My favorite, not to mention only, interesting factoid about “rise of Japan” paranoia in the 70s and 80s was that in the original version the company in alien was called Weyland Corp. and they changed it to Weyland-Yutani to tap into subconscious fears about Japanese multinational buying everything up
After getting laid off from my tech job last year I started a personal project to digitize and modernize old media found in my parents house. This has forced me to buy lots of old equipment or retrofit old pieces for modern use. VHS players, floppy disk readers, camcorders, etc. This has given me great appreciation for purpose-built devices that I think I'll hang onto for a while. However, this got me to thinking about how Americans enjoy physical objects.
While Americans have ceded much of their life to the realm of the digital glowing screen, the only place it seems where we want the tactility of buttons, switches and knobs are in the automobile.
Most electric car brands (Tesla, Rivian, etc) are primarily software-driven physical devices. It's ostensibly an extension of the digital world we find ourselves at odds with (you can watch YouTube in your Tesla). But gas-powered cars are squarely physical/analog devices, likely because internal combustion is very old tech. There were pushes to make cars more digital, but manufacturers going back to buttons feel like a small victory.
people love analogue synths. i often wonder what the equivalent would be for an electric car. you could certainly run all or most of one on analogue electromechanical control systems. would it be more fun to drive?
I loved the Marx/Sony juxtaposition and, as a "knowledge worker" in a tech company, I can relate. I enjoy my work and it enriches me, yet I know that it doesn't love me back. Which brings me to AI. My company is laying off people because of AI, but they're not being replaced as much as displaced.
Despite what you might have heard from some people like Sam Altman who aren't really programmers (he was one of my "startup advisor" in 2012, and in the few meetings I had with him, I couldn't help but notice how unremarkable he was; I figured that his talent was being in the right place at the right time; the Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley, sans heart), LLMs can't really code (as I write this, one of the top trending articles on Hacker News, which is like Reddit for tech workers, is titled "Why LLMs can't really build software"; the site is run by Sam Altman's former employer).
So the irony is that my colleagues aren't being laid off because AI can do their work - it really can't - but because so much money is being invested in AI data centres that the company has to save money elsewhere by laying people off. It's like the gold rush at the end of Deadwood, not the beginning, only nobody knows if there's actually much gold to be found.
I recently opened a box that has made multiple moves without being untaped and found an old Sony Walkman sport (the one with the high impact yellow carapace) and was bummed that I have exactly zero cassettes left to play on it. There's certainly nostalgia involved - I thought of going to hockey camp with with my briefcase of cassettes summer of 1985 - but there's also something genuinely satisfying about sliding the cassette in and the k-thunk of closing it and even the click of auto reverse when you get to the end of a side. It's a tangible example of engineering in a way that software can't approach for most of us.
The other thing I'm reminded of is 1983's A Nation at Risk which predicted a "rising tide of mediocrity" among American students as compared to our Japanese counterparts. The begat a school reform movement which (IMO) has done significant damage to student motivation and genuine learning though the embrace of proficiency and standardization as educational values.
Great piece. Just two things to add when I think of my Japanese relatives and their attitudes/preferences:
1. The majority of small payments in Japan are still made in cash. That has started to change but only very recently.
2. Yahoo is still one of the most popular websites in Japan. The general approach to internet UX is sort of fascinatingly retro. Try and book a ticket on the ANA or JAL website and you’ll see what I mean.
There are cultural reasons for both but I’m still fascinated by this stuff.
I did research in Japan in 1986-87, when Chalmers Johnson was all the rage. But I was examining the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, not MITI, and it was striking how little his thesis was in evidence there. MPT had a regulatory scheme centering cooperation among stakeholders, but it wasn't a matter of industrial planning; the agency was just achieving consensus (among everyone who counted) by making sure that everyone (who counted) got a piece of the pie. In the areas I was looking at, Japan's tech development was behind ours; the U.S. was seeing the rollout of cellular phones, while the Japanese academics I talked to thought cell technology would never work.
The stupidest result of my union's last couple of contract campaigns is that I now own a record player, a tape player, a VHS player, and a laserdisc player. And I use them. I even fondly imagine that I'll learn how to fix them (this won't happen). I haven't written too much about this because I'm afraid it's not very interesting; the benefits are actually incredibly obvious and lots of people have attested to them: once a movie is playing or an album is playing on one of these things, I'm locked in and paying attention. The continuous half-awareness of the internet that I live with for most of the other hours of the day stops. I am no longer thinking "I *could* be doing something else right now."
