Difficulty of Japanese in adding definite values to its products which justly more money to be paid

In the movie "Back to the Future Part II" there is a famous dialogue between an American adult in '50s, Doc and an American teen in '80s, Marty:

Doc: No wonder it didn’t work, this piece of Junk says made in Japan.
Marty: What do you mean? All the best stuff comes from Japan.

"Made in Japan" changed the meaning between these two generations. From "cheap but junk" into "cheap and excellent". Interestingly, for Japanese themselves, the general recognition have never reached such a praise and it remained "cheap but good enough" or "great ordinary".


One reason is that so strong the brief of Japanese has been "all the best stuff come from outside of Japan". The country was located in the eastern terminal of the Silk Road through which all sorts of products and literatures were commerced and reached to Japan from various regions all the way along.

Another reason why Japanese people do not regard "Made in Japan" as premium is the high quality and reliability of these products have come from thorough eliminations of "waste" by famous rigorous Kaizen continuous improvement process. Japanese like minimalism but they do not regard as "premium" to pay extra money. It is hard for Japanese to represent "excess" which often regarded as "waste".


Difficulty of Japanese in adding definite values to its products which justly more money to be paid can be observed in the struggle of Toyota in establishing premium status of its Lexus brand. However, the difficulty is more severe in software and service industries where they cannot provide material products with definite functionalities which justify their prices more easily. Thus they often resort to "extra works" the employees put into their services and/or supports.

Unfortunately, the practice is worsening the working conditions of employees of Japanese software/service industries.

Why Japanese software/service industries failed to follow Kaizen and zero-accidents tradition

Recently, I bought a second-hand Nikon New FM2. It is a real gem of Japanese precision manufacturing which follows the tradition of Karakuri works.

Japanese people are good at designing not only automated machines but also production lines. The incremental improvement of manufacturing process called Kaizen and the initiative to reduce occupational hazards to the minimum - zero - called Zero-sai (zero-accdients) were the pinnacle of it.

Then, why Japan has been loosing its edge in software and service industries? Are Kaizen and Zero-sai irrelevant in those industries? No, companies and organisations around the world in software/service industries are applying those methodologies and getting results

Actually, Japan promoted national initiatives aiming to kick start its software industries based on the consent of "software manufacturing factory" in 1980's. Japanese government estimated the number of shortage of programmers would be 600,000 in 1990 and started various national projects to establish measures to train and provide them. Unfortunately, those initiatives were severely misdirected judging by today's standard. They were fixated to strictly waterfall development approaches, systems with extremely centralised controls and closed network topologies.

So Japanese government had wasted enormous resources for training 600,000 people equipped with outdated skills. As it was based on centralised, waterfall, closed paradigm, bottom-up corrections and improvements like Kaizen and Zero-san could not happen. If it had been after object-oriented paradigms and distributed processing models, it would have been a different story - analogies from manufacturing processes could have been far more easily applied. Then, Kaizen and zero-faults could have been features of Japanese software productions.

For service industries, a different story applies. I will write about it in the next post.

Efficiency should not be the objective of its own

The fire on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner at London Heathrow Airport reignited concerns on the airworthiness of the new plane with lengthened records of troubles, and contrary to its nickname, it is starting to look more like a nightmare.

Dreamliner features heaps of innovative state of art technologies originally intended for a more futuristic airplane to fly just barely under Mach 1 called the Sonic Cruiser. I think those technologies were too much for the not-so-exiting purpose, fuel-efficiency.

Every housewife knows well that any flashy new features claiming that they will save time and money in household should not be taken as their face values. They often end up higher costs, longer efforts and lower utilisations than the time-tested ordinary ways with wise, sure and simple inventions. Dreamliner may have fallen the same pitfall.

Also, there is a problem about the motivation of engineers. If engineers are tasked with solving problems with newly introduced technologies, which objective is more motivating, to create the fastest commercial jetliner, or to create the most economical jetliner? The answer would be evident.

Of course, to create something very economical is a noble purpose. However, it is not enough to motivate a person just because the work supposed to do is a good thing. Every school teacher must admit it. Also, when you are told to do make a plane or an automotive more economical, do you suppose you would be lavishly paid for it?

Efficiency should not be the objective of its own. As a human nature, it just does not work. In this sense, it is not efficient at all. It should always be linked to something much more motivational for the people to do the job.

Incompatibility of seniority systems with disruptive innovations

The seniority system plays a significant role in Japanese culture. When you learn Japanese language in an advanced level, you would notice it in the uses of a different set of respectful expressions to elders than of general polite expressions to peers. From the seating positions at a dinner table to payment systems in companies it affects every aspect of Japanese society. It may seem to be social pecking order and unfortunately sometimes it actually is, but traditionally it should be more accommodating and accompanied by passing on of time-tested wisdom and leadership by examples as an elders responsibilities.

Japan is not the only country to retain such a prominent seniority system but Korea has an even stricter one. Once I acquainted with a Korean gentleman at a cosy bar in Tokyo and we started conversations very casually and friendly. But eventually it turned out that I was by far senior than him and he turned sober immediately with his face pale and began apologising for his rudeness. It was quite hard to calm him down and convince him I was not insulted at all.

