This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is that this system is heavily driven by Japan's unique, subtle classism. It's a highly collectivist society with strict age-based milestones and immense pressure to secure traditional employment. In Japan, your corporate affiliation often dictates your social standing.
The author paints the lack of shareholder pressure as the secret behind their successful diversification. While true for a few, the flip side is that it created a massive 'zombie company' problem—a heavily discussed issue in Korea and Japan that the West seems largely blind to.
Also, the idea of a 'horizontal culture' in Japan is a myth, especially in software. Even a glance at the Japanese web(5ch, onJ etc...) reveals a deeply entrenched vertical hierarchy. In my experience working with Japanese developers, their reliance on the legacy Waterfall model and an exhausting chain of approvals and reporting was far from horizontal. (Though I admit my sample size is small, it heavily contradicts the Western narrative).
I agree that this rigid system fosters the tacit knowledge needed for hardware and materials. Still, it proves that we all tend to project our fantasies onto cultures we don't fully understand. The divergence in perspectives on HN never fails to amuse me.
Quite the opposite - for me, anyway.
FWIW, as a Westerner, I find the Mondragon Corporation to be fascinating and something I've read a lot about because there's no way we've figured out the ideal sort of setup for a business (or government, or any sort of human organization, given appropriate context) in the year 2026.
We have a lot to learn, and while "different" doesn't always mean "better," I strongly believe being exposed to "different" is necessary for us to devise novel approaches to human organization.
In the US, the American Solidarity Party[3] draws from distributism, for instance.
[1] https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-di...
I still admire Mondragon and wish there were more companies like it, but now I try to remind myself that most characterizations from the outside are surely lacking in nuance.
That said... It's hard to deny the romanticization and projection point above.
Beer goggles can be a mind expanding POV, but you need to be aware of it or you just end up being wrong for silly reasons.
A sober look at different is a good thing. Ooh... I agree that better and more advanced org concepts are likely still to be developed. But Otoh...
The article's thesis statement isn't "the Japanese approach is better," but that business practices like these bundle together, that they're very difficult to change, and that each bundle has different advantages and disadvantages.
Ironically, you've proved a deeper point about how amusing HN is: we all tend to project our fantasies onto the articles we're discussing, even if we didn't fully read or understand the article.
In reality, this system is largely sustained by the ruthless squeezing of subcontractors (for the record, I am Korean, but I actually like Japan), which is a massive social issue there. It’s very difficult for me to understand how anyone could view this structural dynamic as collaborative or horizontal.
If the author had concluded that their success in these niches stems from being an extremely vertical society where defying your superiors is simply not an option, I would have fully agreed. That aligns exactly with what I have experienced firsthand.
>"The andon method is really the J-mode in miniature. Information flows laterally, authority to act is widely distributed, and the people closest to the problems are the ones who fix it."
Does your definition of a 'horizotal culture' actually mean forcing people to work overtime just to hit deadlines? Are you sure you haven't completely confused 'horizotally' with 'top-down'
[1] https://www.jftc.go.jp/dk/guideline/unyoukijun/romuhitenka.h...
P.S. The link I provided is an official directive from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) explicitly warning large corporations to stop ruthlessly suppressing their subcontractors' labor costs.
This country’s economy is built on the sacrifice of others.
Walmart and Amazon ruthlessly squeeze their suppliers. They achieve low prices on some things and try to corner the market on others (and then raise prices). What I don't see them achieving (to the contrary, I see them failing spectacularly at) is the quality control that some Japanese companies excel at.
So there has to be something more to it than that.
You are ignoring a lot of quality Japanese product have been producing for more than 50 years, which answer partly why idolise Japan question. But the so called squeezing of subcontractors is true as of any other American companies if not worldwide and yet they failed ( or mostly failed ) to achieve similar standing to Japanese counterparts in terms of quality.
This is the picture painted for me by the article. Vertical integration eliminates subcontractors. Horizontal integration squeezes them.
> If the author had concluded that their success in these niches stems from being an extremely vertical society where defying your superiors is simply not an option, I would have fully agreed. That aligns exactly with what I have experienced firsthand.
Same story here. When switching jobs is made difficult, the incentive is not to make waves.
> Does your definition of a 'horizotal culture' actually mean forcing people to work overtime just to hit deadlines?
Yes, provided your boss is working with you.
The interesting question in all of these kinds of things is "are there ideas we can take to gain the strengths of other systems or patch the weaknesses in ours?". Looking at Japan specifically, I think I speak for most westerners in saying that if we could get a little more stability and less financial-quarter-driven behavior without taking the whole kit of lifetime employment and zombie companies, that would be a good thing. The author points out just how bundled that is, so it's a tough nut to crack.
One model that does give us that is the 'Untouchable visionary CEO' of Jobs and Musk, but I think the popularity of that approach is also limited, partially because of all the not so visionary CEOs trying to be Jobs, and partially because working for those guys is terrible. They inevitably seem to become tyrants.
Most Americans I know are familiar with the unending work culture of Japanese white collar workers (if only a parody version of it), and want no part of it.
Americans including myself love saying we’re busy though.
HN has had posts romanticizing them, maybe check those
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32622140
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41438060
> it created a massive 'zombie company' problem—a heavily discussed issue in Korea and Japan that the West seems largely blind to
Zombie companies in the west are mentioned as a low/ZIRP phenomena. But the west shouldn't have as big an issue with those because companies, when less diversified, get killed off more often by interest rate hikes.
The EU’s crisis schemes like furloughing employees en masse dull the pain but also do prolong some companies’ lives. The US historically has had much more brutal impacts but quicker recoveries.
In Japan the corporation primarily provides stable income and employment for society, and secondarily returns on capital invested. In America, corporations primarily provide returns on capital invested and secondarily provide stable income and employment.
This shows up in the data too. Japanese corporations are less likely to go out of business but provide worse investment returns. American corporations provide better investment returns, but the citizens have to deal with layoffs.
Most citizens would prefer stability to growth, but I think the tradeoff has a lot of downstream consequences.
Are you Japanese? Because this doesn't match what I know about Japanese companies, like Sony for example, who operate in a very American way.
Your image on Japanese vs American companies feels like the copy and pasted idealistic impression of what American redditors imagine Japanese companies would be like, rather than reality.
People want personal stability, which in our current society means a stable job.
That doesn't have to be the case, though.
