> It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN
Most HNers tend to be in their mid-30s to 50s so a lot of Japan-philia does appear to stem from an older mental image from the 1990s to 2010s.
> This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is that this system is heavily driven by Japan's unique, subtle classism. It's a highly collectivist society with strict age-based milestones and immense pressure to secure traditional employment. In Japan, your corporate affiliation often dictates your social standing...
The Japanese Keiretsu and later Trust Bank model is the norm in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and other Asian countries as well due to a mix of colonial, financial, and policymaking ties.
This is still a form of orientalism which OP is pointing out. Japanese people don't work better or worse than anyone else, and most commenters think all yellow faces look the same and thus can't differentiate between a Japanese, Chinese, or Vietnamese working behind the counter at a konbini let alone other services jobs where Westerners are most likely to interface with.
> and most commenters think all yellow faces look the same and thus can't differentiate between a Japanese, Chinese, or Vietnamese working behind the counter at a konbini let alone other services jobs where Westerners are most likely to interface with.
This seems quite presumptuous, and not all that different from the orientalism you're accusing OP of.
Orientalism in the standard definition means the Western tendency to view non-Western societies in an "othered" or exotic gaze, be it in either a pedestaling or derogatory context.
Think yellow fever, weebs, ad nauseum conversations about Japan (and Asia in general) on HN and Reddit.
You are correct.
Japans system was ahead of its time back then and was heavily imported into Korea. The flaws I pointed out are not strictly a Japanese problem it's really an issue shared across all of East Asia.
1. Japan has become much "chiller" from a work culture perspective, with hours worked being comparable to those of the UK and Ireland [0] thanks to regulatory changes in the 2010s.
2. While conglomerates remain prominent, a new generation of large Western-style employers like Rakuten, Mercari, LY, SoftBank, etc have arisen and operate with American-style (and -educated) management, and the stereotypical "salaryman" lifestyle is on it's last legs.
3. Japan has quietly become an immigration driven society. A major reason behind the rise of Takechi's faction in the LDP as well as Sanseito is because of the post-2019 immigration boom [1]. Going from less that 1% overseas born residents to around 4% in roughly 5 years was a massive shift socially and impacted both blue and white collar employment in Japan.
4. Japan has culturally shifted to be accepting of an offensive military posture. You see this shift in Japanese media (eg. SnK, Nippon Sangoku) as well as Japanese foreign policy [2]. A more muscular Japan with a chip on their back is arising.
5. Younger Japanese are more open to calling out tourists and Westerners when they do weird or weeb s#it or treat Japan as their own Disneyland. They now treat Westerners the same way they treat other non-Japanese people now. The mindset shift I've noticed is an "us" (which now includes Koreans and Taiwanese) versus "them" which now includes everyone else.
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Ironically, I think contemporary South Korea is closer to the image that HNers have of Japan versus Japan today.
I'd largely question the accuracy of point 1 IN PRACTICE.
Japan is notorious for uncounted and unpaid overtime, vacation days no one takes, and paternal leave you'd better not think of if you don't want to instantly become your division's outcast.
I worked in a host of countries, including the UK and Japan (the latter about a decade ago - I'd be surprised if things had diametrally changed since that time). The actual work hours are not remotely comparable.
(In fact the UK is one of the locales where I worked the least in terms of actual hours. Much less than in France, where they're supposed to be slackers... So generally I call BS on these stats.)
Yes but 2 ends up being a good check on 1 in the higher productivity ends of the knowledge work economy in Japan. I'd disagree a bit in degree to what alephnerd says and additionally think a lot of the actual "zangyou" ("overtime") work that Japanese do today involves drinking with the boss or going on business trips, but think his comment is largely correct. I also think the insistence in Japanese doing on-site work in Japan leads to a lot of inefficiency that Western businesses and governments have largely left behind 10-15 years ago.
I actually find the Western unawareness of how Japan has become an immigrant society, especially in service roles, to be hilarious. It's by far the biggest Japanese social change in the last 20 years probably up there with growing acceptance of LGBT lifestyles and is a massive, divisive political issue in Japan now. Also further goes to show how much idealized othering happens in these discussions.
The average konbini service worker a foreigner interacts with in Tokyo is going to be an immigrant. 12 years ago, I only met a handful of immigrant service workers.