Tokyo has a couple (at least) very small jazz listening clubs that are not much bigger than a Manhattan studio apartment where you select an album from a menu. ‘Kind of Blue” was my selection last time and a white gloved waiter brought it out for me to inspect prior to putting it on the turntable. Vinyl as a fetish object.
Regarding capitalism with Japanese characteristics, although income inequality has increased significantly, Japan is still, compared to the US, relatively egalitarian. CEO salaries are modest compared to their American counterparts and if you’re fortunate enough to be hired as a company employee by a large employer you are (still) usually guaranteed lifetime employment with your salary linked to seniority. Billionaires in Japan are not considered admirable—in fact they are generally regarded as contemptible. The huge increase of part time and hourly work though is changing things, especially for younger workers, in a really bad way…
I’d suggest reconsidering the framing here: using billionaire visibility/CEO pay as a proxy for egalitarianism misses where inequality in Japan is actually structured - by gender, employment status, age.
~40% of workers are in non-reg/PT roles: lower pay, no security or upward mobility. These jobs disproportionately go to, you guessed it, women, young, and elderly workers. We know what the sentiment toward immigration is, of course.
Their gender wage gap is one of the WIDEST in the OECD (i believe beat only by KR). Lifetime employment + seniority-based wages do persist, but are the preserve of a shrinking share, chiefly older men at major firms.
They do not produce celebrity billionaires, it's true, but inequality is real and entrenched; it is less ostentatious, more structural, and built into its employment system itself.
I find the"billionaires Y/N" metric as a catch-all metric to be flattening to the point of meaninglessness, and straying into slopulist territory. But YMMV.
I had a friend who was hugely into right wing talk radio in the late 80s/early 90s. She’d get all worked up listening to Pat Buchanan and then go on and on about how the Japanese were buying all our real estate. Ugh.
I wish I wasn't so late to the comments. I've spent my whole young professional career at an American branch of a Japanese company, and I've been wanting to write about the promise and failure of Japanese capitalism for a while. Good to see some great books to start with in this article/comments.
Software is definitely a pain point for Japan as a whole still. My company produces excellent hardware and awful software to run on it. Our newer internal business software is even worse than the old 90s and 2000s stuff it's replacing--just as poorly coded but with the massive bloat of modern software added in. We also struggle mightily with cybersecurity implementation. My theory on this: people who grow up in a society that doesn't even use bike locks don't have a good starting point to develop a security mindset.
The flip side of this is that Japanese people/companies don't fall into the trap that we do in the West of replacing things that work perfectly well. Case in point: mainframes. Our best-working system is a 1980s IBM mainframe-based one. It's well-maintained and there are no plans to replace it, which is good. A lot of companies learn the hard way that replacing well-functioning mainframes because they're "obsolete" is a recipe for disaster. (This goes along with the first principle of software engineering: never EVER rewrite from scratch.)
The tail on the end of this era is that the Japanese system is starting to lose some of its unique elements. Lifetime employment is starting to strain (I think Sony did some layoffs in Japan last year.) You don't see very many Japanese brands in the store anymore, but the products that are there aren't made in Japan anymore--Sony has largely moved production to Malaysia for instance. Japanese auto manufacturers are starting to unwind their holdings of their suppliers and are beginning to shop around instead of automatically giving contracts to their "group companies"--and they're finding lower prices elsewhere.
One final note, the increase in quality of Chinese products in the last 5 years has been incredible. And I'm not talking about foreign brands setting up shop in China, but Chinese companies like DJI and 10,000 others you've never heard of. This is probably old news to most people but I've seen it firsthand and I don't think it'll be long before some of the best products in the world are being designed and built in China. For me specifically, if Chinese companies can match our "Japanese Quality (TM)" with Chinese prices, my company is toast.
Hi John, another enjoyable article. Some of your readers might like this long dissertation from 2006 I found when looking into the rise and decline of Japan-as-the-future a while back. Its free to download.