Overall, economic growth is good for society as a whole, so it makes sense that a state should encourage it as much as it can.
This means that what is good for an individual is not the same as what is good for society.
I think the ideal solution would be to keep the risk-taking in business that you need for good growth, and instead provide stability through strong social support services, like healthy unemployment insurance or UBI. That way, everyone can take risks to try to drive the economy forward, but not starve if things go poorly.
The problem with basing the language in the aggregate, is implies that distribution doesn’t matter, and all modern economic models agree. This is a big problem for the reality of people living in ever increasing inequality. Money is a competitive resource, we use it to bid for real resources. If constant economic growth disproportionately goes to the already wealthy, it worsens inequality when resources to exploit become more scarce. It’s one thing to have massive swaths of untouched natural world to exploit for human benefits, but those days are long gone IMO.
It took me a minute to figure out the typo ("depraved" instead of "deprived")
Japan compares much better to the US in terms of how much wealth the top 1% control. 24.6% vs 34.8% according to https://wid.world
Graph here: https://imgur.com/a/UwWvaHW
American CEOs are on the board of 8 companies but spend 5 minutes a year combined at the offices of those companies. They spend their weekends at private islands off the coast of the US Virgin Islands with other billionaires. They fire employees who ask for health care benefits or a day off. They actively endorse political candidates who went to the same private island with them and who will lengthen working hours, reduce benefits, and make it easier to fire employees. They want global surveillance to track anyone who's ever even considered saying anything bad about them. When it's possible to inject ads directly into our brains, those CEOs will force their employees to do it.
As an American who's been in Japan for a very long time and worked at Japanese companies, Japanese companies don't pay big bucks, but there are fewer deranged ultra rich people within them.
And in the long-term, people start fleeing the "stable" countries for already-grown ones.
So we had overtime for 2 months working from 10am to 4am just so that we could deliver the "feature complete" software. If any bugs were found they were classified as either blockers (feature cannot be shown without) or scheduled to be fixed after delivery.
My boss knew it was stupid, he didn't like it but it was the standard contract from that big Japanese company and we were small and they weren't going to change that.
Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere. They present cherry-picked aspects of both countries that make China look bad and Japan look good. In reality every country has its good and bad aspects.
This is just part of the propaganda machine and what politicians want you to believe, in an effort to align their populations to be supportive of their foreign policy and military motives. That ultimately trickles down to things like this. When people come to HN, or any place, with rose-colored glasses of Japan, they will seek confirmations of that rose color everywhere.
As an American educated by the American public education system and indoctrinated by American media, our government is certainly stupid and vengeful enough to make me want to support this if it were true, but it's just not. The much more banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by projecting a favorable image of itself via the media it exports, whereas China is just comparatively terrible at exercising this sort of soft power.
We're talking about media and narratives mainly.
On idealizing Japan, people here seem to think it's benefic and pushed by Japan, where I think it's more complicated. If the goal is to keep the US customers and workers in a state of fear and adversity, you need a credible threat from a somewhat powerful enemy, and idealization becomes needed.
That was Japan a few decades ago, that lead to the bashing movement, and I think it kept going t a smaller pace still, while China got set as the next unstoppable threat.
I think the default approach in the West - and that's not a US-specific thing - is to treat exotic faraway lands with a mix of curiosity and awe. But China is a geopolitical rival with a political system that rightly makes many Westerners queasy, so it doesn't benefit from that anymore.
This is actually a great example for extant romanticization of China. People lauding Chinese expediency in the context of industry and construction often don't realize it's almost entirely enabled by extreme underregulation and underenforcement of industrial safety standards. Chinese people themselves will often point this out, though depending on the person they may frame it more in a style of "The West is slow because of all of the red tape!"
Of the subset of Westerners who are aware of this, sometimes I have to balk at how many of them will take that framing to heart and paint it as a positive thing. Even most Chinese don't have a positive view of it, not in reality. At most it's a tragic necessity required to build China up, though younger Chinese rightly tend to see it for what it is: corporate exploitation of laborers.
Of course in the context of solving political problems, the Politburo readily cutting through its own invented problems is another matter.
You seem to be an American so I'm very confused. You'd have to be willingfully blind at this point to not see the anti-chinese propaganda that has been going on in America for (at least) the past decade.
Meanwhile, on platforms like YouTube and communities such as Hacker News, the bias is even much stronger. China, along with the broader “Axis of Resistance” and third worldist camp (though China arguably doesn’t fully belong there), is often praised, while the West, including Japan, receives disproportionate criticism.
Now back in the 80s? Back in the 80s, despite being aligned with the West, they were perceived a lot like China is today. Everyone was scared that they were going to start eating the West's lunch and various negative stereotypes and exaggerations started to bubble up: it was a futuristic land, but a futuristic land of suicides, with little drone-like salarymen crammed into little shoebox apartments the size of a Western bathroom, working 20 hour days.
Between the Plaza Accords and the bubble bursting and decade after decade of Lost Decades, the Japanese threat was successfully neutralized. I think Cool Japan is mostly something they've earned for themselves, frankly.
Yep. A lot of cyberpunk fiction from that time that demonized corporate influence and power was inspired by the rise and perceptions of Japanese technology companies.
I can remember one of the American news magazine shows, maybe 20/20, showing a Japanese school with long hours and intense discipline and contrasting it with fat, illiterate American kids (the same stereotypes were made about the Soviet Union).
A lot of the perception of Japan, especially among Gen X and younger, is influenced from exports of Japanese culture. Nintendo, JRPGs, Manga, Anime, and even the quirky stuff reflects well on the Japanese though American eyes. No propaganda is needed.
So basically just what the west is becoming?
You mean, American bathroom.
Apartments in major Europe cities aren't that much bigger than Japanese but for sure the bathroom sucks.
Alternatively it could be due to emergent outcomes from our societies and systems.
Is there a word or concept that explains the idea that "people in power are controlling us"? Maybe the word is related to hierarchy? I also see it in conspiracy thinking (Rothschild, lizard people). The assumption that somebody is in charge manipulating us, and that we can discern their motives based on what their incentives are imagined to be.
A past example might be the red menace - which appeared to me to be part of US culture (politicians pushed it but I think they also took advantage of a natural us-versus-them zeitgeist). People seem to collectively desire a labeled enemy (you also see it about sports teams).
