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Re:Why Japan lost its comparative advantage in producing ele... by watwut on Saturday October 05, 2019 @02:02PM (#21166955)
Probably not true fully. If they are so detail oriented, they will understand what "max" means and they will also understand how specifications and industry works.

They might have trolled or basically showing off superior production process.

Re:Why Japan lost its comparative advantage in producing ele... by beerandt on Sunday October 06, 2019 @08:52PM (#21176334)
I think they're so used to having things lost in translation, that they take people at their word, no matter how strange it may seem.

Second hand knowledge, but I was told they're detailed oriented because they basically don't trust anyone to tell them when they're wrong. The culture is so adverse to causing offense, that instead of reporting a mistake to a colleague, errors are sometimes allowed through and "engineered around" at the next point of assembly.

There were a lot of nuances to how this sometimes became self correcting and sometimes caused project failure, but as far as I can tell, that applies to everything Japan.

Firsthand sidenote: A similar cultural thing is being ashamed at anything less than proficiency, and will "pretend" to have no knowledge of a topic if they're not an expert. For instance, most people will claim to not understand English, because they're not fluent. But make no mistake, they understand 95% of what you're saying.

Re:Why Japan lost its comparative advantage in producing ele... by watwut on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:01AM (#21191260)
There is zero chance they would be able to produce high quality components without understanding what error rates in specifications of other companies mean.

Low error rates in their own output means that they understand industry processes very well.

Re:Why Japan lost its comparative advantage in producing ele... by iforgotpassword on Sunday October 06, 2019 @11:38AM (#21172677)
If the story is true, definitely this. By putting the broken parts in there they pretty much guaranteed that all the other ones are flawless, otherwise they'd have broken the contract.