Quite the opposite - for me, anyway.
FWIW, as a Westerner, I find the Mondragon Corporation to be fascinating and something I've read a lot about because there's no way we've figured out the ideal sort of setup for a business (or government, or any sort of human organization, given appropriate context) in the year 2026.
We have a lot to learn, and while "different" doesn't always mean "better," I strongly believe being exposed to "different" is necessary for us to devise novel approaches to human organization.
In the US, the American Solidarity Party[3] draws from distributism, for instance.
[1] https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-di...
He had to flee the country because his chosen party was purged. He survived a street battle. Then made a final visit to many of his comrades in prison.
Don’t presume that his views were shared with those who had influence.
He had admiration for his comrades in arms, especially the mess hall staff. He was on the workers side, but he was in the banned party, of the losing side of the war.
Above all, Orwell saw through the propaganda at home and the rest of the worlds deliberate misunderstanding of the whole situation. For instance, he saw that France had a tacit agreement with the Soviets to slow-walk supplying arms to the Nationalists, to ensure French financiers had protected investments in Spain’s railroads. And every newspaper outside Spain reported like Fox News.
And I bet these salary-capped co-op leaders are still appropriately capable / qualified. The U.S. billionare situation is ugly.
I still admire Mondragon and wish there were more companies like it, but now I try to remind myself that most characterizations from the outside are surely lacking in nuance.
In technical econ terms, the marginal profit of new employees is typically below the average profit of existing employees. A profit-maximizing business only cares that the marginal profit is positive, and will hire until there is no additional profit to be made. A co-op is incentivized to keep average profit per employee high, which can mean reducing headcount in order to keep the average strong. So that's why co-ops can have a sort of exclusive club feel to them.
SV is actually an interesting example which proves how employee ownership can drive prosperity, but the typical co-op crowd doesn't want to talk about it because it's too capitalist-coded. In a way, SV companies show that employee ownership is not some sort of instant cure for everything which ails capitalism.
That said... It's hard to deny the romanticization and projection point above.
Beer goggles can be a mind expanding POV, but you need to be aware of it or you just end up being wrong for silly reasons.
A sober look at different is a good thing. Ooh... I agree that better and more advanced org concepts are likely still to be developed. But Otoh...
Genuinely curious.
The interesting question in all of these kinds of things is "are there ideas we can take to gain the strengths of other systems or patch the weaknesses in ours?". Looking at Japan specifically, I think I speak for most westerners in saying that if we could get a little more stability and less financial-quarter-driven behavior without taking the whole kit of lifetime employment and zombie companies, that would be a good thing. The author points out just how bundled that is, so it's a tough nut to crack.
One model that does give us that is the 'Untouchable visionary CEO' of Jobs and Musk, but I think the popularity of that approach is also limited, partially because of all the not so visionary CEOs trying to be Jobs, and partially because working for those guys is terrible. They inevitably seem to become tyrants.
Most Americans I know are familiar with the unending work culture of Japanese white collar workers (if only a parody version of it), and want no part of it.
Americans including myself love saying we’re busy though.
Not really sure they are measuring what they think they are measuring. This being more pronounced amongst young people may be because working long is being seen as less and less cool, as there has been a major vibe shift among young workers regarding their relationships with employers. Doesn't necessarily mean they are actually working less, might mean they don't want to admit it.
Revealed concrete hours would be much more trustworthy
HN has had posts romanticizing them, maybe check those
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32622140
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41438060
> it created a massive 'zombie company' problem—a heavily discussed issue in Korea and Japan that the West seems largely blind to
Zombie companies in the west are mentioned as a low/ZIRP phenomena. But the west shouldn't have as big an issue with those because companies, when less diversified, get killed off more often by interest rate hikes.
The EU’s crisis schemes like furloughing employees en masse dull the pain but also do prolong some companies’ lives. The US historically has had much more brutal impacts but quicker recoveries.
The Japanese company had some rituals were a bit weird, but harmless/charmingly quaint like mandatory volunteer days, keeping a copy of the founder's precepts on my desk for executive walkthroughs. They also had some bad tendencies, like praising employees for being there at 6AM/8PM. If something didn't work, they'd give it a bit of runway to see if it could pull through before cutting back. When there were layoffs, it was the whole division failing (each division competed with the others). It's hard to imagine what kind of political statements would have been offensive to that employer, it was just a neutral job. Really, the worst part was subpar compensation (and I still felt spoiled compared to Japanese coworkers).
My next job was at an American megacorp. The executives would give a holiday speech about "social responsibility" and how well we were doing, then layoff a factory. The employer was constantly involving themselves with US national politics, but employees were expected to refrain from having political opinions of their own.
Reminds me of my first job in state government where the incredibly underpaid workers had to go through bureaucratic paperwork if they needed a second job to pay the rent (ostensibly because of the conflict of interest risk)
Yet the governor was a known slumlord. I’m sure there’s no potential conflict of interest there.
During work hours or after work hours (for both)?
Speaking for myself, I'd find that very interesting! I just stumbled over an article about it a few days ago, and don't think it's weird that different parts of the world would be interested in a regional business phenomenon.
I know the author isn't trying to paint Japan as a utopia. The reason I call it 'romanticized' is because the author claims Japan's success in precision parts is driven by 'horizontal' and 'collaborative' practices. That just isn't true.
In reality, this system is largely sustained by the ruthless squeezing of subcontractors (for the record, I am Korean, but I actually like Japan), which is a massive social issue there. It’s very difficult for me to understand how anyone could view this structural dynamic as collaborative or horizontal.