Or see the sibling comment "banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by projecting a favorable image of itself" where manipulation is imagined as the base cause. I just don't see the world that way (apart from the scientific difficultly of discerning cause versus effect in human systems).
Maybe it is just all memes.
Individually even very well educated people don't seem to see systems and effects of systems: e.g. every thread about economics e.g. politicians pretending they are in charge when systems have fucked them.
(For the record, I would put Japan above both China and the US at the moment in that regard.)
this theory is typically mentioned when introducing the Theory of the Firm, i.e. why do companies exist at all? why not everyone just freelances, and when you need a marketing/finance/legal/coding person, you just contract one on the free market? the idea is that there are always frictions when doing business with someone new (is this person good? trust worthy? how do i find out?), and how much friction there is determines how big the firm will grow (to incorporate functions in-house, or expand to other industries).
in a perfect frictionless economy, it could indeed be true that business transactions all happen at the smallest unit, i.e. the individual. at the other extreme, there would just be one firm that coordinates all economic activities. all real world economies sit some where in between.
Related: In most of the world, carmakers separate out a luxury brand from their other products: Honda with Acura, Toyota with Lexus, etc. In Japan, they don't. The explanation I usually get is that the culture primarily associates luxury with "being attached to the big-name corporation". So you don't really improve on that by introducing another smaller brand, even one you build up as luxury.
See also the patio11 comment:
>>My salary was $30k, but there is some tangible value in having a pocket full of business cards which practically read "Attention, person who has just been handed this card: give the bearer whatever he wants. We're good for it. If you don't, we will remember." That status is very much not the same as the one you get if you combine two part-time jobs into the same level of income.
Speaking for myself, I'd find that very interesting! I just stumbled over an article about it a few days ago, and don't think it's weird that different parts of the world would be interested in a regional business phenomenon.
I'd be pleasantly surprised, very impressed and it would make me reach out to have an offline chat. Not exaggerating.
It's not at all like in the article, it's not horizontal, and very much hierchcal and rigid.
And it can be seen in japanese software, it looks like it was designed from request sheet without actually understanding why. It's often nonsensical and extremely convoluted.
Most of the good japanese software is actually developed in the west by subcontractors. For example Sony games
Lack of mobility across companies (no price discovery on wages), lack of specialization (no focus), age based hierarchy (anti-meritocratic). None of these sound good for a well-tuned system.
I suspect much of Japan's stagnation is due to this system.
This is absolutely true in the US as well, by the way. People will treat you differently if you work for a FAANG company. People take a lot of pride in telling others they work for one. And we even have a word for someone who used to work for Google, for instance.
Western Japanophiles, especially from the US, and even if they speak the language and have lived there, are mostly ignorant and their idea of Japan is a full phantasy.
There are people who romanticize Japan/Asia because they never were there and it is not attainable for them.
There are people who romanticize Japan/Asia because they have direct business interests to do so like selling dreams to the first group.
If HN was Brit-dominated, while less romanticised perhaps we probably would seem oddly fascinated with say France, to our minority members elsewhere.
This particular article was decently nuanced though.
IMO, the tight-knit division of labor between Toyota and its subcontractors is a slightly different story from the broad diversification within a single corporation. While the latter was historically bolstered by strong industry-academia ties (often driven by university cliques), we rarely see this kind of broad diversification happening in recent years. That said, Japan's traditional "membership-based" employment system, combined with a cultural reluctance to shut down unprofitable business units, is likely what has allowed this diversification to persist for so long.
In any case, Japanese companies are currently struggling with the friction between their traditional corporate culture and the superficial adoption of Western concepts like DX, Agile, meritocracy, job-based employment, and a startup-centric mindset. I suspect Korea might be facing similar structural clashes, though perhaps you are adapting at a much faster pace.
The Japanese company had some rituals were a bit weird, but harmless/charmingly quaint like mandatory volunteer days, keeping a copy of the founder's precepts on my desk for executive walkthroughs. They also had some bad tendencies, like praising employees for being there at 6AM/8PM. If something didn't work, they'd give it a bit of runway to see if it could pull through before cutting back. When there were layoffs, it was the whole division failing (each division competed with the others). It's hard to imagine what kind of political statements would have been offensive to that employer, it was just a neutral job. Really, the worst part was subpar compensation (and I still felt spoiled compared to Japanese coworkers).
My next job was at an American megacorp. The executives would give a holiday speech about "social responsibility" and how well we were doing, then layoff a factory. The employer was constantly involving themselves with US national politics, but employees were expected to refrain from having political opinions of their own.
Reminds me of my first job in state government where the incredibly underpaid workers had to go through bureaucratic paperwork if they needed a second job to pay the rent (ostensibly because of the conflict of interest risk)
Yet the governor was a known slumlord. I’m sure there’s no potential conflict of interest there.
During work hours or after work hours (for both)?
Most HNers tend to be in their mid-30s to 50s so a lot of Japan-philia does appear to stem from an older mental image from the 1990s to 2010s.
> This essay on Japan's corporate diversification and physical tacit knowledge is an interesting read. However, as an East Asian, my assessment is that this system is heavily driven by Japan's unique, subtle classism. It's a highly collectivist society with strict age-based milestones and immense pressure to secure traditional employment. In Japan, your corporate affiliation often dictates your social standing...
The Japanese Keiretsu and later Trust Bank model is the norm in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and other Asian countries as well due to a mix of colonial, financial, and policymaking ties.
And people take pride in what they do, and try their best.
2. While conglomerates remain prominent, a new generation of large Western-style employers like Rakuten, Mercari, LY, SoftBank, etc have arisen and operate with American-style (and -educated) management, and the stereotypical "salaryman" lifestyle is on it's last legs.
3. Japan has quietly become an immigration driven society. A major reason behind the rise of Takechi's faction in the LDP as well as Sanseito is because of the post-2019 immigration boom [1]. Going from less that 1% overseas born residents to around 4% in roughly 5 years was a massive shift socially and impacted both blue and white collar employment in Japan.
4. Japan has culturally shifted to be accepting of an offensive military posture. You see this shift in Japanese media (eg. SnK, Nippon Sangoku) as well as Japanese foreign policy [2]. A more muscular Japan with a chip on their back is arising.
5. Younger Japanese are more open to calling out tourists and Westerners when they do weird or weeb s#it or treat Japan as their own Disneyland. They now treat Westerners the same way they treat other non-Japanese people now. The mindset shift I've noticed is an "us" (which now includes Koreans and Taiwanese) versus "them" which now includes everyone else.
