What can we learn from U.S.-Japan trade war of 1980s?
It is true that the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S. is different from the one between the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s, but the two trade wars do have a lot in common. First, both involve the world's largest and second-largest economies; second, China is the country with the largest trade surplus with the U.S., the spot was held by Japan during the 1980s; third, China is highly dependent on the U.S. market, so was Japan. The U.S. approach and the intensity of the trade wars are also more or less the same.
I don't think the tech war is the full explanation for the decline of Japanese tech; the failure to focus on software is a big one and seems to be due to internal factors such as conservatism and business models tied to sale of hardware.
However when the US combines it industrial interests with its state apparatus it is a formidable force; media described the Japanese society as authoritarian, bitter and racist - eager to get back the Americans after world war 2 - with the everyday Japanese being mindless warrior drones in a strict hierarchy. (For examples of this sentiment see the movies Black Rain or Rising Sun - or lookup the tragic death of Vincent Chin - a Chinese mistaken for being Japanese).
The US justice system ran a series of entrapment campaign targeting Japanese firms. And there was buy-american campaigns and extra tariffs were put on Japanese imports.
Ultimately the Japanese yielded. The plaza accord fixed the Yen at a very high price point hampering Japanese exports. And quotas were set for US exports to Japan and Japanese car factories were setup in the US.
And then in 90es you had the rise of now competitative tech firms from South Korea and Taiwan.
>the failure to focus on software is a big one and seems to be due to internal factors such as conservatism and business models tied to sale of hardware.
It's the same in Germany. Up until 10 years ago or so, they still thought the future of their economy will be selling more diesel engines to everyone. Today Germany is still the world's leading exporter of diesel engines, but how long can that cow be milked until they realize a significant part of their economy is living on borrowed time?
It's what you get when your majority wealth holders, politicians and business leaders are well past their retirement and don't care about the changing world around them, don't care to empower the youth in wealth generation, gate-keeping it all for the existing gentry.
Another article that shows the similarities in mindset from the time is this one from 1987, it's quite funny how similar it reads to stuff published today.
This is interesting and.. quite different in one very important key way:
"Are the Japanese picking our brains?'' a congressional staffer asks. ''Yes. They're doing it very well. They're doing it legally. The question is whether we have a two-way street"
> In the 80es the us and Japan fought a tech and trade war very similar to the us china tech war that is going on today.
Fundamental difference between these two trade wars is that US had then and still has now military presence in Japan while none in China. Japan has a somewhat limited sovereignty that affected how they could fight the trade war.
I'm not familiar with that community or even ones closely related, but I've worked several years in Japan and Korea, so I'll take a stab at it.
For Japan, I'm pretty confident it's the language barrier. As in most countries, tech people in Japan are mostly males, and mostly are not very strong in the humanities and in social skills. This group tends to be extremely self-conscious about their limited English ability and generally avoids interaction with foreigners.
For Korea, I see a trend, but I'm not confident about the explanation. I see lots of bright kids at university, see them get hired at big tech firms, and see them enthuse about their work over beers. I don't see them interacting a lot with foreigners. My impression is there is so much going on within Korea that they don't feel strongly motivated to look outside.
That's true in general for Japan, but trained Japanese engineers who want a rsync-able cloud storage service are fine to register English web services.
There are reasons I come up with: Little known in Japanese community; there are many people don't watch English community even if they are fine to read English docs and send PR. There are almost zero article introduces rsync.net. Yen is weak for Dollar at this time. Overseas storage service tend to be slow from Japan. It's harder to be adopted by enterprises without Japanese reseller.
In my experience, rsync+ssh with higher latency is slow and price isn't attracting, so I haven't tried it yet.
Isn't it that Japan is REALLY inward-focused society? I've read multiple times that watching their TV as a foreigner is a weird experience, for the most part they talk about stuff going on in Japan more so than anywhere else.
So there’s clearly stuff being done to train a younger generation to speak English better than was the case previously.
The problem is that even with that, the mindset still appears to preserve the notion of Japanese supremacy over everything irrespective of data to the contrary. So improvement isn’t happening.
Take the Shinkansen as anotherq example. Impressive if you look at the train specs and reliability/punctuality. What isn’t seen so readily is the manual process of booking seats at stations with limited options for booking online. That manual process is often so inefficient that you might as well travel by a slower train given the loss of time involved.
