(2) As someone whose obsession with anime even annoys people at anime conventions, my take is that irony has a special place in Japanese culture. For instance they say they have filial piety but they have high rates of elder abuse. Allegedly they have a pacifist constitution but they have a large “Japan Self Defense Force”. There is always an outsider and insider view of a situation which is fertile ground for “normalization of deviance”, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchi–soto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae
(3) “Continuous improvement” optimizes the happy path at the expense of resilience to exceptional events. For instance just in time production was crippled by the supply chain shocks of the pandemic. At Tokaimura they were mixing nuclear fuel and were (a) making a higher enrichment than they ever did before and (b) had modified their tools to speed production up. (b) is a competitive advantage in most places but in nuclear fuel processing you have to always avoid forming a critical mass and that is done through applying rules to the process. They got away with it… Until they didn’t.
