Yeah listen, I own the same Zojirushi crap you do, a lot of it, and it has its own problems. The mugs leak occasionally, the rubber and silicone goods are cumbersome for many people to deal with, there are voids in the lids and interior corners in the rubber goods that are hard to clean, they mold all the same as anything else exposed to water. The boilers develop a lot of scaling issues, they are not easy to clean, the replacement parts are expensive, and you talk to their CS, they will tell you the wrong dimensions for things like screws. And they don’t replace anything for free.

I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk. But I’ll just say that you are buying these things because you can buy it on Amazon, and Amazon wrote all this software to fill in the blanks like returns which Zojirushi would never do, and because Wirecutter told you to, and their affiliate marketing machine is very software enabled. It is actually a good example of my point: can you think of a Japanese brand that in your opinion has great purely mechanical products like mugs but advertises as aggressively as Apple does? What about a brand that can reach people with ad blockers, so therefore it must innovate, like by managing fleets of influencers, digital product catalogs / product syndication, affiliate schemes, etc.?

> I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk.

I'm not being hostile, but I think you're being very non-responsive. At various points I've been trying to figure out why, because it's so baffling. I mean, the question is "Why is Japanese software crap when their physical products are well designed," and you're going on and on about Amazon's logistics software, which is pretty much a non-sequitur.

The simple answer is that Japanese software isn’t crap. It’s good in a ton of places that matter but might be invisible to consumers. Also in places that are visible: We play tons of video games developed in Japan, Nintendo might be the very best game studio on Earth. LINE was way ahead of its time too, it was a very innovative chat app that was synergistic with cell phone hardware in many ways that mattered like payments security, but maybe there isn’t enough space for chat apps to differentiate themselves and their success is driven by chance.

To me, one reason is that in some markets inside Japan, people do not yet pay for software. For example hardly anyone in Japan pays for Spotify subscriptions. However they do spend in gacha games. So it’s not as black and white as, tangible versus intangible goods. There’s no broad strokes generalization about a cultural difference that is persuasive to me. The article talks about stuff that is basically ancient history or industrial policy, which is also interesting but unpersuasive. I bring up the Amazon logistics software as an example of the possibility that even stoic hardware companies are software companies, and people like Zojirushi, so then it is sequiter to say, we’ll actually Zojirushi is good at software. So really we mean “bad at making globally important social media apps” which is a totally different thing than “bad at software.”

I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.

I might sound unbelievable for our fast-paced world of the west but there are centuries old shops in japan that still manufacture the same products with the same methods, not only in Japan but in various parts of the world, excellence wasn’t born after computers.

ISTM that both sides are right here, but both are deep in the woods and missing the trees.

"This product does not contain machines!" "No, but it is made using machines!"

(Remember the 6 classical machines: screw, inclined plane, wedge, lever, wheel and axle, and pulley.)

Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk, and you can't make junk into something good?

You can use junk to make good things, but you can't make good things out of junk.

Maybe the problem isn't Japan. Maybe the problem is that all modern software is junk, and even Japan can't make that good.

>Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk

I believe most of the world has become complacent with “good enough” and a factory (be it hard or soft ware) that does not churn producs out of the door quickly enough is seen as “unproductive” Probably Japan software industry is trapped between being productive and excellent being neither after all.

Agreed.

> I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.

No. For a physical non-software-driven product, those things are pretty much orthogonal.

If a product is good, it's due to the attributes of the product itself, and those are mainly due to the design decisions and priorities of the manufacturer.

All the things you list may make the business more efficient and more successful, but they have little to do with the kinds of products I'm talking about.