If the author had concluded that their success in these niches stems from being an extremely vertical society where defying your superiors is simply not an option, I would have fully agreed. That aligns exactly with what I have experienced firsthand.
> In reality, this system is largely sustained by the ruthless squeezing of subcontractors (for the record, I am Korean, but I actually like Japan), which is a massive social issue there.
Well that's just like your opinion...man. I think you're both singularly wrong. Trying to attribute a single factor to a highly complex system is a fool's errand.
If your conclusion is correct "ruthless squeezing of subcontractors" are there other cultures whether there is true and the country has been successful in precision parts? Otherwise, it's pretty impossible to conclude the causality.
Car culture. We're a very car-centric society, and the Japanese auto makers have been a part everyday life to 3 full generations of Americans now. Even most Baby Boomers are too young to remember a world without Honda or Toyota. Across all age groups, a lot more Americans grew up with a fondness for their family's Toyota than their family's Hyundai.
I grew up in middle America. Both my grandfathers were "GM Men" if you will. Partly by vocation, partly by culture. On both sides of my family, every car was either a Chevy or a Buick. When my folks bought a Honda in 2007, it was treated like a scandal. But yknow what? Now one of my cousins has a Hyundai, and nobody batted an eye. Things are changing, even for the "raise hell praise Dale" crowd.
Japan's car makers, and their other industrials have a 40-year head start on embedding themselves in the American zeitgeist. Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Yamaha, they've all been here a really long time. They're loved because they're familiar. That's a bias, and I think that bias colors the way we talk about east Asian businesses more broadly.
> We're a very car-centric society, and the Japanese auto makers have been a part everyday life to 3 full generations of Americans now.
I keep writing this over and over again on HN: There are NO highly developed non-micro states that are not car centric outside of major cities. Yes, literally, Japan, outside of a few large cities, is incredibly car centric. Sure, the cars are small and cute, but it is defintely car centric!
> Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Yamaha, they've all been here a really long time.
Yeah and this is the exact reason why people call the US car-centric. Only in the US the large cities are car-centric too. You just proved the parent comment's point.
> They came for a single reason: To avoid import tariffs. Please stop romanticising this for any other reason.
You're hallucinating. There is zero romanticization in the parent comment about why they came to the US.
Where did I suggest they came for any particular reason? I just said they got here first. They've had more time to become entrenched in people's lives than the Korean or Chinese companies that followed. That's all! Nothing "romantic" here!
At no point did I indicate any nostalgia for the idiosyncracies of the "GM patriarch" family. Is that what you're suggesting?
And yeah, "we" is Americans. As evidenced by the sentence that starts with "I grew up in middle America."
I genuinely don't understand this comment. It's like you saw "we're a car-centric society," stopped reading, and started typing.
That's an argument. Lack of density means that public transportation is hard to have enough scale. But the US is uniquely bad at both density but also lack of transportation options. In countries like the UK and France (just because I'm familiar with them, I'm not claiming they're the only ones or it's something unique to them) even small towns have a regular bus or train connection to elsewhere. Might not be the best frequency, but it's there. In the US even multi hundred thousand people cities have literally nothing other than cars as an option.
So there are layers of car centricity. And considering most people live in cities, in countries like most of the developed world, the majority of the population has the option of at least decent transit. You know which countries are the exception.
I'd be interested in hearing an example or two of cities in the U.S. with populations greater than 200,000 that don't have a bus system.
https://arlingtonnetwork.com/arlington-mass-transit-rideshar...
> So there are layers of car centricity
Yamaha, Korg an Roland were the defining instrument producers of the 80s and 90s. Few things have altered the course of popular music as much as the TR-909 and TR-808, M1, DX-7, Juno, Jupiter. All of electronic music grew out of those.
The Walkman and Discman were iconic.
Honda was building P3 and ASIMO. The PlayStation 1/2 and Nintendo 64/GameCube were a thing.
I didn't even get into anime, the language or music from there until decades later. But all of the cool things came from Japan back then. Honestly, they still kind of do.
Although, to me, what I've always loved about Japan is how they will take every medium that arrives on the scene and treat it with loving craftsmanship. From jazz to skateboarding to yo-yos.
It resonates with me, because I get uncomfortable if I do too much passive consumption and am not making something.
Related: In most of the world, carmakers separate out a luxury brand from their other products: Honda with Acura, Toyota with Lexus, etc. In Japan, they don't. The explanation I usually get is that the culture primarily associates luxury with "being attached to the big-name corporation". So you don't really improve on that by introducing another smaller brand, even one you build up as luxury.
See also the patio11 comment:
>>My salary was $30k, but there is some tangible value in having a pocket full of business cards which practically read "Attention, person who has just been handed this card: give the bearer whatever he wants. We're good for it. If you don't, we will remember." That status is very much not the same as the one you get if you combine two part-time jobs into the same level of income.
Most HNers tend to be in their mid-30s to 50s so a lot of Japan-philia does appear to stem from an older mental image from the 1990s to 2010s.
> This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is that this system is heavily driven by Japan's unique, subtle classism. It's a highly collectivist society with strict age-based milestones and immense pressure to secure traditional employment. In Japan, your corporate affiliation often dictates your social standing...
The Japanese Keiretsu and later Trust Bank model is the norm in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and other Asian countries as well due to a mix of colonial, financial, and policymaking ties.
And people take pride in what they do, and try their best.
