The stuff did get built in the company, usually half by contractors and half by the internal staff developers under guidance form the aforementioned managers. It was just build very slowly and it was held together by sticky tape and dreams.

One manager spent 50% of his time keeping an old system he wrote as a developer years earlier from completely falling over because no one else could understand it, byzantine doesn't begin to describe it.

He worked many, many, many hours overtime doing this in addition to his managerly duties but, of course, because this is Japan, he won an award for hardest worker of the year and a trip to Hawaii... which he couldn't take because otherwise the system would fall over.

Reminds me of a relative's tale when he talked with a Japanese developer to find out why one product of their company was really slow at processing data and the other was much faster. Turns out they were developed by two different teams, one of which had the idea to use the GPU for acceleration. The two teams were neighbours in the same company building but communicated so little they didn't know what the others were doing, and how.

This would be a pretty good short film.

There is a lot of outsourcing to Tata and others in Japan, yes. With many many middlemen between the poor guy spitting out the code and the one writing the requirements

3 years is enough time, but you will produce trash for your first year. The problem is that you just spent 3 years training someone and now you throw all that training into the trash and start from scratch with the next guy.

Don't forget that the training of the new people is done by the managers, i.e. the people with 3 years experience before they stopped learning and practicing themselves. "Blind leading the Blind" in many cases.