Why Japanese companies do so many different things • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#381

Post by the_af » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #107

jdw64 wrote: post #7

It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…

I've thought a lot about (and I don't mean this in a derogatory way) the weebu phenomenon. I remember encountering it first in college when I met people who were in an anime club. It wasn't for me but my philosophy generally is "let people enjoy things". I will say that it often goes beyond "idealizing". I'd use the word "fetishizing". I've wondered how much of this stems from being disaffected by the modern (particu…

South Korea is partly replacing Japan with this Western idealization, right? Kpop, K-everything. And it's also a dying country, like you said. And also a mirage, the K-pop phenomenon which looks cool from the outside is all about exploitation, extreme control, and unhealthy fandom obsession from the inside.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#382

Post by cvoss » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

Article argues that we don't see J-model software companies (or at least they aren't very good) because there's something inherent about software that demands innovation, green field work, blue sky ideas, etc., and that those things only happen (well) in an H-model company.

I disagree. So much of software is long lived or should be. We desperately need incremental refinement of already solid products and instead we have decay and rot because H-modelers make bad calls. (E.g. OSes.)

My team develops a product that is 15+ years old. As I read how J-models work, I kept thinking, "Yeah, we need that. That would help a lot. I'd love to work for decades on this product if we could do it thay way." Our product is mature and always in demand. But it always needs maintenance and it frequently needs significant improvement to keep pace with the changing environment around it. Bad H-model judgments have sent it in the wrong direction sometimes based on directives from on high, when, actually, the team itself holds so much knowledge and expertise that we can often self-organize in ways that maintain, refine, and improve this 15 year old system. We could benefit so much from a move toward proper J-model thinking.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#383

Post by jatins » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #7

It’s always fascinating to see how Westerners idealize Japan on platforms like HN. It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is tha…

> In Japan, your corporate affiliation often dictates your social standing

Where does it not? As in which countries are not like this?

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#384

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

ikurei wrote: post #364

amunozo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing, being Spanish the Basque Cooperatives movement is fascinating. Do you have any recommended read about it?

I had a couple of eye-opening conversations about this the last time I was in San Sebastian. Not everyone there loves Mondragon as much as we think, some see it as a closed club that makes it arbitrarily hard to get a job with them depending on your connections. I met some workers unhappy of their hiring practices and I think their starting working conditions. No idea if they were fair or just resentful. I still admi…

Yeah the problem with co-ops is that every new employee means reduced profit-sharing for existing employees. Ironically, companies in SV actually have a nice solution to this problem: Employees get equity, but newer employees get less than older employees. So from the perspective of old employees, it still makes financial sense to hire new employees, because the old employee equity becomes more valuable.

In technical econ terms, the marginal profit of new employees is typically below the average profit of existing employees. A profit-maximizing business only cares that the marginal profit is positive, and will hire until there is no additional profit to be made. A co-op is incentivized to keep average profit per employee high, which can mean reducing headcount in order to keep the average strong. So that's why co-ops can have a sort of exclusive club feel to them.

SV is actually an interesting example which proves how employee ownership can drive prosperity, but the typical co-op crowd doesn't want to talk about it because it's too capitalist-coded. In a way, SV companies show that employee ownership is not some sort of instant cure for everything which ails capitalism.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#385

Post by the_af » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #176

jmyeet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought a lot about (and I don't mean this in a derogatory way) the weebu phenomenon. I remember encountering it first in college when I met people who were in an anime club. It wasn't for me but my philosophy generally is "let people enjoy things". I will say that it often goes beyond "idealizing". I'd use the word "fetishizing". I've wondered how much of this stems from being disaffected by the modern (particu…

1. It’s hilarious that your version of “cool” Japan was immeasurably worse in terms of things like misogyny, racism and war crimes than modern Japan. 2. Post WWII Japan set the benchmark for pulling its people out of poverty in an astonishingly short period of time. 3. There have always been foreign, exotic cultures people have romanticized. The Romans romanticized Greece and ancient Egypt.

I don't think the parent commenter is arguing that living in feudal Japan was cool, or idealizing it. They are just saying Japanese history is fascinating, which it is. Just like ancient Roman is fascinating, or ancient Greece, but I wouldn't want to have lived there.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#386

Post by the_af » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #177

jdw64 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you angling for an 'Honorary Korean' title? You know too much about Korea

God forbid people learn about the world outside their everyday experience.

The parent post meant it as praise. Why the snark?

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#387

Post by Zigurd » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

Some of the examples given in the article make more business sense than others. For example, mass manufacturers of ceramic home articles probably have science and technology expertise that cuts across product categories and markets. Sometimes the logic of focus hasn't focused enough on the expertise it takes to sustain, for example, both toilets and semiconductor manufacturing tooling. The spreadsheet might say you are unlocking shareholder value by spinning off one or the other business, but when it comes time to make the next generation products, it would be to your advantage to have knowledge of both products in house.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#388

Post by senko » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #357

CarlitosHighway wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your posts, which 100% match my experiences with Japan and Westerners not being able to see through the "Tatemae".

If you are from the West, navigating East Asian culture can be exceptionally grueling. At a fundamental level, our societies tend to be inherently exclusive toward different races.

Do you have a good book, article(s) or podcast to recommend on this topic (business culture in East Asia, or a specific country), in English & approachable by Westerners, while not giving just a cartoon overview of the issues?

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#389

Post by foobar10000 » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

gizajob wrote: post #348

nradov wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? How much has that hurt Meta shareholder returns? Are most active fund managers delivering better results than passive index funds?

It’s that passive investing has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because regardless of the company situation the funds have to buy the shares at any price, which has made it simpler for incumbents to grow and stay growing while burning profitability to the ground. Hence why there’s been a recent change to the rules on the Nasdaq so SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic can be included on the indices 15 days after IPO rather than…

Well - there is a giant push to allow non-qualified investors to invest their 401k (and roth and whatever) into the private equities market - pre-IPO companies and such.

I can't shake the feeling of a grand fleecing incoming - and honestly, most big financial companies I know are against it because the blowback of inevitably bankrupting the firefighters&nurses pension fund will be congressional hearings and piercings of corporate veils.

Seems like the feds are pushing for it - for reasons I cannot fathom.

Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things

#390

Post by ajmurmann » Sat, May 23, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #152

kibwen wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere. As an American educated by the American public education system and indoctrinated by American media, our government is certainly stupid and vengeful enough to make me want to support this if it were true, but it's just not. The much more banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by pro…

I suspect that’s related to China’s lower levels of individual freedom relative to Japan. Censorship does not fit well with producing powerful and influential cultural exports like manga, anime and video games.

This is supported by looking at what happened to Hong Kong cinema that was huge till the early 2000s.