A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

The first video game I played was Pokémon blue, created by a Japanese game studio, and the most recent was Elden Ring, created by another.

Sony and Nintendo are two of the world’s biggest companies, and a key part of their business model is creating great games franchises, either in house or working with local studios.

This is all driven by an ecosystem of great software companies, making the best games in the world (or at the least, outside of America).

One of the key issues of Japanese software is that most companies don't rethink problems and processes to suit software, they try make software around an existing process. Most Japanese companies will just try to automate, or digitize some type of manual process and keep the people involved, I'd say just to hang onto jobs because firing people in Japan is pretty much impossible.

Recently while visiting Japan, I tried to get a eSIM card through "Docomo" the national phone carrier via their "online shop". I know...but I had to use them for other obscure reasons.

It was incredible to me how long it took to get the eSIM card. Days and days of problems, hours on the phone. I hit so, so many edge cases it was hard to believe. I actually felt depressed how bad the experience was. Everything was so obscure, and so so many things had to line up in their system.

I actually debugged the software by talking to support people and gaining clues, I finally worked out how to hack the inputs to allow it to give me a eSIM.

The problems were mostly that I had a middle name, which Japanese people apparently never have, say your name is "Ella Mary Smith" but your credit card is "Ella Smith", the "people" won't accept it and their web app does weird things, like removes the space between your first and middle name when you put both of them into the first name field. You some how have to work out through trial and error, the system / process / people don't care about spaces.

The process involved many people "checking" my application and almost being able to arbitrarily deny the application. There was almost no actual automation, I think it would've just been way way easier to visit a store and let them fill out the forms how they wanted, however they've made this particular process "online only" and so you're stuck with probably one of the worst user experiences in the world.

Anyway, each time I applied, I had to wait about 24 hours to be rejected and resubmit the application. Sometimes the application would blow up or the website would time out, error and I had to resubmit all documents again and do a silly online facial identification thing, I did about 12 times. I truly thought I was going to go insane. I didn't leave the hotel for 12 hours trying to hack this beast and workout what was wrong, then multiple day of rejections until I got the combination of inputs right.

What was so striking to me was the way I, as a user had to invent my own solutions to allow the system to give me the eSIM.

For example, I eventually worked out that I must have a credit card which includes a middle name, even though there is only a place for a first and last name when inputting the credit card. So I just lied and said my credit card actually is written as SMITH ELLAMARY (which it doesn't), and the "person" who was checking the application, believed this fairy tale and finally accepted the application.

It was a classic example of so much software I've interacted with in Japan in recent times. It always has this kind of "best effort, just works, sort of works if you're a foreigner and you know how to work around the quirks" vibe to it that I don't really experience anywhere else.

Kodak invented digital photography. History is full of examples where people and companies couldn't see or capture the huge value of their inventions.

> And I think the answer is the language barrier.

This may contribute, but it's not the main issue imo. I've worked with tons of Japanese devs and English didn't hold them back much.

Plus look at Ruby, which was all the rage in webdev at one point. It was invented in Japan, and it had better documentation in Japanese than English.

Bigger issues for Japan's tech industry in 2023:

- Lack of VC/Startup investment (0.02% of GDP vs. 0.52% for USA)[1]

- Lack of government support

- Lack of strong CS university programs

- Risk-averse culture (failure is congratulated in the US but condemned in Japan; people don't want to risk building a startup)

- Continued prevalence of "System Integration" rather than in-house dev teams

- Outsourcing of dev work to cheaper countries (India etc).

- Difficulty of moving to Japan (visa issues, high taxes etc; hard for immigrants to start businesses here)

[1] https://www.boj.or.jp/en/research/brp/ron_2021/data/ron21031...

> because that's where the Timex factory where they built the ZX Spectrum was

You could say that, but there weren't any problems getting ZX Spectrums in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh either, and the whole UK was awash with bedroom programmers making piles of games.

What I think actually put Dundee on the map was David Jones, attending Dundee Institue of Technology (now know as Abertay University) in 1987, employing his friends Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly to form the company DMA Design. They had a series of successful games on the Amiga, releasing the worldwide smash-hit Lemmings in 1991. This encouraged Abertay to offer the world's first computer games degree course in 1997. You can see how large an employer DMA Design was in 1996 in this interview [1] where they were working a little-known game called Grand Theft Auto they released in 1998...

I'd put the case that DMA Design and Abertay kickstarted the Dundee games industry themselves, they had a lot more influence than the Timex factory. Bathgate had the Motorola factory, Greenock had IBM, that didn't turn them into software hubs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENyPdBo-yVI