> I also think the insistence in Japanese doing on-site work in Japan leads to a lot of inefficiency that Western businesses and governments have largely left behind 10-15 years ago.
A lot of that is operational as well - historically, the only other country with a large Japanese speaking population was South Korea, but salaries there have largely aligned and the post-1990s generation switched to concentrating on English instead of Japanese fluency. China has started to fill that gap though (hence why Chinese immigrants in Japan are viewed the same way as Indians are in Canada).
Basically, a company that whose entire internal documentation, communication, archive, and processes were always in Japanese will always bias in favor of hiring Japanese fluent employees, most of whom live in Japan and are Japanese.
You see the same thing in European countries as well, but the difference is it's easier for a German or French company to find talent somewhere else that is German or French fluent (eg. Turkiye/Poland or Morocco/Romania/ respectively).
The newer gen companies have a strong English muscle, but those are also the kinds of companies that are happy shifting hiring overwhelmingly to India or ASEAN.
Sorry I don't mean Japanese firms hiring Japanese workers, I understand that's largely due to language fluency. I meant how much in-person work happens in remote branches. So many Japanese shakaijin friends at Japanese companies are taking constant business trips around the country to do things that a video call and an email thread would do in the West. It helps that transportation in Japan is ubiquitous and cheap so it's fairly easy to go on-site, but it still ends up wasting a lot of time and productivity that I don't think Western firms have to deal with.
See, this is the issue. Karoshi/unpaid overtime in white collar work largely ended as a practice in Japan by the 2010s due to legal changes and enforcement via the 2018 labor reforms and a tight labor market.
Yet you see the same tropes peddled ad nauseum. I may as well use the same priors for Poland in 2026 as I would in the 2000s then when it was Europe's punching bag.
And yet Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Oppo, HTC, Sony, etc continue to exist, scale up, and/or directly compete against Apple or Google.
There was no reason another Nokia couldn't have developed in 15 years, especially given how a number of the brands listed either didn't have a mobile phone business or didn't even exist when the iPhone was launched.
Yet the biggest barrier for any sort of scale-out within Western and Northern Europe is bad terms and non-responsive local government.
There's a reason CEE states with more dynamics and business friendly administrations like Poland and Czechia converged so fast to Western Europe.
Which of these phone companies were startups in the last fifteen years?
The Chinese ones? And that's the argument for less state intervention? The success of Communism? Who also make all the Apple and Google phones not, in their own words due to low cost, but because they can't find that level of Hi-Tech manufacturing skill located in any non-communist state-planned economy.
The PRC embraced capitalism back in 1976 albeit with a state component.
Additionally Xiaomi and Oppo both developed entirely via private sector capital in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Furthermore, I listed other Korean and Taiwanese players that also continued to exist despite historically not being the mobile phone business until the iPhone announcement as well as Japanese players that were able to pivot and survive in a smartphone driven world.
The failure of Nokia itself highlights the failure of the European ecosystem.
Smartphones, AdTech, FinTech, Cloud, Fabless Chip Design, EVs, etc were all greenfield sectors in the late 2000s that any country could have staked a claim in. Plenty did, but the European states didn't outside of FinTech somewhat.
The crux of that issue is because there is a severe aversion to funding, developing, and incubating early stage founders and firms, and much of that stems from a mix of regulatory and policy failures within European states that make early stage ventures unrealistic or bias in favor of protecting large incumbents.
Foreign aid is rarely a gift - in almost all cases it is a business transaction. It is given as a loan, or in return for some mineral rights, or for an important UN vote, or for allegiance in a war.
For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.
Kagame cannot be compared to Park Chung Hee or LKY. Park's economic policies actually helped South Korea climb up the economic value chain, though a lot of that was also due to Japanese technology transfers to Korea in the 1960s-90s.
On the other hand, Kagame's execution on economic reform has been a failure when compared against Uganda, as Uganda [0] has a significantly more complex (ie. higher value) economy than Rwanda [1] despite also suffering a severe civil war in the 1990s and dealing with the Idi Amin's kleptocratic rule in the 1980s.
A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc.
Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya?
Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things.
> For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money.
The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth.
This is a dumb take that highlights the common lack of experience with Africa that arises with anyone who writes about it - Malawi was always much poorer than the rest of East Africa as can be seen by the 1990 HDI [0].