----
Ironically, I think contemporary South Korea is closer to the image that HNers have of Japan versus Japan today.
[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
[1] - https://www.cw.com.tw/article/5136468
[2] - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/japan/return-japanese-hard-po...
Car culture. We're a very car-centric society, and the Japanese auto makers have been a part everyday life to 3 full generations of Americans now. Even most Baby Boomers are too young to remember a world without Honda or Toyota. Across all age groups, a lot more Americans grew up with a fondness for their family's Toyota than their family's Hyundai.
I grew up in middle America. Both my grandfathers were "GM Men" if you will. Partly by vocation, partly by culture. On both sides of my family, every car was either a Chevy or a Buick. When my folks bought a Honda in 2007, it was treated like a scandal. But yknow what? Now one of my cousins has a Hyundai, and nobody batted an eye. Things are changing, even for the "raise hell praise Dale" crowd.
Japan's car makers, and their other industrials have a 40-year head start on embedding themselves in the American zeitgeist. Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Yamaha, they've all been here a really long time. They're loved because they're familiar. That's a bias, and I think that bias colors the way we talk about east Asian businesses more broadly.
> We're a very car-centric society, and the Japanese auto makers have been a part everyday life to 3 full generations of Americans now.
I keep writing this over and over again on HN: There are NO highly developed non-micro states that are not car centric outside of major cities. Yes, literally, Japan, outside of a few large cities, is incredibly car centric. Sure, the cars are small and cute, but it is defintely car centric!
> Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Yamaha, they've all been here a really long time.
That's an argument. Lack of density means that public transportation is hard to have enough scale. But the US is uniquely bad at both density but also lack of transportation options. In countries like the UK and France (just because I'm familiar with them, I'm not claiming they're the only ones or it's something unique to them) even small towns have a regular bus or train connection to elsewhere. Might not be the best frequency, but it's there. In the US even multi hundred thousand people cities have literally nothing other than cars as an option.
So there are layers of car centricity. And considering most people live in cities, in countries like most of the developed world, the majority of the population has the option of at least decent transit. You know which countries are the exception.
Yeah and this is the exact reason why people call the US car-centric. Only in the US the large cities are car-centric too. You just proved the parent comment's point.
> They came for a single reason: To avoid import tariffs. Please stop romanticising this for any other reason.
You're hallucinating. There is zero romanticization in the parent comment about why they came to the US.
Where did I suggest they came for any particular reason? I just said they got here first. They've had more time to become entrenched in people's lives than the Korean or Chinese companies that followed. That's all! Nothing "romantic" here!
At no point did I indicate any nostalgia for the idiosyncracies of the "GM patriarch" family. Is that what you're suggesting?
And yeah, "we" is Americans. As evidenced by the sentence that starts with "I grew up in middle America."
I genuinely don't understand this comment. It's like you saw "we're a car-centric society," stopped reading, and started typing.
Yamaha, Korg an Roland were the defining instrument producers of the 80s and 90s. Few things have altered the course of popular music as much as the TR-909 and TR-808, M1, DX-7, Juno, Jupiter. All of electronic music grew out of those.
The Walkman and Discman were iconic.
Honda was building P3 and ASIMO. The PlayStation 1/2 and Nintendo 64/GameCube were a thing.
I didn't even get into anime, the language or music from there until decades later. But all of the cool things came from Japan back then. Honestly, they still kind of do.
Although, to me, what I've always loved about Japan is how they will take every medium that arrives on the scene and treat it with loving craftsmanship. From jazz to skateboarding to yo-yos.
Oh, we're getting there. It's just a bit fringe right now, but Meta's $90 billion loss on VR and *gestures at various aspects of the Gamestop situation" and a few other incidents have people asking questions that are uncomfortable for the passive investmend fund crowd. Forget zombie companies; by many measures, America has a zombie economy.
It’s a huge structural flaw in the markets right now, yet it seems a flaw that isn’t really going to break anything which is weird in itself. I can’t help but feel that Wall Street is going to find the right place to kick at some point in order to have the whole house of cards come tumbling down for a while so they can buy cheap and negate/steal years of contributions from people buying index funds. Not sure how or when but I’m sure they’re working on it.
Where does it not? As in which countries are not like this?
Have never heard about it until now, but just looking through it, sounds great!
Are they successful?
Japanese culture reflects certain western attitudes which make it stand out.
Do I detect resentment?
I'd say so. Not on all the branches of the cooperative, but it generates over €11 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 70,000 people with a very stable business. It might be a bit tricky to gauge success when the rewards and incentives aren’t quite the same as in your typical capitalist company, though.
In his science fiction novels, Kim Stanley Robinson frequently incorporates the Mondragon economic model to explore post-capitalist, worker-owned, and cooperative societies. I'd say KSR is a decently well-known S/F writer, so at least some westerners (and I'd assume many in this site) have already some idea of it. But I'd say it's true that it's easy to romanticize these kinds of singular situations and brush over the problems they might have.
I think HN'er are smart enough to not idealize everything about Japan.
For example you can be in awe about how clean and safe the country is and how precisely on time all subways train are without idealizing toilet that stream water up your arse.
So without idealizing the one Japanese thing that is inarguably good?
I will say that it often goes beyond "idealizing". I'd use the word "fetishizing".
I've wondered how much of this stems from being disaffected by the modern (particularly Western) world. I worked with an ethnically Chinese guy who was a massive weebu and that always struck me as odd given the Japan-China history.
Japan has always rubbed me the wrong way: misogyny, racism and denial about Japanese war crimes in WW2 mostly. Also the salaryman work culture. I see videos from Japanese workers and life honestly looks miserable. It's also a country that is dying. The samurais, ninjas, Ronin, shoguns, etc are cool though. Japanese history is fascinating.
My hot take here is that China is actually what people idealize Japan to be. China has the most competent government in the world and it's not even close. It's not problem-free. Nowhere is. But the transformation in the lives of ordinary Chinese people over the last few decades is unbelievable. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty.
It could be worse than Japan too. I think South Korea is that. As a non-Korean from the outside looking in, South Korea looks like a dystopian run by aristocratic (chaebol) families where the birth rate is the lowest in the world and it's in fact so low that if nothing changes, South Korea simply won't exist in 3 generations.