This seems quite presumptuous, and not all that different from the orientalism you're accusing OP of.
Orientalism in the standard definition means the Western tendency to view non-Western societies in an "othered" or exotic gaze, be it in either a pedestaling or derogatory context.
Think yellow fever, weebs, ad nauseum conversations about Japan (and Asia in general) on HN and Reddit.
2. While conglomerates remain prominent, a new generation of large Western-style employers like Rakuten, Mercari, LY, SoftBank, etc have arisen and operate with American-style (and -educated) management, and the stereotypical "salaryman" lifestyle is on it's last legs.
3. Japan has quietly become an immigration driven society. A major reason behind the rise of Takechi's faction in the LDP as well as Sanseito is because of the post-2019 immigration boom [1]. Going from less that 1% overseas born residents to around 4% in roughly 5 years was a massive shift socially and impacted both blue and white collar employment in Japan.
4. Japan has culturally shifted to be accepting of an offensive military posture. You see this shift in Japanese media (eg. SnK, Nippon Sangoku) as well as Japanese foreign policy [2]. A more muscular Japan with a chip on their back is arising.
5. Younger Japanese are more open to calling out tourists and Westerners when they do weird or weeb s#it or treat Japan as their own Disneyland. They now treat Westerners the same way they treat other non-Japanese people now. The mindset shift I've noticed is an "us" (which now includes Koreans and Taiwanese) versus "them" which now includes everyone else.
----
Ironically, I think contemporary South Korea is closer to the image that HNers have of Japan versus Japan today.
[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
[1] - https://www.cw.com.tw/article/5136468
[2] - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/japan/return-japanese-hard-po...
Yet you see the same tropes peddled ad nauseum. I may as well use the same priors for Poland in 2026 as I would in the 2000s then when it was Europe's punching bag.
The reality is stuff changes.
I actually find the Western unawareness of how Japan has become an immigrant society, especially in service roles, to be hilarious. It's by far the biggest Japanese social change in the last 20 years probably up there with growing acceptance of LGBT lifestyles and is a massive, divisive political issue in Japan now. Also further goes to show how much idealized othering happens in these discussions.
The average konbini service worker a foreigner interacts with in Tokyo is going to be an immigrant. 12 years ago, I only met a handful of immigrant service workers.
A lot of that is operational as well - historically, the only other country with a large Japanese speaking population was South Korea, but salaries there have largely aligned and the post-1990s generation switched to concentrating on English instead of Japanese fluency. China has started to fill that gap though (hence why Chinese immigrants in Japan are viewed the same way as Indians are in Canada).
Basically, a company that whose entire internal documentation, communication, archive, and processes were always in Japanese will always bias in favor of hiring Japanese fluent employees, most of whom live in Japan and are Japanese.
You see the same thing in European countries as well, but the difference is it's easier for a German or French company to find talent somewhere else that is German or French fluent (eg. Turkiye/Poland or Morocco/Romania/ respectively).
The newer gen companies have a strong English muscle, but those are also the kinds of companies that are happy shifting hiring overwhelmingly to India or ASEAN.
And I made orders of magnitude more money as an employee in those situations than I did otherwise. The average salaried employee's work grievances are petty to annoying and outside of that either wouldn't be solved with collective bargaining (or ownership shares) or would be solved via the legal system.
Also, it's a job. It's not servitude. you're trading your labor for money.
But I'm drawing the parallel between situations where people like a certain work culture that they have never experienced because it conforms to their larger worldview.
It's mostly projection and doesn't meet with reality.
There's a lot that I like about aspects of Japanese work culture but I'm sure that I would find it stifling.
No, far more basic negligence and corruption. Negotiating deliberately bad contracts and collecting bribes. Diverting hours and cushy roles to union reps and their personal friends. Overwhelmingly siding with management against employees (which is what you think they're going to be there NOT to do). The kind of day to day petty shit that over time makes your job intolerable.
Oh and that one time in the retail baker's union (BCTGM) when they defended and successfully reinstated an employee who was terminated for _literally urinating in the cake batter every day for months and feeding it to people_ because it wasn't explicitly stated in the contract that they could use video evidence to terminate people.
If your union is protecting people who commit literal fucking crimes and dangers to public health, no, just fuck you and your union.
So I'm sceptical: was the union really defending that specific employee, or were they trying to prevent a precedent from being set that could be used against other, more upright employees?
The union knew that they had sympathetic arbitration and it was the early years of retail store surveillance being used against employees rather than common criminals (this was decades ago). I doubt a similar case would go the same way today.
I'd be pleasantly surprised, very impressed and it would make me reach out to have an offline chat. Not exaggerating.
This is absolutely true in the US as well, by the way. People will treat you differently if you work for a FAANG company. People take a lot of pride in telling others they work for one. And we even have a word for someone who used to work for Google, for instance.
In Japan the corporation primarily provides stable income and employment for society, and secondarily returns on capital invested. In America, corporations primarily provide returns on capital invested and secondarily provide stable income and employment.
This shows up in the data too. Japanese corporations are less likely to go out of business but provide worse investment returns. American corporations provide better investment returns, but the citizens have to deal with layoffs.
Most citizens would prefer stability to growth, but I think the tradeoff has a lot of downstream consequences.
And in the long-term, people start fleeing the "stable" countries for already-grown ones.
Are you Japanese? Because this doesn't match what I know about Japanese companies, like Sony for example, who operate in a very American way.
Your image on Japanese vs American companies feels like the copy and pasted idealistic impression of what American redditors imagine Japanese companies would be like, rather than reality.