Starting from a lower base as well as weak institutions, weak capital markets, and political instability during the transition to democracy lead Malawi to underperform.
Additionally, Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid to a degree that Malawi and other African nations never saw [1]
Unsurprising that this is an OpenPhilanthropy blog.
India saw a similar issue in the 1970-80s with the rise of the far-left Naxal movement and the far-right Hindutva movement, and the political strife in addition to the collapse of the USSR caused led a country that was contemporaneously comparable to China in the 1980s-90s falling 15 years behind China by the 2010s.
Entire generations of scholar-students ended up joining political movements, student politics degraded campus safety and cohesion, and society politicized to such a degree that state capacity degraded severely, and made most voters to view Singaporean and Malaysian (authoritarian) style "Asian Democracy" to be as a viable option. Heck, LKY, Goh Chok Tong, and other Singaporean policymakers mentored Narendra Modi back when he was CM of Gujarat.
A similar transition is slowly happening in the US as well.
Having lived in China for an extended period (most of two decades) and traveled India for months, I think a "15 years behind" narrative is highly misconstrued, even at that point. I first visited China in '98 and India in 2000. India was laying its first fiber optics in New Delhi, while China was kicking out European suppliers after having mastered its own cellular equipment, cloned Cisco and began to broadcast free to air IP protocol suite TV documentaries to 1.4 billion people. By the 2010s China had hosted the Olympics and had a space station and a viable navigation satellite constellation, a high speed rail network, an aircraft carrier and was advancing domestic airline production. India was then and is now permanently behind China with a completely disparate and arguably negative trajectory: there's no viable temporal offset narrative. In my view the biggest issues in India are treatment of women, the caste system, corruption and poverty.
Additionally, for DCs, the math only really works out with scaled out renewable energy like grid solar - most DC programs and electric buildouts are now using DC load requirements to justify renewable buildouts now that the IRA isn't functional.
Back in the Biden era, we saw a similar movement against REE mining and processing in the far right and left wing social media ecosystem perpetuated by the PRC [0]. Heck, a number of nation state associated accounts were reported and taken down from HN a couple years ago.
It wouldn't be surprising if a large portion of the anti-DC movement is being perpetuated by the same orgs.
Personally, I view the Kochs and Singham as two sides of the same coin and a major reason why Citizens United should not have been ruled in the manner it was.
It is what it is. Data centers are the one bright spot that has been subsidizing green and renewable energy investment now that the Trump admin is running the show, as only mass scale solar and wind can support much of the buildout cheaply and efficiently.
We can always leave for the CEE and India where their governments are basically subsidizing the entire capex for buildout. And then American and Western European HNers complain that "dey took 'er jerbs".
Hiring cycles in 1990s Japan are different from those in the US today.
During that era, white collar hiring was via directly recruitment from out of college at the university's college fair with employment examinations (like an actual paper test) and job mobility was nonexistent (you were expected to remain at your job til retirement).
Panasonic's selection process [0] is representative of how hiring traditionally works in Japan and Asia in general.
While it's tempting for Western new grads and unemployed SWEs to look to such comparisons, it's not really relevant. As I've mentioned before on HN, the tech industry is returning to the norms we had before the COVID boom/bust cycle. You are now expected to go into the office, live in a major hub like the Bay/NYC, and have a CS/CE/ECE/EE degree.
This is outrageous. Where are the armed men who come in to take the protestors away? Where are they? This kind of behavior is never tolerated in Baraqua. You shout like that they put you in jail. Right away. No trial, no nothing. Journalists, we have a special jail for journalists. You are stealing: right to jail. You are playing music too loud: right to jail, right away. Driving too fast: jail. Slow: jail. You are charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses: you right to jail. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, jail. You overcook chicken, also jail. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, jail, right away. We have the best patients in the world because of jail.
Most HNers tend to be in their mid-30s to 50s so a lot of Japan-philia does appear to stem from an older mental image from the 1990s to 2010s.
> This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is that this system is heavily driven by Japan's unique, subtle classism. It's a highly collectivist society with strict age-based milestones and immense pressure to secure traditional employment. In Japan, your corporate affiliation often dictates your social standing...
The Japanese Keiretsu and later Trust Bank model is the norm in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and other Asian countries as well due to a mix of colonial, financial, and policymaking ties.
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