2. Post WWII Japan set the benchmark for pulling its people out of poverty in an astonishingly short period of time.
3. There have always been foreign, exotic cultures people have romanticized. The Romans romanticized Greece and ancient Egypt.
I've never been to South Korea. I'd like to go to Seoul. For me though, South Korea is a cautionary tale in what happens to a country when a handful of families get to control all the wealth, all the good jobs, all the good university places and so on while the working class gets squeezed ever more. There are cultural issues here too that are distinctly Korean, namely that women are expected to have a demanding job AND have children, look after those children and take care of the house (traditionally).
By abandoning the policies that put them in poverty.
The story of China in the 20th century is largely one of missing the bus of the progress that was happening around them. The mechanization of Japan enabled the atrocities you mentioned because China refused to see the writing on the wall (from a balance of power perspective, Japan doesn't get a pass for what they did). Then, when they finally do have a revolution, they end up joining up with the group that weilds absolute power and causes catastrophic famine.
In the 21st century, they've slowly begun adopting western policies and are reaping the benefits while eroding their previously disasterous national policies.
The CCP has become more prosperous as it's become more like Hong Kong.
I know the author isn't trying to paint Japan as a utopia. The reason I call it 'romanticized' is because the author claims Japan's success in precision parts is driven by 'horizontal' and 'collaborative' practices. That just isn't true.
In reality, this system is largely sustained by the ruthless squeezing of subcontractors (for the record, I am Korean, but I actually like Japan), which is a massive social issue there. It’s very difficult for me to understand how anyone could view this structural dynamic as collaborative or horizontal.
If the author had concluded that their success in these niches stems from being an extremely vertical society where defying your superiors is simply not an option, I would have fully agreed. That aligns exactly with what I have experienced firsthand.
> In reality, this system is largely sustained by the ruthless squeezing of subcontractors (for the record, I am Korean, but I actually like Japan), which is a massive social issue there.
Well that's just like your opinion...man. I think you're both singularly wrong. Trying to attribute a single factor to a highly complex system is a fool's errand.
If your conclusion is correct "ruthless squeezing of subcontractors" are there other cultures whether there is true and the country has been successful in precision parts? Otherwise, it's pretty impossible to conclude the causality.
I’ve been promoting it and its organizational structure for a decade on this website and I’m one of the oldest members on HN
Replace 'Westerners' with Americans and you are spot on.
I have never met any European that glorifies any part of Japan (I'd see Asia as a whole), most of them will tell you how the tall buildings make them feel little and how the society is beyond oppressive.
Whatever meritocracy exists in capitalism is ironed out by those rigid hierarchies.
I am not sure what is appealing about Japan, Korea or any of these parts of the world, to me they are full of plastic, sugar and late stage capitalism that makes the Americans look as socialists.
I do strongly suspect that a certain type of male likes these places for reasons I cannot even hold in my mind for more than a few seconds.
Didn't France use to be quite Japano-phile? (At least for movies and anime/manga, but also cuisine). Or is this outdated knowledge now?
> you have a firm that has lots of lifetime employees who can’t be fired, and whose skills are tailored to what your firm needs rather than to a particular occupational category transferable to any employer
> the system only makes sense if the company is also insulated from outside pressure
> the J-firm [Japan-style company], run by its employees and largely indifferent to the interests of shareholders, exists simply to continue existing
> And that basic impulse toward survival is why Japanese companies are so insistent on diversification. If you’ve made a commitment to keep people employed for life, then you need to create jobs for them if their current jobs stop making sense
> If you’re not very worried about profitability, and have lots of well-trained generalist employees, then it makes perfect sense to reinvest your company’s earnings by expanding into new industries
Checkout this article that talks about it: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/2010/07/5-lessons-of-ja...
edit: added article.
One interesting thing about US is that money is worshipped, sure, the super rich billionaires live differently, they can have massive mansions with domestic staff, drivers, live life large, but they are completely outside of society. For people in the 0 - 100m+ range who are forced to interact with each other, there is no big high-status attached to the rich, their lives are a little bit better, but people aren't talking/treating them special. Compare this to a third world country like India, everything is a status marker, if you have a car you are treated a lot better than someone without a car. The outward displays are wealth/status are critical for day-to-day interactions.
That makes about as much sense as comparing top 500 Hollywood actor earnings (including residuals) with the day wages of the folks showing up in TV commercials and as film extras.
The BLS keeps statistics on Chief Executives in general, and pegs their median wages around $200k:
> Here is the answer I want to suggest: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it’s inherent in how they’re structured.
Which is then backed by some economists saying something similar (generally), but all of which completely ignores Japan’s specific history.
As a better example Of examining Japan, here’s a look at Japan’s monopolies, how they were broken up, and partly how that effected the future of their industry:
It hasn't always been like that. Western companies, including US companies, used to have lots of diversification as well (maybe not as much as the Japanese, but much more than today's companies still: not that long ago a company like IBM used to make mouses and keyboards, in addition to their photocopier, mainframe, software, and personal computer business. They even made a hydrogen peroxide analyzer in 1982![1]). They did so because it makes the company more resilient, and because in that time their shareholders wanted the companies they invested in to be resilient, to have a reasonable yield/risk profile.
Things changed in the 80s, when deregulation generate a boom in financial products. Then, individual company resilience was seen as obsolete, you'd cover your risk through portfolio diversification and all you'd want from a company was the pure yield, and companies were streamlined to make as much profit as possible, everything reducing the ratio being sold or terminated.
Fast forward 40 years, people believe it has always been like that and it must be so kind of deep cultural difference between Asia and the West.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20050119055353/http://www-03.ibm...
People can still get hired mid-career, of course, but many companies traditionally hire based more on long-term potential than immediately usable skills, since they expect to train employees heavily through OJT. That also means the number of openings for experienced hires can be relatively limited. And because of the seniority-based structure, even experienced workers may end up starting near the bottom anyway.
There was an entire generation of people who missed that initial hiring window because of economic downturns and hiring freezes, and many of them still struggle to land stable permanent positions even today.
Things are gradually changing, but many structural assumptions are still there. For example, parts of the legal and employment system are historically built around the assumption of lifetime employment, which also makes it difficult for companies to dismiss permanent employees once they are hired.
For obvious reasons, the expected rate of return needs to clear the hurdle of the risk-free interest rate. This puts a pretty high floor on activity that is "worth doing". This is a mechanism by which the phenomenon of ZIRP diversifies economic activity.