I don't know if it really applies to the current thread, but I just wanted to point out that POSIWID is certainly not a vapid, empty concept.
People want personal stability, which in our current society means a stable job.
That doesn't have to be the case, though.
Overall, economic growth is good for society as a whole, so it makes sense that a state should encourage it as much as it can.
This means that what is good for an individual is not the same as what is good for society.
I think the ideal solution would be to keep the risk-taking in business that you need for good growth, and instead provide stability through strong social support services, like healthy unemployment insurance or UBI. That way, everyone can take risks to try to drive the economy forward, but not starve if things go poorly.
The problem with basing the language in the aggregate, is implies that distribution doesn’t matter, and all modern economic models agree. This is a big problem for the reality of people living in ever increasing inequality. Money is a competitive resource, we use it to bid for real resources. If constant economic growth disproportionately goes to the already wealthy, it worsens inequality when resources to exploit become more scarce. It’s one thing to have massive swaths of untouched natural world to exploit for human benefits, but those days are long gone IMO.
(A worse issue is that inequality decreasing can mean things are getting worse for everyone.)
Economic growth means resources get more plentiful.
If you have a very fair distribution of a very small productive output, everyone will be miserable because they don’t have enough to live. At the same time, producing a ton that only goes to a select few will also leave most people miserable.
We don’t want to go to either extreme. We want to find the best way to foster productivity while making sure everyone benefits from that productivity.
My suggestion is that you get the best of both by letting competition and innovation be rewarded, while also taking care of the ‘losers’ in that competition.
It took me a minute to figure out the typo ("depraved" instead of "deprived")
Japan compares much better to the US in terms of how much wealth the top 1% control. 24.6% vs 34.8% according to https://wid.world
Graph here: https://imgur.com/a/UwWvaHW
I do think there will have to be large changes soon.
American CEOs are on the board of 8 companies but spend 5 minutes a year combined at the offices of those companies. They spend their weekends at private islands off the coast of the US Virgin Islands with other billionaires. They fire employees who ask for health care benefits or a day off. They actively endorse political candidates who went to the same private island with them and who will lengthen working hours, reduce benefits, and make it easier to fire employees. They want global surveillance to track anyone who's ever even considered saying anything bad about them. When it's possible to inject ads directly into our brains, those CEOs will force their employees to do it.
As an American who's been in Japan for a very long time and worked at Japanese companies, Japanese companies don't pay big bucks, but there are fewer deranged ultra rich people within them.
At the biggest ones you start to see branches of the organisation dedicated to c level services... Things like a driver awake and ready to go 24/7 (for the whole family), purchasing or even building apartments.
All available in the west, but the distinction is who directly pays for these things.
Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere. They present cherry-picked aspects of both countries that make China look bad and Japan look good. In reality every country has its good and bad aspects.
This is just part of the propaganda machine and what politicians want you to believe, in an effort to align their populations to be supportive of their foreign policy and military motives. That ultimately trickles down to things like this. When people come to HN, or any place, with rose-colored glasses of Japan, they will seek confirmations of that rose color everywhere.
Alternatively it could be due to emergent outcomes from our societies and systems.
Is there a word or concept that explains the idea that "people in power are controlling us"? Maybe the word is related to hierarchy? I also see it in conspiracy thinking (Rothschild, lizard people). The assumption that somebody is in charge manipulating us, and that we can discern their motives based on what their incentives are imagined to be.
A past example might be the red menace - which appeared to me to be part of US culture (politicians pushed it but I think they also took advantage of a natural us-versus-them zeitgeist). People seem to collectively desire a labeled enemy (you also see it about sports teams).
Or see the sibling comment "banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by projecting a favorable image of itself" where manipulation is imagined as the base cause. I just don't see the world that way (apart from the scientific difficultly of discerning cause versus effect in human systems).
Individually even very well educated people don't seem to see systems and effects of systems: e.g. every thread about economics. Maybe it is just all memes.
You seem to be an American so I'm very confused. You'd have to be willingfully blind at this point to not see the anti-chinese propaganda that has been going on in America for (at least) the past decade.
It is true there is anti Chinese propaganda but that is neither here nor there since posturing in this way is simply what competing world powers do.
Look past the institutional framing. The citizenry of all countries on this world are in reality on the same side far more often than opposed. The average American worker, Chinese worker, Russian worker, all want the same things: stability, prosperity, a future worth living.
It is in the self interest of states to promote nationalism and construct out-groups.
But that does not mean ordinary people should internalize such division. A wise citizenry knows to separate the notion of geopolitical competition from hatred towards ordinary citizens/culture of other countries, no matter what the state apparatus tries to tell them.
As an American educated by the American public education system and indoctrinated by American media, our government is certainly stupid and vengeful enough to make me want to support this if it were true, but it's just not. The much more banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by projecting a favorable image of itself via the media it exports, whereas China is just comparatively terrible at exercising this sort of soft power.
I think the default approach in the West - and that's not a US-specific thing - is to treat exotic faraway lands with a mix of curiosity and awe. But China is a geopolitical rival with a political system that rightly makes many Westerners queasy, so it doesn't benefit from that anymore.
No, everyday people are perfectly content to warm to brutal dictatorships who successfully put on a friendly face. Case in point: Dubai.
We're talking about media and narratives mainly.
On idealizing Japan, people here seem to think it's benefic and pushed by Japan, where I think it's more complicated. If the goal is to keep the US customers and workers in a state of fear and adversity, you need a credible threat from a somewhat powerful enemy, and idealization becomes needed.