Destructive discourse: 'Japan-bashing' in the United States, Australia and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s
Thanks, John, for the reminder about the fascination with Japanese industry in the 1980s and 1990s. When I was an editor at the Harvard Business Review in the early '90s, the executive editor was Alan Webber who was deeply involved in Japanese-American managerial exchanges (and, interestingly for your thesis, went on to found the "new economy" magazine Fast Company). My own contribution to learning from Japan: an article in HBR by the Japanese academic Ikujiro Nonaka on "The Knowledge-Creating Company," which described what he saw as the distinctive Japanese approach to product innovation, grounded in analogical thinking (an example: he claimed that the idea for the drum in a Japanese copying machine came from an analogy to a beer can that came out of a brainstorming session!). A kind of case study in the Japanese fusion of traditional and modern thinking. But, you know, we don't have to go to Japan to think about and learn from post-Fordism. Charles F. Sabel (then at MIT, now at Columbia Law School) got there by studying industrial networks in the textile districts in Prato, outside Florence, in Italy. I think I have recommended to you in the past, his book with MIT economist Michael Piore, The Second Industrial Divide, which attempted to chart out a future for American economy along post-Fordist lines. An especially interesting paper by Sabel is called "Learning by Monitoring," in which he interprets the Japanese quality movement as an effective system of continuous organizational learning.
If you haven’t seen it, the Wim Wenders movie from last year “Perfect Days” touches on a lot similar themes about the nostalgia of older Japanese physical devices and media. It’s not only about that, but it’s right up the alley of this article!
John, I’m sure you’ll love Tokyo Jazz Joints then https://www.tokyojazzjoints.com - old analogue hi-fi equipment playing Jazz on Vinyl to old—ish Japanese guys drinking old Scotch and Sake. What’s not to like!
Good cultural commentary, it reminds me that I have to fix the BIOS on the x230 Thinkpad I bought in college sitting in the closet. Old electronics often look great precisely because of their physical presence as you said, the reduced emphasis on one screen over all versus the keyboard, the inputs, various replaceable parts, and so on. I suspect with at-home consumer 3d printing taking off, it is technically easier to prototype old school electronic design than ever.
My favorite, not to mention only, interesting factoid about “rise of Japan” paranoia in the 70s and 80s was that in the original version the company in alien was called Weyland Corp. and they changed it to Weyland-Yutani to tap into subconscious fears about Japanese multinational buying everything up
"Die Hard" also touches on that with its setting: a building built by some giant Japanese corporation.
The full resurrection of the vinyl record does show there is a mass appeal to use physical, less convenient objects with more soul, though.
PS : there is an optimism to the "past future" of that era that one finds a lot in Kraftwerk's very dated but still widely popular music, as well.
Recently, the much-maligned CD, too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTe7U92ecX8 Ride on man!
After getting laid off from my tech job last year I started a personal project to digitize and modernize old media found in my parents house. This has forced me to buy lots of old equipment or retrofit old pieces for modern use. VHS players, floppy disk readers, camcorders, etc. This has given me great appreciation for purpose-built devices that I think I'll hang onto for a while. However, this got me to thinking about how Americans enjoy physical objects.
While Americans have ceded much of their life to the realm of the digital glowing screen, the only place it seems where we want the tactility of buttons, switches and knobs are in the automobile.
It's now notable that manufacturers are moving back to physical buttons: https://www.wired.com/story/why-car-brands-are-finally-switching-back-to-buttons/
Most electric car brands (Tesla, Rivian, etc) are primarily software-driven physical devices. It's ostensibly an extension of the digital world we find ourselves at odds with (you can watch YouTube in your Tesla). But gas-powered cars are squarely physical/analog devices, likely because internal combustion is very old tech. There were pushes to make cars more digital, but manufacturers going back to buttons feel like a small victory.
Everything is computer.
people love analogue synths. i often wonder what the equivalent would be for an electric car. you could certainly run all or most of one on analogue electromechanical control systems. would it be more fun to drive?
I loved the Marx/Sony juxtaposition and, as a "knowledge worker" in a tech company, I can relate. I enjoy my work and it enriches me, yet I know that it doesn't love me back. Which brings me to AI. My company is laying off people because of AI, but they're not being replaced as much as displaced.
Despite what you might have heard from some people like Sam Altman who aren't really programmers (he was one of my "startup advisor" in 2012, and in the few meetings I had with him, I couldn't help but notice how unremarkable he was; I figured that his talent was being in the right place at the right time; the Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley, sans heart), LLMs can't really code (as I write this, one of the top trending articles on Hacker News, which is like Reddit for tech workers, is titled "Why LLMs can't really build software"; the site is run by Sam Altman's former employer).
