Besides being a beautiful website, I was rather touched by their call to action: "Seeking stability only clouds your soul. Fear of failing only kills the seeds of innovation. We must create a more exciting future where people feel free to dream and leap into a world of possibilities. We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live." It's hard not to love Nintendo. Also TLDR for those that didn't sc…
It's so rare to hear about Japanese startups - either becoming successful within Japan or outside. Are other mature East Asian countries going through a similar phase?
Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
211–220 of 288 posts
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression in Japan is that startups have traditionally considered incredibly risky and is a liability in getting loans and future job prospects with established companies - but that’s also changing as the generations shift.
I actually don't know that much about Japan. It's the one place I didn't talk about in East Asia as you can see. That's not entirely true, I guess there's other countries in East Asia: let's not forget Mongolia, and Tibet and Northern Korea. I bet there'd be lots of startups in Mongolia tho I have no idea. Tibet have no idea, tho would love to go. NK I guess there would not be so much because I assume the government…
There are not a few other startups (IPO'd e.g. Balmuda, MoneyForward, Mercari, ZOZO) but they tend to only available locally.
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry to nitpick, but I am a regular listener to Deutsche Welle (dw.com). They have a nice weekly show called DW Africa. More info here: https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/africa/s-12756 Are you aware there are two countries that are casually referred to as "Congo" by non-Africans? (Hello Africans! We hear you loud and clear!) Sorry, this is a real issue for me. I am so tired of Western (and East Asian!) media using t…
>Democratic Republic of the Congo has GDP per capita below 1000 USD per year and is one of the least developed countries in the world -- affected by unfortunate tropical diseases and civil war. (2) Republic of the Congo Reminds me of the heuristic, the more modifiers a country's name has, the more likely it is to have economic or political issues. See for example, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea vs Republic of K…
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lower classes in Italy are not as much penalized as in the US. Eviction takes YEARS and it's just impossible in some situations (kids in the house), healthcare is free for all, personal debt is not as aggressive as here, unpaid debt is a nightmare to go afer. So unemployment figures are not really that important to gauge quality of life. We had many scandals where people just didn't want to get hired and do small wor…
>people just didn't want to get hired and do small works off the books instead because life was just better like that. The blue collar industries have issues hiring junior people for exactly this reason in many of the HCOL parts of the US. Nobody in their right mind wants to suffer through a couple years as a lube and tire tech when you can work when you can get paid more fixing people's cars under the table.
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#215I'm happy someone is pushing for more innovation in Japan but ... there's huge issues
(1) Japanese people generally only speak Japanese. That tends to limit their reach to Japan only. Sure there are exceptions, I'm just saying it adds a hurdle. It also adds a hurdle to importing people.
(2) Japanese culture doesn't encourage sticking out. There's a reason one of the most famous Japanese sayings is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Nearly ever part of Japanese is set against innovation. From the culture of "life time employment", the culture of "cram in high school for a college, party at college, arrive at job making $25k a year because you have no skills but company will train you, hired based on which school you went to". There's the "seniority issues where you're required to defer to anyone hired before you" (apparently that's even worse in Korea to the point my Korean friends say you can't ever truly be best friends with someone a few years old than you because you're required to treat them as your elder, not your peer). There's whole business legal issues where for all kinds of business transactions you're require to go to the local business administration office and have them print out officially stamped forms which you then submit it contracts etc..., You can add in the financial system here is not friendly to new ventures. I don't know where to point to how risk adverse things are here but I can point concretely for you to look at interest rates on savings accounts, certificate of deposit, etc to see it's vastly different than the USA.
(3) Japanese culture for various reasons still produces a much smaller number of career women. If you thought the representation of women in STEM (or pick your career) was low in some country in the west, it's 2-3-4-5x worse here. I'm not going to blame any particular thing but it is the current culture all around. The point is their missing a large pool of talent
(4) There's not much talent here. I don't mean that Japanese people are not talented, I mean rather it's impossible to hire talent. I have friends running companies and they can't find anyone even in Tokyo Metro (34 million people) and Osaka Metro (19 million people). Some of that is cultural, people don't switch jobs. Some of it is truly lack of talent (see education issue above), some of it is low salaries. Example: Top pay at Sony Japan for a software engineer is ~$70k. Most places pay much less. A few cash rich companies might pay more, (Cyber Agent, Mercari, are rumored to pay above $100k).
(5) If software engineers are the leaders of most innovation now, maybe they aren't, but if they are, Japan's attitude about them is they must be 21 to 35 and they are just replaceable cogs. After 35 they must be managers or else they move into some other field.
(6) Overtime is ridiculous
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#216https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379...
There is this link from the development agency. However its a bit hard to understand. It feels like they built their own rendering engine and then coded the animation on top of it...
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non-native who has lived in Japan for many years, but then moved to another country in Asia... I disagree with the regular stream of negative English language news about Japan. It is still a wonderful culture, people, and country. And ignore the "GDP" stuff. You will read the same about Italy in English language newspapers. And (South) Korea. Both are also beautiful countries with great food and very high qualit…
> It is still a wonderful culture, people, and country. Of course it is. But that doesn't make the problems less real. The demographic pressure cooker is still cooking-- a greater and greater proportion of national resources go to support an ever increasing fraction of the old, and stopping this is impossible at this point. Prospects for dating and marriage are collapsing for a large chunk of the populace. Government…
As an outsider they seem to have a lot higher quality of life than the US in many ways.
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry to nitpick, but I am a regular listener to Deutsche Welle (dw.com). They have a nice weekly show called DW Africa. More info here: https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/africa/s-12756 Are you aware there are two countries that are casually referred to as "Congo" by non-Africans? (Hello Africans! We hear you loud and clear!) Sorry, this is a real issue for me. I am so tired of Western (and East Asian!) media using t…
>Democratic Republic of the Congo has GDP per capita below 1000 USD per year and is one of the least developed countries in the world -- affected by unfortunate tropical diseases and civil war. (2) Republic of the Congo Reminds me of the heuristic, the more modifiers a country's name has, the more likely it is to have economic or political issues. See for example, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea vs Republic of K…
You could rewrite “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” in English to “The People’s Rule People’s Concern of the People of Korea”. Like any good lie, repetition doesn’t make it more true, and looks desperate.
My rule of thumb:
One use indicates a dark past the people would like to get away from with citizens, not subjects; two an authoritarian regime the people are subjects of and told they are citizens; three an authoritarian regime without any hope of redemption and the people are property of.
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so rare to hear about Japanese startups - either becoming successful within Japan or outside. Are other mature East Asian countries going through a similar phase?
Are you unfamiliar with Rakuten? It's like Amazon for Japan. Some people might also consider Softbank (the mobile phone division) and SBI Securities (its securities division, under 'Strategic Business Innovator Group'). How about Line? It's the biggest mobile chat app in Japan. Other people can comment more on this one: The number of small start-up game studios must be astonishing. Japan seems to have an endless appe…
Re: Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Democratic Republic of the Congo has GDP per capita below 1000 USD per year and is one of the least developed countries in the world -- affected by unfortunate tropical diseases and civil war. (2) Republic of the Congo Reminds me of the heuristic, the more modifiers a country's name has, the more likely it is to have economic or political issues. See for example, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea vs Republic of K…
So what you're saying is we should change the name of The United States of America to something with only one word?