That was Japan a few decades ago, that lead to the bashing movement, and I think it kept going t a smaller pace still, while China got set as the next unstoppable threat.
This is actually a great example for extant romanticization of China. People lauding Chinese expediency in the context of industry and construction often don't realize it's almost entirely enabled by extreme underregulation and underenforcement of industrial safety standards. Chinese people themselves will often point this out, though depending on the person they may frame it more in a style of "The West is slow because of all of the red tape!"
Of the subset of Westerners who are aware of this, sometimes I have to balk at how many of them will take that framing to heart and paint it as a positive thing. Even most Chinese don't have a positive view of it, not in reality. At most it's a tragic necessity required to build China up, though younger Chinese rightly tend to see it for what it is: corporate exploitation of laborers.
Of course in the context of solving political problems, the Politburo readily cutting through its own invented problems is another matter.
Thank fuck too. Neoliberalism sucks, along with EK + DT.
Turns out you need more that just vague platitudes than "things should be better."
No shit dude. Welcome to the ground floor everyone agrees with.
This is why EK is such a fucking dork. Go follow some organizers with your preferred beliefs, that would do you better than listening to the smart boy thinking very smart things and if you disagree with the smart boy you aren't a serious adult.
Kind of like Tesla's latest factories, or DR Horton building homes with massive problems from day 1?
Or Silicon Valley being a collection of superfund cleanup sites?
Or just the environmental pollution, in general, in Texas?
No one has figured out how to balance growth with safety. Ideally it shouldn't be hard, the total amount of money saved is pennies compared to the overall investment, but making everyone follow the rules via regulations ends to being a huge cost and time multiplier.
> but making everyone follow the rules via regulations ends to being a huge cost and time multiplier.
The cost and extra time it takes saves lives. That's the bottom line. It's your attitude that gets people maimed and killed.
My argument, and I should have made it clearer, is that we are paying a huge penalty for people who are dishonest. The amount of money they save by being dishonest and endangering others is generally tiny, but the cost to society to prevent the dishonesty is huge in the form of regulations.
(For the record, I would put Japan above both China and the US at the moment in that regard.)
Now back in the 80s? Back in the 80s, despite being aligned with the West, they were perceived a lot like China is today. Everyone was scared that they were going to start eating the West's lunch and various negative stereotypes and exaggerations started to bubble up: it was a futuristic land, but a futuristic land of suicides, with little drone-like salarymen crammed into little shoebox apartments the size of a Western bathroom, working 20 hour days.
Between the Plaza Accords and the bubble bursting and decade after decade of Lost Decades, the Japanese threat was successfully neutralized. I think Cool Japan is mostly something they've earned for themselves, frankly.
Yep. A lot of cyberpunk fiction from that time that demonized corporate influence and power was inspired by the rise and perceptions of Japanese technology companies.
I can remember one of the American news magazine shows, maybe 20/20, showing a Japanese school with long hours and intense discipline and contrasting it with fat, illiterate American kids (the same stereotypes were made about the Soviet Union).
A lot of the perception of Japan, especially among Gen X and younger, is influenced from exports of Japanese culture. Nintendo, JRPGs, Manga, Anime, and even the quirky stuff reflects well on the Japanese though American eyes. No propaganda is needed.
So basically just what the west is becoming?
Rather, the west seems to be characterized mostly by insanely expensive housing caused by an extreme antipathy towards denser housing as populations grow, and a K-shaped economy where white collar coastal elites are actually doing relatively well but everyone else - namely blue collar and service workers - are doing worse and worse. Suicide rates aren't rising dramatically, and are nowhere near where they were in Japan at their peak in the 80s, which itself was always overstated (they were higher than they were in the US at the time, but were comparable to many other western countries).
* better and better
You mean, American bathroom.
Apartments in major Europe cities aren't that much bigger than Japanese but for sure the bathroom sucks.
IMO, the tight-knit division of labor between Toyota and its subcontractors is a slightly different story from the broad diversification within a single corporation. While the latter was historically bolstered by strong industry-academia ties (often driven by university cliques), we rarely see this kind of broad diversification happening in recent years. That said, Japan's traditional "membership-based" employment system, combined with a cultural reluctance to shut down unprofitable business units, is likely what has allowed this diversification to persist for so long.
In any case, Japanese companies are currently struggling with the friction between their traditional corporate culture and the superficial adoption of Western concepts like DX, Agile, meritocracy, job-based employment, and a startup-centric mindset. I suspect Korea might be facing similar structural clashes, though perhaps you are adapting at a much faster pace.
This particular article was decently nuanced though.
I will say that it often goes beyond "idealizing". I'd use the word "fetishizing".
I've wondered how much of this stems from being disaffected by the modern (particularly Western) world. I worked with an ethnically Chinese guy who was a massive weebu and that always struck me as odd given the Japan-China history.
Japan has always rubbed me the wrong way: misogyny, racism and denial about Japanese war crimes in WW2 mostly. Also the salaryman work culture. I see videos from Japanese workers and life honestly looks miserable. It's also a country that is dying. The samurais, ninjas, Ronin, shoguns, etc are cool though. Japanese history is fascinating.
My hot take here is that China is actually what people idealize Japan to be. China has the most competent government in the world and it's not even close. It's not problem-free. Nowhere is. But the transformation in the lives of ordinary Chinese people over the last few decades is unbelievable. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty.