So the irony is that my colleagues aren't being laid off because AI can do their work - it really can't - but because so much money is being invested in AI data centres that the company has to save money elsewhere by laying people off. It's like the gold rush at the end of Deadwood, not the beginning, only nobody knows if there's actually much gold to be found.
the bubble will burst. but yep, you're essentially on the money.
I recently opened a box that has made multiple moves without being untaped and found an old Sony Walkman sport (the one with the high impact yellow carapace) and was bummed that I have exactly zero cassettes left to play on it. There's certainly nostalgia involved - I thought of going to hockey camp with with my briefcase of cassettes summer of 1985 - but there's also something genuinely satisfying about sliding the cassette in and the k-thunk of closing it and even the click of auto reverse when you get to the end of a side. It's a tangible example of engineering in a way that software can't approach for most of us.
The other thing I'm reminded of is 1983's A Nation at Risk which predicted a "rising tide of mediocrity" among American students as compared to our Japanese counterparts. The begat a school reform movement which (IMO) has done significant damage to student motivation and genuine learning though the embrace of proficiency and standardization as educational values.
Great piece. Just two things to add when I think of my Japanese relatives and their attitudes/preferences:
1. The majority of small payments in Japan are still made in cash. That has started to change but only very recently.
2. Yahoo is still one of the most popular websites in Japan. The general approach to internet UX is sort of fascinatingly retro. Try and book a ticket on the ANA or JAL website and you’ll see what I mean.
There are cultural reasons for both but I’m still fascinated by this stuff.
I did research in Japan in 1986-87, when Chalmers Johnson was all the rage. But I was examining the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, not MITI, and it was striking how little his thesis was in evidence there. MPT had a regulatory scheme centering cooperation among stakeholders, but it wasn't a matter of industrial planning; the agency was just achieving consensus (among everyone who counted) by making sure that everyone (who counted) got a piece of the pie. In the areas I was looking at, Japan's tech development was behind ours; the U.S. was seeing the rollout of cellular phones, while the Japanese academics I talked to thought cell technology would never work.
The stupidest result of my union's last couple of contract campaigns is that I now own a record player, a tape player, a VHS player, and a laserdisc player. And I use them. I even fondly imagine that I'll learn how to fix them (this won't happen). I haven't written too much about this because I'm afraid it's not very interesting; the benefits are actually incredibly obvious and lots of people have attested to them: once a movie is playing or an album is playing on one of these things, I'm locked in and paying attention. The continuous half-awareness of the internet that I live with for most of the other hours of the day stops. I am no longer thinking "I *could* be doing something else right now."
Tokyo has a couple (at least) very small jazz listening clubs that are not much bigger than a Manhattan studio apartment where you select an album from a menu. ‘Kind of Blue” was my selection last time and a white gloved waiter brought it out for me to inspect prior to putting it on the turntable. Vinyl as a fetish object.
Regarding capitalism with Japanese characteristics, although income inequality has increased significantly, Japan is still, compared to the US, relatively egalitarian. CEO salaries are modest compared to their American counterparts and if you’re fortunate enough to be hired as a company employee by a large employer you are (still) usually guaranteed lifetime employment with your salary linked to seniority. Billionaires in Japan are not considered admirable—in fact they are generally regarded as contemptible. The huge increase of part time and hourly work though is changing things, especially for younger workers, in a really bad way…
I’d suggest reconsidering the framing here: using billionaire visibility/CEO pay as a proxy for egalitarianism misses where inequality in Japan is actually structured - by gender, employment status, age.
~40% of workers are in non-reg/PT roles: lower pay, no security or upward mobility. These jobs disproportionately go to, you guessed it, women, young, and elderly workers. We know what the sentiment toward immigration is, of course.
Their gender wage gap is one of the WIDEST in the OECD (i believe beat only by KR). Lifetime employment + seniority-based wages do persist, but are the preserve of a shrinking share, chiefly older men at major firms.
They do not produce celebrity billionaires, it's true, but inequality is real and entrenched; it is less ostentatious, more structural, and built into its employment system itself.
I find the"billionaires Y/N" metric as a catch-all metric to be flattening to the point of meaninglessness, and straying into slopulist territory. But YMMV.
I had a friend who was hugely into right wing talk radio in the late 80s/early 90s. She’d get all worked up listening to Pat Buchanan and then go on and on about how the Japanese were buying all our real estate. Ugh.