Small absolute changes in risk-free interest rates cause many things to become unprofitable when the relative change in interest rates is large. A risk-free rate of 1.0% and 1.5% are both small but the latter is 50% higher than the former.
The other side of this is only new baby firms invest in that thing that makes a little bit of money. But given enough refinement, that thing starts making more and more money as it gets better and better. And soon, that new baby firm outshines the incumbent. The incumbent's wasn't incentivized to invest in the thing that started off worse but eventually became the new model. Think Kodak with film-vs-digital cameras.
This was the thesis of 1997's The Innovator's Dilemma, written by the guy who coined "Disruptive Technology".
Is your experience in the same America where Meta is losing another 4-6 billion $ this year in AR/VR business unit, after losing 19 billion $ last year. Similar with Google's and Apple's AR/VR unit which also consume a lot of money in R&D(funding a lot of high paying jobs) and not make any money, yet.
So sure, there's no risk appetite for things that make little money, except for all the evidence proving the contrary.
If it ends up AI only makes a little profit annually in the longer term the whole thing collapses on itself.
Because "making little money" is a commodity business activity, overrun with competition from Europe and Asia.
So why would you ever want to compete in the race to the bottom of "little money" when you have the highest labor cost in the world? It makes no business sense.
You go into "all or nothing" moonshots because Europe and Asia can't compete there. Especially when you have the world reserve currency as the infinite money glitch cheat code (while it lasts).
Author says: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it’s inherent in how they’re structured.
My response: No mention of culture? Sure maybe it is because of how they are structured somewhat, but it's also because of their culture. Japanese are masters of their craft. Look at the best pizza place in the world, the best burger maker in the world.. they are not in Italy or America, but in Tokyo.
Japanese take pride in their work and master their craft. A small pizza-shop owner in Tokyo doesn't make great pizza because of how it was structured. It's cultural. Japan takes Western concepts, and applies an obsessive cultural devotion to mastery (Shokunin).
Look at all the foreign-things Japan is now famous for: Japanese Whiskey, Denim, bread making, Japanese curry, etc.
EDIT: I forgot about this other thing. He also does describe a mechanism for that culture.
Thank you for explaining this. I was alawys amazed how the japanese would take the cuisine from other countries and make it better in all aspects than the country that originated it.
OP mentions curry, bread, pizza, etc. Those are things most gaijins complain about when in Japan!
Can't find a proper piece of bread that isn't sweetened, or you find a French chain doing something almost similar but still not on par with breads found in France.
I helped at a pizza shop near Fuji city and while it was not bad, they weren't quite there yet.
I can say that some foods are not bad but saying that they do things inherently better? C'mon now.
Still haven't found a decent thai or indian restaurant in Japan, and probably never will, given the general aversion for strong spices.
Funny you mentioned France. Japan won the world pastry competition held in France. The french came second.
How about that?
are you not in Tokyo? Because “no decent Thai restaurant in Tokyo” is a wild claim
You can get spicy food in Tokyo! It’s just not going to be all the restaurants. You gotta to to the right place. But you don’t need 100 good thai restaurants to eat dinner, you just need the one.
You can get very hot spicy katsu curry in most Japanese cities.
I am a Spanish guy living in Japan, and while Japanese food is good and I surely enjoy it, their "Spanish restaurants" are a pale imitation of the original. Same for the Italian restaurants (which only cook spaghetti, as if there was no other kind of pasta), and I guess any other imported cuisine.
I think all your examples are terrible (bread) or overpriced (Japanese Whiskey). There are also a lot of places that are pretty crap in Japan like restaurants where they clearly don't really care.
Compare to Italy that wherever you go everything seems really high quality. I was in a gas station in the middle of nowhere and I had a really great cappuccino for example.
That's a bold claim. While I'm sure the average quality in Japan is significantly better than ours, I would put the best pizza places in Jersey, NYC, and CT up against anywhere in the world.
But Tokyo has a loooooooot of good food from various places, and a lot of people with money willing to spend 5 bucks a slice (for example). Or at least enough to sustain one restaurant.
The contrapositive: what magical thing exists in Jersey that would not be exportable to Tokyo?
I would bet that NYC has the best cheap slice tho.
I don't think Kimberly-Clark ever opetated a concert hall, but they did run an airline (Midwest Express) and K-C Aviation was an airplane servicing firm.
It's not that American companies don't operate in diverse businesses. Maybe they're less likely to, but it happens when the need arises... if there's no reasonable supplier for an important input, then you start one, or you ask an existing supplier if they can start a new line of business that's somewhat related.
The headline example is that Toto, known as a maker of ceramic toliets, is making a lot of money making specialty ceramics used in semiconductor manufacturing. Which yeah, ceramic manufacturer makes ceramics.
The US business market does like to spin-off divisions when they are successful and can be independent.
At one point in the 1990s, you could buy a toaster from the same company that makes airplane engines, MRI machines, and produces “Saturday Night Live.” And you may have financed that toaster through their financial arm (GE Capital). Eventually the many lines of business were spun off from companies like this.
What came next was a very different type of consolidation - companies like Comcast, Chevron, and the current “AT&T” who went from being regional players to buying as many other companies just like themselves in order to maximize economies of scale - they’re huge but really just do one or two very closely-related things.
Existing large businesses were the primary source of major investments in new businesses, or in remaking old businesses for a rapidly modernizing world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Inc.
used to have a big position in hotels and just about everything else and it trained quality movement advocate Phil Crosby
I don't know if all companies should be run like Japanese companies, but there's something very heartwarming about this. Some companies exist for the purpose of employment, and that's okay. In fact it's admirable and makes me want to cheer.
Compared to 20 years ago, Japanese people travel much less (millions fewer can afford to go overseas). Residential energy is 35% more expensive per kwh, compared to only 5% in the US. Food as a portion of monthly Japanese spend is 48% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. Despite millions of vacant dwellings, the home ownership rate is slipping. They earn less and they spend less.
Tokyo may seem quaint to American visitors clanking down their metal Chase travel credit card for more sushi, but for the typical Japanese, although they take it with grace and in stride, they have mired in stagnation and degrowth for a generation.
* Japan is ranked 23rd on the Human Development Index. The US is 17th.
* However, Japan is ranked 8th on the US News Quality of Life Index. The US is 30th.
