One of thing that I learned the hard way about "Japanese companies" - despite western conceptions, every company in Japan has its own unique culture (and takes pride in having its own culture!). What's more, often departments and division inside the same companies work in very different way.
Why am I saying that? Because in some of the Japanese companies I've worked with were the exact opposite of that. To be sure, lip service was duly paid to the aforementioned "commitment to excellence", and every release procedure had its own operational manual, sometimes 300 steps long. Repeated manually for every server. Out of 100-200.
Configuration updates? Sure, let's log in to every server and vi the config file. How do we keep excellence? Just diff with prev and verify (with your eyes that is) that the result is the same as in your manual. After every "cd" you had to do a pwd and make sure that you moved to the directory you meant to. After every cp you diffed to the original file to make.
Releases obviously took all day or often all night, and engineers were stressed and fatigued by Sisyphean manual with its 300 steps of red tape. They invariably made silly mistake, because this is what you get when you use human beings as glorified tty+diff. We had release issues and service outages all the time.
We've fortunately managed to move away to modern DevOps practices with a lot of top down effort. But please don't tell me every Japanese company magically delivers top quality. Some of them do, some of them don't, even in the same industry. Insane levels of bureaucracy could be found all across the board, but whether that bureaucracy actually encourages or deters quality is an entirely different story.