It could be worse than Japan too. I think South Korea is that. As a non-Korean from the outside looking in, South Korea looks like a dystopian run by aristocratic (chaebol) families where the birth rate is the lowest in the world and it's in fact so low that if nothing changes, South Korea simply won't exist in 3 generations.
2. Post WWII Japan set the benchmark for pulling its people out of poverty in an astonishingly short period of time.
3. There have always been foreign, exotic cultures people have romanticized. The Romans romanticized Greece and ancient Egypt.
I've never been to South Korea. I'd like to go to Seoul. For me though, South Korea is a cautionary tale in what happens to a country when a handful of families get to control all the wealth, all the good jobs, all the good university places and so on while the working class gets squeezed ever more. There are cultural issues here too that are distinctly Korean, namely that women are expected to have a demanding job AND have children, look after those children and take care of the house (traditionally).
Young people in general aren't stupid (again, in general, not just China). They can look around and see they have limited opportunities, will probably never own a home, won't ever be able to retire, will have crippling debt (for college in the US), etc so it's natural to look around and say "what exactly is the point?" and, in some cases, just opt out. In the US you see this with things like "van life", moving to cheaper countries, tiny homes or just spending all your money on experiences because, to you, you have no future. I thin kreligion historically played a huge role in getting people to do those things anyway. But now, why would Alfred Q. Zoomer live paycheck-to-paycheck doing a shitty job just so Jeff Bezos can have slightly more money?
China at least has invested in eliminating poverty, building infrastructure (eg the high speed rail network) and transforming the lives of everyday Chinese people. Like I see Tiktoks from a rural Chinese woman who works in a shoe factory for $11/day but only really spends $1/day to live. She lives in a modern house (20+ years ago it was a rundown shack), has Internet, watches live streams, rides everywhere on an electric scooter and pays for everything digitally (of course).
Part of China's current woes are that Xi Jinping quietly just popped the real estate bubble and declared that houses are for living, not speculation. That market has been correcting itself for years ever since. But that's a long-term good.
I'll take the transformation of Chinese lives (not just in Tier 1 cities) over what's happened in coal mining country, the Rust Belt and agricultural communities in the US. It's not even close.
I suspect your information might be out-of-date because I've seen videos of tourists in Tier 3/4 cities (let alone Tier 2) and honestly it beats most US cities. There's no official list of tier cities but Chongqing is widely considered a Tier 2 city. Chongqing is widely called the "cyberpunk city" [4].
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/china-...
[2]: https://thediplomat.com/2026/05/why-china-treats-lying-flat-...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-youth-jobl...
By abandoning the policies that put them in poverty.
The story of China in the 20th century is largely one of missing the bus of the progress that was happening around them. The mechanization of Japan enabled the atrocities you mentioned because China refused to see the writing on the wall (from a balance of power perspective, Japan doesn't get a pass for what they did). Then, when they finally do have a revolution, they end up joining up with the group that weilds absolute power and causes catastrophic famine.
In the 21st century, they've slowly begun adopting western policies and are reaping the benefits while eroding their previously disasterous national policies.
The CCP has become more prosperous as it's become more like Hong Kong.
There are people who romanticize Japan/Asia because they never were there and it is not attainable for them.
There are people who romanticize Japan/Asia because they have direct business interests to do so like selling dreams to the first group.
Lack of mobility across companies (no price discovery on wages), lack of specialization (no focus), age based hierarchy (anti-meritocratic). None of these sound good for a well-tuned system.
I suspect much of Japan's stagnation is due to this system.
The article's thesis statement isn't "the Japanese approach is better," but that business practices like these bundle together, that they're very difficult to change, and that each bundle has different advantages and disadvantages.
Ironically, you've proved a deeper point about how amusing HN is: we all tend to project our fantasies onto the articles we're discussing, even if we didn't fully read or understand the article.
In reality, this system is largely sustained by the ruthless squeezing of subcontractors (for the record, I am Korean, but I actually like Japan), which is a massive social issue there. It’s very difficult for me to understand how anyone could view this structural dynamic as collaborative or horizontal.
If the author had concluded that their success in these niches stems from being an extremely vertical society where defying your superiors is simply not an option, I would have fully agreed. That aligns exactly with what I have experienced firsthand.
>"The andon method is really the J-mode in miniature. Information flows laterally, authority to act is widely distributed, and the people closest to the problems are the ones who fix it."
Does your definition of a 'horizotal culture' actually mean forcing people to work overtime just to hit deadlines? Are you sure you haven't completely confused 'horizotally' with 'top-down'
[1] https://www.jftc.go.jp/dk/guideline/unyoukijun/romuhitenka.h...
P.S. The link I provided is an official directive from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) explicitly warning large corporations to stop ruthlessly suppressing their subcontractors' labor costs.
This country’s economy is built on the sacrifice of others.
Walmart and Amazon ruthlessly squeeze their suppliers. They achieve low prices on some things and try to corner the market on others (and then raise prices). What I don't see them achieving (to the contrary, I see them failing spectacularly at) is the quality control that some Japanese companies excel at.
So there has to be something more to it than that.
In the highly fluid U.S. corporate ecosystem, mobility is always an option. If a supplier loses a contract with Walmart, they can still pivot to another massive retailer, even if it's not quite as large.
Japan and Korea, however, have small landmasses, and the reputational risk is absolute. If a company's reputation is damaged by a single failure or a lost contract, their next job simply vanishes. Because of this existential threat, they fundamentally cannot compromise on quality. Imagine what happens to a small supplier in Japan if they are cut off by a mega-retailer like Aeon Mall. There is no backup giant waiting to take them. They are finished.