Similar inefficiencies are observable throughout Japan. The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things. True of the younger English speakers as well from what I’ve seen. Not entirely sure if that’s blind deference, fear of conflict/group judgement or the result of brainwashing into a collaboration over competition mindset. Maybe it’s a mix of all of the above.
So I see very narrow examples of personal excellences where that obsession and perseverance doesn’t involve getting others on board. But innovation or improvement involving groups is more dysfunctional than anything I’ve seen elsewhere by a wide margin.
It's not just we have alternatives for some services, the entire Internet looks like "our" thing from this side. Everything is either perfectly localized, or built and run by local entities, or dominated by local users. In rare cases that none of above are true, social graph of users are still completely closed off from the outside world.
I mean, it's even the case offline. Have anyone seen or used the omnipresent NCR made ATM, with transparent green card slot? There are lots of Ingenico Lane/5000 lately, but that green plastic cover still isn't a thing here. I think there are very few regions that you could live without ever seeing one in life. We're isolate as that.
It's not that there aren't alternatives, but that it's an interesting question why that specific market is under-represented. It could well be just luck of the draw, but there might be other reasons as well.
For the ones who remember BeOS and its history, from Wikipedia : In 2002, Be Inc. sued Microsoft claiming that Hitachi had been dissuaded from selling PCs loaded with BeOS, and that Compaq had been pressured not to market an Internet appliance in partnership with Be. Be also claimed that Microsoft acted to artificially depress Be Inc.'s initial public offering (IPO). The case was eventually settled out of court for $23.25 million with no admission of liability on Microsoft's part.
And how can we forget the war that MS waged against Linux for many years, and the copyright lawsuits brought by SCO, partly financed by MS?
So ... stop for a moment and think about where we could be in terms of software and operating systems if some actors (all from the same country) didn't keep trying to kill the competition with unfair tactics in order to continue selling one of the worst operating systems ever created and the main vehicle for all the viruses, malware and ransomware.
Japan's 10-year "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative. I remember, this was very famous in the 80s. It was talked about all over the world. Even in popular magazines in Brazil (like Time), for example.
> The project imagined an "epoch-making" computer with supercomputer-like performance running on top of large databases (as opposed to a traditional filesystem)
Oh that sounds pretty reasonable; It's like the distributed systems that all large services rely on.
> using a logic programming language to define and access the data
Ugh, already going downhill.
> The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines)
I thought they were going to continue their 80s dominance with their robot technology, starting with those amazing vending machines. But then nothing happened.
Readit News
A war that Japan decidedly lost.
Here is an article from Chinese state media drawing the parallels:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-07-11/Lessons-from-U-S-Japan...
What can we learn from U.S.-Japan trade war of 1980s?
It is true that the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S. is different from the one between the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s, but the two trade wars do have a lot in common. First, both involve the world's largest and second-largest economies; second, China is the country with the largest trade surplus with the U.S., the spot was held by Japan during the 1980s; third, China is highly dependent on the U.S. market, so was Japan. The U.S. approach and the intensity of the trade wars are also more or less the same.
However when the US combines it industrial interests with its state apparatus it is a formidable force; media described the Japanese society as authoritarian, bitter and racist - eager to get back the Americans after world war 2 - with the everyday Japanese being mindless warrior drones in a strict hierarchy. (For examples of this sentiment see the movies Black Rain or Rising Sun - or lookup the tragic death of Vincent Chin - a Chinese mistaken for being Japanese).
The US justice system ran a series of entrapment campaign targeting Japanese firms. And there was buy-american campaigns and extra tariffs were put on Japanese imports.
Ultimately the Japanese yielded. The plaza accord fixed the Yen at a very high price point hampering Japanese exports. And quotas were set for US exports to Japan and Japanese car factories were setup in the US.
And then in 90es you had the rise of now competitative tech firms from South Korea and Taiwan.
It's the same in Germany. Up until 10 years ago or so, they still thought the future of their economy will be selling more diesel engines to everyone. Today Germany is still the world's leading exporter of diesel engines, but how long can that cow be milked until they realize a significant part of their economy is living on borrowed time?
