Can Japan reboot its startup culture?

Often though, a younger company just assumes the "body" of the older one. It helps with getting loans from the bank, etc.

Quite true. Where they excel is physical processes (hardware and people). Within an hour of being there it's evident: monorail quickly ferries you from tarmac to customs (easy), then fingerprint scanner connected to PC running Windows XP craps itself 10 times before success (annoying). Your luggage is neatly arranged on the conveyor by staff so that it's upright, identifiable and simple to pick up (easy). Go to bathroom and grin as the urinal flushes itself, then wash hands with delightful auto soap dispenser and auto basin then quickly egress to the airport subway (great!). Discover onboard wi-fi only accessible using unintelligible pre-paid system (nuts...I need to check my email). Oh well, I'll be at the hotel soon. Check in and bang your head against the wall as they advise one part of their system has the correct check-in/check-out dates, while another critical system has different dates. Lovely clerk talks with manager to find a work-around to a double-booked room. Finally get in hotel room and whip out Macbook Air...Ethernet access only. Off to the local Softbank store to get a dongle. Plug it in - 100/100mbit internet connection (Lovely!).

You're in a state of flux between delight and bewilderment.

A few points:

“this is accompanied by a very envious, critical and vocal audience. They underline every possible reason that the product will fail and keep doing so indefatigably. They attack the innovator on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc; and they keep doing so until the innovator raises a white flag.”

What.

There's always haters and detractors. That's part of doing anything in life, and start-ups are no exception.

Once, a Japanese guy spent 10 minutes trying to explain that our startup's failure was guaranteed because Japanese people would never upload their company stamp (a necessary function of official Japanese business documents) to a web service. Even after I told him we already have a bunch of users who are doing this, he was steadfast, so I simply crossed him off the list of people to spend time on. Problem solved.

One of the very first things we learned when selling to businesses in Japan is that social proof is a critical factor. So our focus changed to getting even a single business using our software, and then trying to feature them and promote them as much as we could.

It's pretty damn hard for people to say your product is failing when you can show you have a lot of people using it.

The more we did this, the more businesses we could get, and we continued to repeat this process until last month when we finally crossed 10,000 signed up companies in Japan.

Getting to here took years of work. This is part of a startup. Understanding your problem space and challenges, and then adapting your product and marketing message accordingly.

"Japanese businessmen tend not to trust the younger generation."

Oh yeah? Try doing a startup and being in the younger generation, AND being foreigners.

You have to build and earn trust over time. You're not handed a trust card as soon as you open a new business.

"If you look at successful Japanese start-ups, they are mostly run by CEOs who have applied the ‘foreign connection’ in some way"

This is frustratingly inaccurate, and belies a total lack of exposure and understanding of the Japanese startup scene. There are plenty of very successful startups that are based in Japan, and focused on Japan, that have zero foreign elements.

"In some cases, like Mr Son, he has managed to combine all five factors."

Commentating on the Japanese startup scene using the CEO of Softbank as an example, Softbank being a company founded in 1981 with a market cap of 43 billion dollars, makes no sense at all.

"There’s lots of venture capitalists here but they are only interested in games and new media"

Wrong. We get weekly un-solicited contacts from Japanese VCs asking for meetings with us.

This is a result of us hustling very hard over a long period of time, and working very hard to establish our credibility and stability.

The Japanese startup scene definitely has areas where it can improve, but they're at best papered over in this article.

- It is too risk averse. Making big mistakes, especially with your career, is looked down upon and it makes you a social pariah.

- Japan is too brand name obsessed and it's not limited to products either. It extends to your career, as to what company you work for and what schools you graduated from. i.e. You need to work for already successful companies. It also doesn't look too kindly on drop outs or anyone different either, who are probably the very people building successful start ups.

- While the younger generation is better, Japan still has a xenophobic society. Most foreigners unless they are of Japanese descent still can't get citizenship. Foreigners bring a lot of innovation and different ideas to the start up sector that Japan misses out on it. The US isn't perfect on this matter either, but compared to Japan it's way better.

In Japan's defense, most of the EU suffer similar problems.

Shopping in Korean, I can just set it to OCR mode and sorta read labels I don't understand. (Of course, Hangul's probably a lot easier to OCR than kana+kanji.) I've also found that while the store people will respond to me in Korean if they don't see me, once they realize it's me they flip into a common third tongue.

I've even had "conversations" in other languages just by pressing the flip button and letting the other person talk. They can correct any audio recognition failures or just type.

In general, the translations for simple stuff and interactions seem pretty good. Sometimes you need the alternative translations to find one that is accurate. But I wouldn't say you "cannot speak, listen, write, or read anything".

OTOH, sometimes it has odd things. Formal-something I (吾輩) like from the "I am a cat" gets translated as "Spence" (I think the pronoun isn't used much). Or maybe one possible pronunciation of them is close enough to Spence it's used as a name in some place that uses those characters?

Not to mention, you can pick up the kana in a week, and at least the meanings of the basic kanji in a month or two, claims the guy that made the book that did teach me kana in a week. I'd assume if you're gonna go to Japan and be serious, you'd at least listen to the first 10 Pimsleur sessions for basic "hi I can't speak Japanese", and learn the scripts somewhat.