The cultural system of emphasising on respect for elders is not necessarily bad especially in the culture of diligence and commitment for lifetime learning. However, the recent technological roller-coaster with disruptive innovations changed the entire landscape. Time-tested wisdom is now often obsolete and even obstructing before the advancements of technologies. Because in a seniority system it may be troublesome to promote a youth with greater knowledge and familiarity about latest technologies than elders who generally do not appreciate such new developments.

It is interesting that recently Koreans are doing better in high-tech industires than Japanese despite its sterner seniority system than of Japan. In my opinion, it works counter-wise. As having a sterner seniority system, Korean youths see more opportunities overseas and succeed in business in the global market for accelerating innovations. Japan is just comfortable enough to stay but prohibiting to innovate within for its youths.

Proud Japanese elders are not happy with their current odds against the rival country. They are openly suggesting that a stricter seniority system like Korea's would be required to restore Japan's once mighty high-tech industries. However I think it would not work and even if it works it would be because Japanese youths abandon their country over more accommodating countries - the result Japanese elders would not want.

Return to manufacturing or go for object-oriented?

I started learning a new programming language today. It is Ruby. Having heard about it and knowing it was made in Japan but somehow I hadn't picked it up until a health IT standard guru mentioned it in his blog. As soon as my expression of interest on twitter about using it for building a knowledge base system, a suggestion from a generous geek came and I started looking into its Java VM based implementation, JRuby.

Ruby is a kind of object-oriented programming language. You can write a book on the object-oriented paradigm/programming or OOP, but let me say it just simply here, that it is a way of writing programs by putting together heaps of well-designed and proven-to-work parts and modules just like manufacturing automobiles. Actually it came from an idea of turning software engineering into a kind of manufacturing rather than of art.

However, Japan, which was once the manufacturing powerhouse flooding the world with its products, has not seen any significant software products influencing the world except rare exceptions like Ruby, the very tool for OOP. "Return to manufacturing" is the current popular slogan in Japan with the Japanese word "Mono-zukuri" which means "manufacturing things". But I think "Go for object-oriented" is more suitable slogan for that country because good objects may produce good things but it would be dangerous to making material things primary objects.

Ray Murakami

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori 2013

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori 2013, the Māori language week 2013 starts in New Zealand today and the the theme for this year is Ngā ingoa Māori, Māori names.

As Māori and Japanese languages have similar (almost identical) pronunciations and intonations, the Māori names sound awesome and make me feel at home. It is great that many places in New Zealand (Aotearoa) are called in Māori names even in English speaking and even when English names are popular, they still retain Māori names in most cases.

It is a bit shame that English speakers in general do not bother original pronunciations of foreign words but it is good to see that Pakeha (New Zealand Europeans) are at least try to recognise original sounds. Still I can easily surprise Pakeha by pronouncing Māori sentences just like a native speaker.

As there are many free online materials like this, I would recommend fellow Japanese to learn this beautiful language, as it would wipe out their fears for pronunciation of foreign languages, especially of English. 

Ray Murakami

Tolerance to the unexpected

I have changed the title and site URL of this blog again. I hope it does not trouble anyone too much as I had left this without any updates for quite some time.

The initial title I started this blog with was "More a Kiwi than a Kiji" meaning that I am becoming a Kiwi, the New Zealand national bird, than a Kiji, the Japanese counterpart and representing my sentiment as an expatriate.

The second and previous title was "Ray's Adverse Events Report in the Kiwi Life of a Zen Health IT Analyst", a very lengthy one as the result of trying to pack as much as information on who I am and what I do but I now think it very verbose.

So, I made the new one shortly "Trilogues within me" which I hope to stay for a longer time than previous two.

The new title reflects the increased significance of other two languages than Japanese in my thoughts, especially of English. Honestly, nowadays I am more relaxed in talking and corresponding in English than in Japanese even though the latter is my mother tongue.

It does not necessarily mean that things go more smoothly in English for me. Quite opposite is often the case. Actually more often things would go wrong in many reasons including different cultural expectations. However, I know misunderstandings cause more damages on the both sides in communications in Japanese, because those are less tolerant to the unexpected, namely mistakes.

Now I am so away from the ordinal everyday life in Japan or in Japanese culture, I am afraid my values are so apart from those of people living Japanese way of life.

A while ago, there were disputes in Japanese social media about a famous disabled author refused to dine in an artisan Italian restaurant because of the reservation without declaring need for assistance with wheel-chair access. Eventually the restaurant owner apologised with an excuse that he and his staff just couldn't handle the situation without prior arrangements and didn't mean any discriminations.

I think it is a good example that communications in Japanese suddenly became difficult when something unexpected happens. So Japanese are generally have been taught to behave according to others' expectations. I wish that tolerance to the unexpected becomes norm as the ever increasing global   exchanges require it even for people in Japan.

Ray Murakami