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Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

bbc.com

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Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#241

Post by asiachick »

umvi wrote: post #230
exhaze wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS Happy to answers any questions about Tokyo life as an engineer/entrepreneur, just reply to my comment. I get where you're coming from, but you can make the same one-sided joke post about Americans. Having done both... - started YC backed startup while in SF and worked at Uber for 4 years - in Tokyo for the past 2 years I honestly think that the outcomes here in Tokyo are much better than in SF. Yes, incomes are lo…

Is it true Japanese companies pay software engineers peanuts compared to USA? How much Japanese do you need to speak to get by?

In general, yes. There are exceptions but in general Japanese tech companies pay very poorly.

For example, Yahoo Japan (still more popular than Google Japan AFAIK) pays collage grads $36k a year starting salary. I think USA Google Interns get ~3x that.

https://about.yahoo.co.jp/hr/job-info/role/0005/#potentialJo...

I know it's just one data point but it's not far from the average. For Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon, NEC, Rakuten, etc it will definitely be in the same ballpark. You can probably get 2x that if you have 10 years experience but if you're over 35 you're considered too old to code by many companies.

There are exceptions like maybe Mercari as they are doing well. And western companies, Google, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, pay well.

I have no idea if this is why but I'm guessing one reason is they have a captive market. If your only language is Japanese you can't work anywhere else in the world.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#242

Post by wst_ »

calciphus wrote: post #77
porknubbins wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I think regardless of profitability keeping small/medium businesses around is not just the for the longevity bragging rights. Some of these businesses preserve arts, techniques, handcrafts, recipes etc that might have otherwise been lost. And there is something to be said for street level neighborhood character created by these stores.

Something but...what? Tge street-level character of a city isn't magically preserved because the acquiring company chose to retain the name. Example: I live near a sushi restaurant that has changed hands six times in my life. Two times they kept the name. One time they kept the facade. Never did they keep the employees. Maybe a token "manager" but the character of the place always shifts. I like the metaphor because…

These are not the businesses we're looking for.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#243

Post by bytematic »

tkgally wrote: post #123

A few days ago, I went into a barbershop in Fujisawa, south of Tokyo, to have my hair cut. When I entered, the sole barber was slumped on a sofa looking at a computer screen. He didn't seem particularly happy to have a customer. The shop was messy, a white cat wandered around, and I had to step over a live turtle in a tank on the floor to get to the barber chair. As the barber cut my hair, I asked him about the shop.…

Is it part of the culture in japan that you take over the business of your parents? I wonder if that negatively affects the quality of the business to have children running it that don't particularly want to.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#244

Post by JshWright »

jacquesm wrote: post #176
JshWright wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's two years away from launching, and has been for at least two years now (this is Leo's joke, not me criticising his project)

Hehe, a bit like fusion then. Well, here's to hoping that he gets it completed in his lifetime and that he gets to take her out on the maiden voyage and that all works out well. It is an incredible undertaking, I just watched some of his joinery videos, him doing stuff 'without getting too fancy about it' is workmanship level that I can only aspire to and know that I'll never reach it.

I think he's probably pretty close to the actual two year mark at this point. The bulk of the really big, heavy, structural stuff is done (getting it reframed was a big milestone). Still tons to do, obviously, but an increasingly large percentage of the remaining work is stuff that can be done efficiently by one person.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#245

Post by abecedarius »

momentbruh wrote: post #58
kinkora wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engi…

> Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it. This sentence is doing an unbelievable amount of work. I don't think you realize how strange it is that we have instant-speed trans-Atlantic communication that can transmit massive amounts of data. Computers are practically foreign objects to plenty of people born in the 60s, who grew up as they were invented. You don't think someone from 1920, with no…

I was born in the 60s and I hold with the people who think we've been in relative stagnation, despite sometimes getting that living-in-the-future feeling. The 80s and 90s felt like progress was picking up after the 70s malaise, but not like the decades around 1900 as I've read about them. Since 2000ish it's like we went down the wrong trouser-leg of time.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#246

Post by philipps »

PinguTS wrote: post #120
Danieru wrote: post #6

Do you remember Ship of Theseus? The thought experiment about if a ship which has been fully rebuilt bit by bit is it still the same thing? Japan appears consistent in saying, yes, rebuilding or swapping out components keeps the identity. You see this attitude in "Japan's oldest temple, burned to the ground and rebuilt every 20 years". In the west we might argue that burning a building and rebuilding, would count as…