So, while geographical and structural differences dictate this extreme pursuit of quality, framing it as a "horizontal culture" is completely wrong. As an East Asian, I can confidently say that "horizontal culture" is the single most mismatched term you could possibly use to describe East Asia
Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan
japanese Business Culture and Practices: A Guide to Twenty-First Century Japanese Business Protocols
This is the picture painted for me by the article. Vertical integration eliminates subcontractors. Horizontal integration squeezes them.
> If the author had concluded that their success in these niches stems from being an extremely vertical society where defying your superiors is simply not an option, I would have fully agreed. That aligns exactly with what I have experienced firsthand.
Same story here. When switching jobs is made difficult, the incentive is not to make waves.
> Does your definition of a 'horizotal culture' actually mean forcing people to work overtime just to hit deadlines?
Yes, provided your boss is working with you.
You are ignoring a lot of quality Japanese product have been producing for more than 50 years, which answer partly why idolise Japan question. But the so called squeezing of subcontractors is true as of any other American companies if not worldwide and yet they failed ( or mostly failed ) to achieve similar standing to Japanese counterparts in terms of quality.
You argued that this article (by David Oks) is an example of "how Westerners idealize Japan." I argued that this article does not idealize Japan, and that, if you interpreted Oks' article that way, then you didn't understand the article.
I didn't say that Japanese business culture is more "horizontal" than Western business culture, or that Japanese business culture is better in any particular way. I didn't even say that the article is right or wrong about anything.
All I did was to restate the thesis statement of the article, to clarify what the article actually says.
I don't harbor any particular affinity for Japan, or Japanese business culture. I know very little about it. I'm not an authority to speak on it, and I didn't.
You assumed what I believe without understanding what I wrote. You did exactly the same thing to me that you did to David Oks.
The overarching tone of this entire article is clear: it is searching for something in Japanese culture that is supposedly missing in Western culture. Throwing in a few lines of critique doesn't negate the fact that it is fundamentally romanticizing the system. The author explicitly dresses it up with nice words like 'horizontally flowing information' and 'consensus.'
But that is purely a Western academic fantasy. It completely ignores the extreme vertical hierarchy, the lack of geographic mobility, and a social structure with zero socio-economic exit strategies. He looked at it entirely through a Western lens. Now, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing in a vacuum—the way I see myself is different from how you see me, and there are pros and cons.
But the Andon culture acts like a Panopticon. If you pull it too much, it accumulates and ruins your performance review. There's a reason Toyota had massive issues with power harassment (pawahara), leading to a new employee's suicide. Frankly, as a Korean, I don't like criticizing Japan because people immediately assume I'm just being hateful due to our colonial history. I was purely pointing out the stark differences based on my own lived experience.
And now you're making cowardly excuses after initially being sarcastic and implying I couldn't read? Look, you make good games. Your game is beautiful, and your site is great. But let's just be honest here. If you just admitted it and said 'my bad,' we could move on. We are both adults. Yes, I got annoyed and spoke harshly, but let's not pretend your initial comment wasn't sarcastic. Don't treat people like idiots.
Let's just apologize to each other and end this. I've heard that the Japanese game industry actually does have a somewhat horizontal structure, so I understand why you might base your perspective on that. It's a natural cognitive bias.
Honestly, if you hadn't spoken so aggressively first, I would have just acknowledged your point and moved on. What's the point of fighting on the internet? Also, if you ever need a Korean translation for your game, let me know, I can help you out.
Anyway, I was pissed off and snapped at you, and since we are both adults responsible for our actions, I apologize for the harsh words on my end. But let's be real—it's perfectly valid for me to be offended when you accuse me of not properly reading the article.
Please go back and reread your own comment and ask yourself if it was truly a fair critique
There's almost no way these guys (low pass filter)can see the water they have been breathing since they were born unless they've had first hand experience that wakes them up (high pass filter)
Add to that (Western) (indie?) game-makers and hafu are both predominantly right-wing.. far-right, if you take a global perspective. Polite to the point of being offensive, though. :) Perhaps there are very very few opportunities in which to feel a loss of control in real life, or trained since infancy
That said, there's seems to be still a lot of useful info in article that bears "bookmarking"..
Anyways..
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Especially
Jesuit to Marxist or Marxist to Catholic is always interesting, but it's not quite an 180 life changer
Like sending Mormon kids to spread the faith in Indi-- er, Maharashtra
Unless said mobility is paid for by the company.
As part of the job rotation mentioned in the article, larger Japanese companies are also notorious for reassigning job locations, often at short notice and with zero care for family dynamics. Hence the tanshin-fu'nin phenomenon, where the husband is sent off to work at some factory or regional branch in the sticks for years while the wife brings up the kids elsewhere.
Anyway, you clearly know a lot about Japan, and I apologize if it came across as me just badmouthing the country. My original intent was simply to point out how drastically different things look from an East Asian perspective compared to a Western one. I didn't mean to keep painting Japan in a negative light—every system obviously has its pros and cons. I actually have fond memories of the unique, close-knit, family-like atmosphere that Japanese companies have
I think main difference is that there is very little tradition of company thinking they own something to the workers, and (I think) far more of companies just buying out their competition and then gutting any tradition and institutional knowledge within
> (Moving in Japan involves massive upfront rental fees like shikikin (deposit) and reikin (key money), making the physical act of relocating extremely prohibitive.)