It's what you get when your majority wealth holders, politicians and business leaders are well past their retirement and don't care about the changing world around them, don't care to empower the youth in wealth generation, gate-keeping it all for the existing gentry.
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987...
"Are the Japanese picking our brains?'' a congressional staffer asks. ''Yes. They're doing it very well. They're doing it legally. The question is whether we have a two-way street"
Fundamental difference between these two trade wars is that US had then and still has now military presence in Japan while none in China. Japan has a somewhat limited sovereignty that affected how they could fight the trade war.
Dead Comment
We get signups from mainland China. From Saudi Arabia. From Ghana. Even attempted signups from Iran.
But it's very, very rare someone from Japan signs up.
Why is this ?
For Japan, I'm pretty confident it's the language barrier. As in most countries, tech people in Japan are mostly males, and mostly are not very strong in the humanities and in social skills. This group tends to be extremely self-conscious about their limited English ability and generally avoids interaction with foreigners.
For Korea, I see a trend, but I'm not confident about the explanation. I see lots of bright kids at university, see them get hired at big tech firms, and see them enthuse about their work over beers. I don't see them interacting a lot with foreigners. My impression is there is so much going on within Korea that they don't feel strongly motivated to look outside.
There are reasons I come up with: Little known in Japanese community; there are many people don't watch English community even if they are fine to read English docs and send PR. There are almost zero article introduces rsync.net. Yen is weak for Dollar at this time. Overseas storage service tend to be slow from Japan. It's harder to be adopted by enterprises without Japanese reseller.
In my experience, rsync+ssh with higher latency is slow and price isn't attracting, so I haven't tried it yet.
My experience is that English in Japan isn’t really spoken outside of big tech firms and even there the quality isn’t great.
I have tried organizing an event on the same topic in Japanese and in English, almost no one showed up in English but it was full in Japanese.
They have their own alternatives to some services and stack overflow, qiita.
The thing is that they don’t really need to speak English and for the cases they need English they bite a foreigner.
The problem is that even with that, the mindset still appears to preserve the notion of Japanese supremacy over everything irrespective of data to the contrary. So improvement isn’t happening.
Take the Shinkansen as anotherq example. Impressive if you look at the train specs and reliability/punctuality. What isn’t seen so readily is the manual process of booking seats at stations with limited options for booking online. That manual process is often so inefficient that you might as well travel by a slower train given the loss of time involved.
Similar inefficiencies are observable throughout Japan. The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things. True of the younger English speakers as well from what I’ve seen. Not entirely sure if that’s blind deference, fear of conflict/group judgement or the result of brainwashing into a collaboration over competition mindset. Maybe it’s a mix of all of the above.
So I see very narrow examples of personal excellences where that obsession and perseverance doesn’t involve getting others on board. But innovation or improvement involving groups is more dysfunctional than anything I’ve seen elsewhere by a wide margin.
I mean, it's even the case offline. Have anyone seen or used the omnipresent NCR made ATM, with transparent green card slot? There are lots of Ingenico Lane/5000 lately, but that green plastic cover still isn't a thing here. I think there are very few regions that you could live without ever seeing one in life. We're isolate as that.
Compare with Singapore, Taiwan.
The funky keyboard http://xahlee.info/kbd/TRON_keyboard.html
More on the OS architecture: http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/itron.html
Demonstration of BTRON: https://youtu.be/7RNbIEJvjUA?t=1505
I can't help but feel wistful about what could have been if these had become mainstream then.
https://www.osnews.com/story/136392/the-only-pc-ever-shipped...
The overwhelming majority of the public won't change settings. Even those that are trivial, low- or no-risk, and readily reverted.
Ken Sakamura is a genius.
[1] https://github.com/tron-forum/mtkernel_3
Honestly, what do you think running this on a rbp would accomplish for you? It's an RTOS, not a desktop operating system.
TRON is still widely used in Japanese industry.
How the Japanese were going to conquer the world with AI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
Oh that sounds pretty reasonable; It's like the distributed systems that all large services rely on.
> using a logic programming language to define and access the data
Ugh, already going downhill.
> The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines)
Oh of course they tried to build a high-level CPU too. Still a terrible idea decades later: https://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html