chance to succeed it means a huge escspe route from China's influence, as the whole EV stack relies on them (getting rid of petroleum fuel is of course the same deal, Japan has no oil). That's basically a low risk high return bet. We're seeing how hybrids are still fairing better that full EVs and Tesla hasn't displaced Toyota either. Computing standard is the same: they've been stuck with US standards for eternity now, up to iOS and android eating the national market when they had a decade long lead. Not pouring money into any half viable bet would be crazy.