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So Japanese government had wasted enormous resources for training 600,000 people equipped with outdated skills.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.
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