> Japan appears consistent in saying, yes, rebuilding or swapping out components keeps the identity. You see this attitude in "Japan's oldest temple, burned to the ground and rebuilt every 20 years". In the west we might argue that burning a building and rebuilding, would count as a new building. That is a wrong example/comparison. Even in the west rebuilding an heritage is not considered as a new building. In Europe…

I believe the Dom in Cologne was finished and is now being maintained by a staff of more than 100 stone masons etc... so many parts of it have been replaced over the years. I always found it fascinating to see how shining and light the restored parts looks compared to the black surface of the older parts. I quite like the dark surface, it gives the building a brooding power that I love. It’s my favorite church, but I am inescapably biased as I was born in Cologne.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#247

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Raidion wrote: post #234
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty negative? Water and sewage infrastructure can last 100 years in the USA. The company that makes commercial pumps for cities is still around, and called upon to recreate 80-year-old pumps to replace ones still in use under New York streets. Our electrical grid is unparalleled in the world. Our phone/internet. These things are not so wonderful in other countries (when they even have them at all). What infrastruc…

I mean, I'm a big fan and resident of the US, but it's accurate to say we're not doing the best job with our infrastructure. We have a lot of trouble with aging bridges: https://www.artba.org/2018/01/29/54000-american-bridges-stru... We have a lot of trouble with aging water systems: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/20/465545378... https://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BPC-... A lot o…

That was my point. We built well back then.

Everybody seems to be excited to point out, that infrastructure investment is at a low now. E.g. Obama's 'shovel-ready' money didn't go to sewer and water, since those are 'invisible'. So pointless visible projects like cables-down-the-freeway-media got built instead.

This is of course obvious. This thread has become a place to vent about that, which is fine.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#248

Post by chriscatoya »

huffmsa wrote: post #153
chriscatoya wrote: post #40

Interestingly, this feels related to the low levels of entrepreneurship (Japan ranks 4th lowest in the world) https://bradchattergoon.com/japan-and-entrepreneurship-e468a... These things are neither universally good nor bad: I do believe the Japanese conception of duty (and how it diverges from an American sensibility) plays a large role in the fact 33k businesses are over 100 years old. As an American this many busi…

The low level of entrepreneurialism isn't 1 to 1 with low innovation though. I think you're right about the sense of duty, it leads people to turning their innovation into something that can help their existing company versus taking it and starting their own firm most of the time. On the flipside, company management seems more accepting of occasionally taking these radical ideas and rebuilding the whole business arou…

I generally agree, however I don’t think we should extrapolate trends in Japanese corporate culture from gaming companies. The origin of most of them are gambling syndicates (if you catch my drift) and I don’t think they would reflect the mainstream mores.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#249

Post by blaser-waffle »

johnohara wrote: post #238
erikpukinskis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite YouTube channels, Sampson Boat Co, is doing just that: a young shipwright is rebuilding the classic sailing yacht Tally Ho piece by piece, in a modest workshop by the sea up in Oregon. It will be all new by the time he’s done, minus some hardware, but he has never lost continuity with the original hull. This is just how wooden boats are, whether you do it bit by bit, or as a big project, eventually…

Episode 38 was about as real as it gets for me. We all know somebody, somebody's father, or somebody's uncle with a similar passion for woodworking, equally similar "digit reduction," same explanation, "yeah, stupid mistake, my fault," and a new respect for the tools of the trade. Thank you for the link.

Wait, he lost a finger in the episode? Or it was about how he hurt himself during the work?

Either way -- whoa.

Re: Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old

#250

Post by erikig »

ansible wrote: post #173
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a story from a morning radio show. Guy calls in to say how he "legally" stole a car. Steals expensive car, strips it, abandons frame. Frame is collected and put up for auction. Thief buys bare frame and puts all the stripped parts back on.

It is definitely car theft. This is just a way of getting a clean (-ish) title for it afterwards. In the USA, it will still be a salvage title.

It is definitely car theft. But...if he claimed that he parked the car in this neighborhood and came back to find it stripped he could conceivably get away with it.

That's an interview I would like to listen to

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