I don't think that part is all that different? While we don't have "key money" it's still a big deal to take your life and move it somewhere else
Are they successful?
Japanese culture reflects certain western attitudes which make it stand out.
Do I detect resentment?
I'd say so. Not on all the branches of the cooperative, but it generates over €11 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 70,000 people with a very stable business. It might be a bit tricky to gauge success when the rewards and incentives aren’t quite the same as in your typical capitalist company, though.
In his science fiction novels, Kim Stanley Robinson frequently incorporates the Mondragon economic model to explore post-capitalist, worker-owned, and cooperative societies. I'd say KSR is a decently well-known S/F writer, so at least some westerners (and I'd assume many in this site) have already some idea of it. But I'd say it's true that it's easy to romanticize these kinds of singular situations and brush over the problems they might have.
So we had overtime for 2 months working from 10am to 4am just so that we could deliver the "feature complete" software. If any bugs were found they were classified as either blockers (feature cannot be shown without) or scheduled to be fixed after delivery.
My boss knew it was stupid, he didn't like it but it was the standard contract from that big Japanese company and we were small and they weren't going to change that.
Have never heard about it until now, but just looking through it, sounds great!
Oh, we're getting there. It's just a bit fringe right now, but Meta's $90 billion loss on VR and *gestures at various aspects of the Gamestop situation" and a few other incidents have people asking questions that are uncomfortable for the passive investmend fund crowd. Forget zombie companies; by many measures, America has a zombie economy.
It’s a huge structural flaw in the markets right now, yet it seems a flaw that isn’t really going to break anything which is weird in itself. I can’t help but feel that Wall Street is going to find the right place to kick at some point in order to have the whole house of cards come tumbling down for a while so they can buy cheap and negate/steal years of contributions from people buying index funds. Not sure how or when but I’m sure they’re working on it.
I can't shake the feeling of a grand fleecing incoming - and honestly, most big financial companies I know are against it because the blowback of inevitably bankrupting the firefighters&nurses pension fund will be congressional hearings and piercings of corporate veils.
Seems like the feds are pushing for it - for reasons I cannot fathom.
I think HN'er are smart enough to not idealize everything about Japan.
For example you can be in awe about how clean and safe the country is and how precisely on time all subways train are without idealizing toilet that stream water up your arse.
So without idealizing the one Japanese thing that is inarguably good?
Replace 'Westerners' with Americans and you are spot on.
I have never met any European that glorifies any part of Japan (I'd see Asia as a whole), most of them will tell you how the tall buildings make them feel little and how the society is beyond oppressive.
Whatever meritocracy exists in capitalism is ironed out by those rigid hierarchies.
I am not sure what is appealing about Japan, Korea or any of these parts of the world, to me they are full of plastic, sugar and late stage capitalism that makes the Americans look as socialists.
I do strongly suspect that a certain type of male likes these places for reasons I cannot even hold in my mind for more than a few seconds.
Didn't France use to be quite Japano-phile? (At least for movies and anime/manga, but also cuisine). Or is this outdated knowledge now?
this theory is typically mentioned when introducing the Theory of the Firm, i.e. why do companies exist at all? why not everyone just freelances, and when you need a marketing/finance/legal/coding person, you just contract one on the free market? the idea is that there are always frictions when doing business with someone new (is this person good? trust worthy? how do i find out?), and how much friction there is determines how big the firm will grow (to incorporate functions in-house, or expand to other industries).
in a perfect frictionless economy, it could indeed be true that business transactions all happen at the smallest unit, i.e. the individual. at the other extreme, there would just be one firm that coordinates all economic activities. all real world economies sit some where in between.
Western Japanophiles, especially from the US, and even if they speak the language and have lived there, are mostly ignorant and their idea of Japan is a full phantasy.
If HN was Brit-dominated, while less romanticised perhaps we probably would seem oddly fascinated with say France, to our minority members elsewhere.
Where does it not? As in which countries are not like this?
"Social standing" in this case means if your girlfriend's parents will let you marry her. Not, like, who likes your LinkedIn posts.
It's not at all like in the article, it's not horizontal, and very much hierchcal and rigid.
And it can be seen in japanese software, it looks like it was designed from request sheet without actually understanding why. It's often nonsensical and extremely convoluted.
Most of the good japanese software is actually developed in the west by subcontractors. For example Sony games
I’ve been promoting it and its organizational structure for a decade on this website and I’m one of the oldest members on HN
This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is that this system is heavily driven by Japan's unique, subtle classism. It's a highly collectivist society with strict age-based milestones and immense pressure to secure traditional employment. In Japan, your corporate affiliation often dictates your social standing.
The author paints the lack of shareholder pressure as the secret behind their successful diversification. While true for a few, the flip side is that it created a massive 'zombie company' problem—a heavily discussed issue in Korea and Japan that the West seems largely blind to.
Also, the idea of a 'horizontal culture' in Japan is a myth, especially in software. Even a glance at the Japanese web(5ch, onJ etc...) reveals a deeply entrenched vertical hierarchy. In my experience working with Japanese developers, their reliance on the legacy Waterfall model and an exhausting chain of approvals and reporting was far from horizontal. (Though I admit my sample size is small, it heavily contradicts the Western narrative).
I agree that this rigid system fosters the tacit knowledge needed for hardware and materials. Still, it proves that we all tend to project our fantasies onto cultures we don't fully understand. The divergence in perspectives on HN never fails to amuse me.