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> It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don

by creshal 11y ago

> It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh).

toyg 11y ago
There is a cultural element -- the Japanese perceive the cultural contrast between their world and "ours" more acutely than we do, in both directions (i.e. their positions go from "the West is much better than us" to "the West is so much worse than us" very quickly, it's hard to find level-headed assessments of both positions). Most of the "obviously it can't work" sentiment actually comes from there, in many cases. And then there is an economic issue: their currency has been so strong for so long, it simply wasn't worth for most medium-to-small companies to invest in tricky oversea expansion for a very long time. Things have changed a bit there, but the cultural perception has not shifted much. There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms. And then, of course, there is the recent history of train-crash expansion in the '80s. That didn't end well, and some of the lessons they learnt was not to try too hard to expand abroad.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  > There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms. I'm not so sure about this analysis. Korea is a much smaller market than Japan and also has regulations hostile foreign products in general (high import tariffs and so on) or to Japanese products in particular (such as limitations on how much Japanese-language material can be broadcast). I don't know what it means to say that they "simply cannot match China on equal terms;" it's only recently that Japan's economy's size was surpassed by that of China and even then it has a number of advantages that China does not (much higher per-capita income, a more stable regulatory environment, lower levels of corruption, etc., you get the idea).
  - toyg 11y ago
    This is the historical perspective I was talking about, but I'll just note that your points are not orthogonal to mine. The end result is that post-crash, Japanese companies have been very reluctant to expand, either close-by or far away.
rmc 11y ago
It's common amoung US companies as well. How many tech companies aren't available in !USA? How much "streaming TV shows" aren't available in !USA?
- navait 11y ago
  90% of those are legal issues, whether it be in the US or in the country they are expanding to, especially in the case of copyrighted media.
  - acveilleux 11y ago
    I don't buy that (outside of copyright licensing). Especially for anything cloud based. As a Canadian, we don't have a choice but to expand to include the US early on (since it's a market 10x bigger) and I've not really seen that become a stumbling block.
    - toyg 11y ago
      Because you don't have a choice, you faced the related issues right away and found them not a big deal. Most US businesses do have a choice to just ignore these issues completely, because their internal market is big enough to sustain expansion for a long time. (although when it comes to audio-video, @navait is correct: it's a legal minefield.)
  - rmc 11y ago
    Amazon's European headquarters, and AWS cloud is in Ireland. There's no amazon.ie. I had to use amazon.co.uk.
emodendroket 11y ago
Japan has a huge economy and market, much like the US, which also exhibits similar insularity.
paulmd 11y ago
That's very true. Fuji is notorious for this - they build fantastic cameras/lenses but until recently there was little advertising and they were difficult to source outside Japan. They're also very bad at keeping US customers in the loop about their supply issues.
twblalock 11y ago
> I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh). The Japanese domestic consumer market is so enormous that many Japanese companies are simply not interested in selling their goods internationally, because they don't need to. They can make plenty of money without dealing with the complications of selling their products in other countries. Many are small businesses and are content with making enough money to cover payroll.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Same in Germany. And the reason why so many smaller German companies existed in pretty much the same way for the past millenium.
- rmc 11y ago
  I presume that US companies would also have this effect. US domestic market is very large, so why bother expanding to (say) UK which is ~15% the size?
serge2k 11y ago
I really enjoyed the bit in the crash bandicoot blog that was posted recently where the author mentioned how the Japenese execs from Sony were completely against bringing crash to Japan. They tweaked the looks of the character slightly and the execs bought in right away.

by creshal 11y ago

toyg 11y ago

There is a cultural element -- the Japanese perceive the cultural contrast between their world and "ours" more acutely than we do, in both directions (i.e. their positions go from "the West is much better than us" to "the West is so much worse than us" very quickly, it's hard to find level-headed assessments of both positions). Most of the "obviously it can't work" sentiment actually comes from there, in many cases. And then there is an economic issue: their currency has been so strong for so long, it simply wasn't worth for most medium-to-small companies to invest in tricky oversea expansion for a very long time. Things have changed a bit there, but the cultural perception has not shifted much. There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms. And then, of course, there is the recent history of train-crash expansion in the '80s. That didn't end well, and some of the lessons they learnt was not to try too hard to expand abroad.

emodendroket 11y ago
> There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms. I'm not so sure about this analysis. Korea is a much smaller market than Japan and also has regulations hostile foreign products in general (high import tariffs and so on) or to Japanese products in particular (such as limitations on how much Japanese-language material can be broadcast). I don't know what it means to say that they "simply cannot match China on equal terms;" it's only recently that Japan's economy's size was surpassed by that of China and even then it has a number of advantages that China does not (much higher per-capita income, a more stable regulatory environment, lower levels of corruption, etc., you get the idea).
- toyg 11y ago
  This is the historical perspective I was talking about, but I'll just note that your points are not orthogonal to mine. The end result is that post-crash, Japanese companies have been very reluctant to expand, either close-by or far away.

rmc 11y ago

It's common amoung US companies as well. How many tech companies aren't available in !USA? How much "streaming TV shows" aren't available in !USA?

navait 11y ago
90% of those are legal issues, whether it be in the US or in the country they are expanding to, especially in the case of copyrighted media.
- acveilleux 11y ago
  I don't buy that (outside of copyright licensing). Especially for anything cloud based. As a Canadian, we don't have a choice but to expand to include the US early on (since it's a market 10x bigger) and I've not really seen that become a stumbling block.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Because you don't have a choice, you faced the related issues right away and found them not a big deal. Most US businesses do have a choice to just ignore these issues completely, because their internal market is big enough to sustain expansion for a long time. (although when it comes to audio-video, @navait is correct: it's a legal minefield.)
- rmc 11y ago
  Amazon's European headquarters, and AWS cloud is in Ireland. There's no amazon.ie. I had to use amazon.co.uk.

emodendroket 11y ago

Japan has a huge economy and market, much like the US, which also exhibits similar insularity.

paulmd 11y ago

That's very true. Fuji is notorious for this - they build fantastic cameras/lenses but until recently there was little advertising and they were difficult to source outside Japan. They're also very bad at keeping US customers in the loop about their supply issues.

twblalock 11y ago

> I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh). The Japanese domestic consumer market is so enormous that many Japanese companies are simply not interested in selling their goods internationally, because they don't need to. They can make plenty of money without dealing with the complications of selling their products in other countries. Many are small businesses and are content with making enough money to cover payroll.

kuschku 11y ago
Same in Germany. And the reason why so many smaller German companies existed in pretty much the same way for the past millenium.
rmc 11y ago
I presume that US companies would also have this effect. US domestic market is very large, so why bother expanding to (say) UK which is ~15% the size?

serge2k 11y ago

I really enjoyed the bit in the crash bandicoot blog that was posted recently where the author mentioned how the Japenese execs from Sony were completely against bringing crash to Japan. They tweaked the looks of the character slightly and the execs bought in right away.