Grass is greener on the other side.
https://data.worldhappiness.report/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-countries-fo...
If you’ve ever worked for a Japanese corp under a Japanese boss, you would basically experience that your life is hell. As a westerner we are even subjected to far lesser rules and customs than a Japanese, and yet to me it still felt far more stifling and unbearable than any western company I worked for. Western companies have different failure modes, but intense unspoken micromanagement and stupid expectations was never one of them.
And I was a supposed “subject matter expert”, to be treated better than rank and file. That said, this clearly works for Japanese people, many of them are happy, I think they would be miserable under a western firms “do whatever the f you want as long as you get results” culture. To each their own.
Japan in some sense is stagnating if you compare it to a GOAT like US, but Japan of 1910s was also probably stagnating compared to US, in its own terms Japan is doing fine and their political situation is much more civil. So GG to them
It is important to note, however, that the starting point is very different. The idea of employees robbing those evil shareholders sounds good but has resulted in capital markets that effectively do not function. Tidying up that mess will not be simple and improving equity markets will go a long way.
Also, the structure of Japan is a function of US policy after WW2 to dismantle the zaibatsu. In every single other historical case that I am aware of the result of "employee-friendly" policies has resulted in the kind of permanent underclass that people fear, incorrectly, that AI will lead to (i.e. Germany). It is a known bad idea. Japan avoided this because all the wealthy people's assets were taken, this didn't happen in other countries (i.e. Germany) which led to significant financial instability/risk/inequality (Germany also has inequality within a completely stagnant economic system, which is different from inequality in a system where the composition of wealthy people is continually changing...Germany's billionaires are a combination of people who mysteriously got rich in the 1930s very quickly and people who have been rich since the 10th century).
Japan is interesting but it is a complete outlier. Even with their relatively good relative economic performance, they could be producing absolute-terms growth that is double or even quadruple where it is now. Comparing middling economies like Japan or Western Europe with countries growing the same rate and per-capita incomes that are double is a misunderstanding of potential. Average economic performance should be double the US consistently for multiple decades.
I disagree. So much of software is long lived or should be. We desperately need incremental refinement of already solid products and instead we have decay and rot because H-modelers make bad calls. (E.g. OSes.)
My team develops a product that is 15+ years old. As I read how J-models work, I kept thinking, "Yeah, we need that. That would help a lot. I'd love to work for decades on this product if we could do it thay way." Our product is mature and always in demand. But it always needs maintenance and it frequently needs significant improvement to keep pace with the changing environment around it. Bad H-model judgments have sent it in the wrong direction sometimes based on directives from on high, when, actually, the team itself holds so much knowledge and expertise that we can often self-organize in ways that maintain, refine, and improve this 15 year old system. We could benefit so much from a move toward proper J-model thinking.
I like to create little businesses. Most of them are unsuccessful.
I tried to get a bit of business liability insurance, including E&O for this, but it’s proven to be somewhat difficult:
I do too many things.
I design and sell 3D printed plastic parts, write books, publish a blog, and publish software.
I’ve tried this like three times (it’s time consuming).
Last time I decided to stick with just digital assets and I put “software development” but listed my blog and books, figuring most software companies run forums, publish guides, and blog.
They declined because they don’t cover “publishers”.
I guess you need to buy insurance for each division or something.
I was just looking for some general business liability and E&O while I figure out what works.
I wrote How to Lose Money with 25-Years of Failed Businesses about some of my tries over the years.
https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...
Reading it now, great read!
Now the paper company got into the hotel business seems a far better example. No idea how that happens.
That's easy. They have corporate visitors to their corporate offices and the available hotels are insufficient. They decide to just make their own hotel.
There are many corporate campuses with an embedded hotel. Some run by the corporation itself, some with significant management contracting with the corporation, and some independently managed.
Large corporation has a small travel business is very common.
In retrospect, I tend to think that this take was naive. It probably increased financial performance but it discouraged taking risks, and pushed the multidisciplinary skills out of companies in a way that is hard to reverse, inducing knowhow loss and probably slowed down innovation. But this is only my personal analysis and I am no economist.
Amul is controlled by 3.6 million milk producers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
U.S. energy-producing cooperatives are consumer-owned, not-for-profit utilities providing power to over 42 million Americans across 56% of the nation's landmass. These entities consist of local distribution systems, generation and transmission (G&T) cooperatives, and agriculture-focused energy co-op.
The nation’s 900 electric cooperatives (co-ops) power the homes of more than 42 million Americans across 47 states: https://www.energy.gov/cmei/success-stories/articles/eere-su...
I wonder what it unique about electricity that this model is widely adopted in a predominantly anti-worker country in the world. Is it because farmers are the biggest votebank? And mostly rich, powerful, have all the political connections?
Mumbai Dabbawala Association is a 125-year-old, cooperative-style logistics system that delivers approximately 200,000 home-cooked meals daily to office workers across the city.
There are definitely world class companies in Japan, but also broad systemic problems with incentives
This example seems to contradict the author's main point.
The Toyota factory in Kentucky got some of the benefits of the Japanese approach without importing every practice. They might have had a more Japanese organisation than Ford, but surely they didn't replace American practices in matters outside their control. They still had to deal with American approaches to labour practices, banking, local government, etc., all of which are called out in the article as necessary for the J-mode to flourish.
https://theonion.com/yamaha-ceo-pleased-with-current-product...
Companies like this with deep interlocking expertise used to be common in the US too when the US actually made things. GE was a conglomerate of "diversified" expertise - at least until a grandfather of financialization laid the seed to take apart the company.
AT&T and Xerox used to maintain all sorts of deep expertise in all sorts of science and technical activities - though maybe it could be noted that they were famously bad at spinning out other diversified product lines. But the expertise was a need in their core activities. Maybe the most interesting thing about Japanese businesses is that they have shown how to successfully start and maintain diversified product lines.
The main reason we are surprised by these "diversified" products, I suspect is that the typical American (and HN reader), is just not very familiar with the wide range of expertise needed to actually run manufacturing businesses.
Look at it this way, you need to maintain the expertise anyway, originally for the Toilets, but you only need that expertise sometimes, and to be experts worth anything at all, they need to do things outside of what the company is already doing to deepen and maintain that expertise. If you have a set of highly technical experts operating like mini startups - is it a surprise that one might become a unicorn in the balance sheets from time to time?
