Still Japan is the country where companies such as Sony and Nintendo originate from and the people over there certainly can be creative/disruptive.

One such company that can truly change the world as opposed to creating another chat app is euglena: http://www.euglena.jp/en/

Sony and Nintendo is now stagnating. So I'm not sure what innovation is anymore in Japan.

The conformism, herd and inflexibility of generations helped the downward spiral of Japan. Which is really such a shame from such a beautiful country.

Maybe now but they have innovated in the past, and Nintendo still does to a certain degree.

It's not like their society became more conformist all of a sudden. In fact it was probably even more so a couple of years/decades earlier.

Look at the manga industry: there are mangas that touch on virtually any genre. That is a testament to the creativity of some of the people in this land.

I am not saying they will become as creative as the people in SV but I believe they definitely have the potential to bring innovative concepts to life.

I lived in Japan for 6 years and found that there is no more innovation there. It's because of the way they are a self preserving economy. Things that are available in Japan can't be used overseas. Which is the main reason why they are falling behind.

TVs, mobile phones (before the iPhone came out in Japan), voltage aren't available to be used overseas.

View my comments here from a previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6717211

Or look at board gaming in recent year. Japan is certainly capable of disruptive innovation.

No, no. The animal spirits are still there. But the structure of the economy is locked down tight. New business models that threaten to disrupt the established oligopolies are routinely killed off through the simple mechanism of outlawing them.

Still, there is room for innovation in new product categories. And technology is changing fast enough that new categories appear every few years. Take mobile gaming, for instance. And it comes as no surprise to me that the Number 1 Bitcoin exchange is Japanese. They have to deal in Bitcoins because the rest of the financial sector is locked down so tight that even Paypal can barely operate here.

> And it comes as no surprise to me that the Number 1 Bitcoin exchange is Japanese.

MtGox's not Japanese, really. It was founded by Jed McCaleb (American) who may have been living in NYC when he started it, and was bought out by, I think, some Europeans. It may now be located in Japan and have some Japanese employees, but in a way, it is an exception that proves the rule.

That's kind of disappointing.

Why is Mt. Gox in Japan at all, then? Is it simply because of the popularity of trading card games in Japan?

I have no idea. Japan doesn't seem like a great place to be doing something like MtGox (and AFAIK, _Magic: The Gathering_ is not popular in Japan).

I'm actually not even sure if individuals with such a spirit can even do much in the environment (funding, exit options, corruption, backdoor dealing, etc.) they are in. Piggybacking on trends abroad (like how Coiny is cloning Square) might actually be a wise strategy given their context.

Germany's Rocket Internet is doing pretty well on piggy backing. It would probably work in Japan, too.