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.