> The most important of these, by far, is lifetime employment
That ship has sailed. The most favorable accounts[0] put it around 30~40% of the workforce at most, other accounts pronounce it dead. There can be pockets of exceptions, but the bigger companies still afloat aren't shielded from that reality.
[0] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/43581/1/matanlemat...
I like to create little business try’s. Most of them are wildly unsuccessful. I tried to get a bit of business liability insurance, including E&O for this.
Why?
Because I do too many things.
I design and sell 3D printed plastic parts, write books, publish a blog, and publish software.
I’ve tried this like three times (it’s time consuming).
Last time I decided to stick with just digital assets and I put “software development” but listed my blog and books, figuring most software companies run forums, publish guides, and blog.
They declined because they don’t cover “publishers”.
I guess you need to buy insurance for each division or something.
I’d just like some general business liability and E&O while I figure out what works.
The pattern might also hold at a broader level. The United States is a relatively young nation that has seen plenty of internal strife (plenty of civil wars including The Civil War) whereas Japan has existed in some form for 2,600 years.
Probably too deep to consider, but the thought hit me that trees and plants (like these J-firms) grow multiple branches as quickly as they can because they are optimizing for survival.
How are you defining civil wars such that America has had "plenty" of them? Could you list a few?
The price of a computer chip has been lowered so significantly because of the standard process that is used across millions of chips with materials that are 99.999999999% pure.
For every neatly diversified company you have 10 zombie companies with workers floundering around like ants without a queen.
You use "zombie companies" as a universal pejorative and suggest we should all be instead worshiping at the alter of economic efficiency, JIT-delivery, and maximizing shareholder value without really considering the critiques there.
Yes, the "zombie company" strawman is paying people to move dirt from one hole to the other and back again which is dumb, but the "efficient company" has its own strawman, one drowning in manufactured debt, peeing in pee bottles in-between amazon warehouse isles, and unable to manufacture its own medical equipment when a black-swan pandemic event hits.
Which one is "better" largely depends on if you value societal stability or shareholder profits.
Or, in the framing of the article (which is summarizing Aoki, Milgrom, and Roberts), J-style companies exceed in periods of moderate volatility where 1) things don't change so much that you need the money-above-all-else incentive that favors strong hierarchical Jobs-like leadership that finds the visionary new solution, but 2) they change enough that the money-above-all-else incentive that favors value-engineering enshittification loses out to competition. The "societal stability" is just a part of the incentive bundle that forces the adaptation called the J-style approach.
In Japan's case, quite literally -- as their population distribution looks like its about to topple over.
By this criteria, in the entire world, only US and UK seem to do capitalism properly. Whether the current age of tech companies survive till 2050s is to be seen, (we are already seeing signs of OpenAI, Anthropic joining them but it is to be said if the existing monopolies of say Microsoft will be disrupted).
In other countries, big companies have been the same for hundreds of years, from Japan to Germany to Korea to India. This is no longer capitalism as much as it is some soft form of Feudalism, where the same set of families hold power for generations at a time till some major fortune swings occur.
> Aoki’s key insight was that the J-mode had a comparative advantage in environments of moderate volatility: situations where conditions changed frequently enough that rigid central plans would be outdated before they were executed, but not so radically that only top-down strategic intervention could cope. In an environment of stable, predictable demand, the H-firm did fine; in an environment of extreme disruption, where the whole product line had to be rethought, centralized authority was indispensable, and the H-firm also did fine. But in between—where the challenge was to make constant small adjustments in a changing but recognizable paradigm—the J-firm excelled.
See for example https://aakashgupta.medium.com/microsofts-ceo-just-became-a-... or https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-12/zucker...
Two thoughts:
- Japanese management style and processes are probably fruitful ground for understanding how teams of agents should work. H-firms require inspirational leadership, and agents don't need that.
- There is an interesting opportunity to turn Japanese process knowledge into a trainable environment, which of course should be done in such a way to benefit Japan and the Japanese people ("The type of deep process knowledge that has accreted within companies like Kyocera and Toto is almost impossible to replicate")
What, no mention of their personal massagers?
Oh we had that level of conglomerates. Deutsche Bank and Allianz as capital providers, Siemens, AEG, Thyssen, Krupp, Mannesmann and a bunch of others formed the so-called "Deutschland AG" [1] - a web of interconnected very large companies, that also had very good ties to politics.
It was a better time.
Vertical integration is almost looked like a mistake in the western investor driven companies; and inventions are to be bought, not actually made, why risk research money into anything not deemed "core business" by the market ?
dumb example: it does computer chips (graviton cpus), it does backpacks and stationary (stuff under the "amazon basics" brand), it does editorial work (amazon self-publishing), it does satellite communications. oh and cloud computing and more and more stuff.
An example would be "super apps". If you google this term you will see countless results that say "Chinese users prefer one app that does everything; they are also better at handling information density." The argument becomes: Super apps exist because Chinese users like Super apps. This is wrong. If you ever talk to a single Chinese user you will learn that none of them like these types of apps.
Read the comments here as an example: https://x.com/felixleezd/status/2039008846514119046
> "No it doesnt. As a Chinese, these apps are shitty to use and I struggle with finding what I need most of the time."
> 'Lol no.
> Its just bloat without careful thoughts.
> "We have this new product, pls add it to the main screen, pls send a notification to all our users to try it out, pls my promotion depend on it"
> You can get away with this for decades if the main moat is strong enough.'
> "I hate them, full of shitty ads and ads and ads. Basically, every app wants to lend you money, which is a total disaster."
There's not a single user that likes "super apps."
Then why do they exist? Because of the business environment. In the 2010s, post-iPhone and when smartphones became everyman's personal computing device, VC investment into China skyrocketed, culminating in 2015. Alibaba alone launched something like 50 new services during this decade. A few giant companies remained while the other startup tech companies failed; they divided the market among themselves, and in order to increase LTV per user they started bootstrapping their new services by putting links into them inside their existing platforms. Taobao adding links to Alipay and so on.
So "super apps" exist in China because of the business environment. The apps are literally designed by KPIs: get more users to click on this button and open this other service. It has so far been impossible for any startup to disrupt the BAT giants, so they can keep adding more and more services to the same apps and as a result they get more cluttered.
The reason I'm making the analogy about China is that the same is certainly true for Japan. It is a steady-state, non-dynamic market where companies that were created decades ago remain and can expand horizontally. It has nothing to do with Japanese culture.