I wish I wasn't so late to the comments. I've spent my whole young professional career at an American branch of a Japanese company, and I've been wanting to write about the promise and failure of Japanese capitalism for a while. Good to see some great books to start with in this article/comments.
Software is definitely a pain point for Japan as a whole still. My company produces excellent hardware and awful software to run on it. Our newer internal business software is even worse than the old 90s and 2000s stuff it's replacing--just as poorly coded but with the massive bloat of modern software added in. We also struggle mightily with cybersecurity implementation. My theory on this: people who grow up in a society that doesn't even use bike locks don't have a good starting point to develop a security mindset.
The flip side of this is that Japanese people/companies don't fall into the trap that we do in the West of replacing things that work perfectly well. Case in point: mainframes. Our best-working system is a 1980s IBM mainframe-based one. It's well-maintained and there are no plans to replace it, which is good. A lot of companies learn the hard way that replacing well-functioning mainframes because they're "obsolete" is a recipe for disaster. (This goes along with the first principle of software engineering: never EVER rewrite from scratch.)
The tail on the end of this era is that the Japanese system is starting to lose some of its unique elements. Lifetime employment is starting to strain (I think Sony did some layoffs in Japan last year.) You don't see very many Japanese brands in the store anymore, but the products that are there aren't made in Japan anymore--Sony has largely moved production to Malaysia for instance. Japanese auto manufacturers are starting to unwind their holdings of their suppliers and are beginning to shop around instead of automatically giving contracts to their "group companies"--and they're finding lower prices elsewhere.
One final note, the increase in quality of Chinese products in the last 5 years has been incredible. And I'm not talking about foreign brands setting up shop in China, but Chinese companies like DJI and 10,000 others you've never heard of. This is probably old news to most people but I've seen it firsthand and I don't think it'll be long before some of the best products in the world are being designed and built in China. For me specifically, if Chinese companies can match our "Japanese Quality (TM)" with Chinese prices, my company is toast.
Hi John, another enjoyable article. Some of your readers might like this long dissertation from 2006 I found when looking into the rise and decline of Japan-as-the-future a while back. Its free to download.
Destructive discourse: 'Japan-bashing' in the United States, Australia and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s
https://researchportal.murdoch.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Destructive-discourse-Japan-bashing-in-the-United/991005542036407891
Thanks, John, for the reminder about the fascination with Japanese industry in the 1980s and 1990s. When I was an editor at the Harvard Business Review in the early '90s, the executive editor was Alan Webber who was deeply involved in Japanese-American managerial exchanges (and, interestingly for your thesis, went on to found the "new economy" magazine Fast Company). My own contribution to learning from Japan: an article in HBR by the Japanese academic Ikujiro Nonaka on "The Knowledge-Creating Company," which described what he saw as the distinctive Japanese approach to product innovation, grounded in analogical thinking (an example: he claimed that the idea for the drum in a Japanese copying machine came from an analogy to a beer can that came out of a brainstorming session!). A kind of case study in the Japanese fusion of traditional and modern thinking. But, you know, we don't have to go to Japan to think about and learn from post-Fordism. Charles F. Sabel (then at MIT, now at Columbia Law School) got there by studying industrial networks in the textile districts in Prato, outside Florence, in Italy. I think I have recommended to you in the past, his book with MIT economist Michael Piore, The Second Industrial Divide, which attempted to chart out a future for American economy along post-Fordist lines. An especially interesting paper by Sabel is called "Learning by Monitoring," in which he interprets the Japanese quality movement as an effective system of continuous organizational learning.
If you haven’t seen it, the Wim Wenders movie from last year “Perfect Days” touches on a lot similar themes about the nostalgia of older Japanese physical devices and media. It’s not only about that, but it’s right up the alley of this article!
John, I’m sure you’ll love Tokyo Jazz Joints then https://www.tokyojazzjoints.com - old analogue hi-fi equipment playing Jazz on Vinyl to old—ish Japanese guys drinking old Scotch and Sake. What’s not to like!
Good cultural commentary, it reminds me that I have to fix the BIOS on the x230 Thinkpad I bought in college sitting in the closet. Old electronics often look great precisely because of their physical presence as you said, the reduced emphasis on one screen over all versus the keyboard, the inputs, various replaceable parts, and so on. I suspect with at-home consumer 3d printing taking off, it is technically easier to prototype old school electronic design than ever.