The future of technology isn’t what it used to be—a discussion of the collapse of Japanese influence on technology & design. Why did Japanese companies cease to be the admired cutting-edge of computer, video game, Internet, or smartphone technology, underperforms in critical areas like software design (such as programming languages) and is instead one of the last havens of fax machines & feature phones, with prestigious but largely useless humanoid robotic programs?

I quoted approvingly Gibson’s old 2000s dictum that Japan was further into the future than the West. This used to be more true than it is, and the discrepancy started being noted as early as 1998, in Ohsuga’s “The Barriers to Software Development in Japan”. The problem is the dog which did not bark: there is a curious lack of Japanese contributions in software technology. Japan has a highly educated population a good fraction of the size of US population (127m vs 300m), considerable indigenous R&D capability (albeit declining), long involvement in computing hardware, early dominance of entire categories of consumer electronics etc. Hence, if all were equal, one would expect something like a third of all major software packages written by Japanese or Internet services developed by Japanese, and so on. Instead, one notices almost a complete absence of such Japanese contributions. (To the extent one doesn’t notice this, one is engaging in base rate fallacy—Japan ought to be producing much globally selling or popular software and its absence is surprising .) In software, the only major contribution I know of is the Ruby programming language ; one could argue that would-be FLOSS contributors are “bled off” or parasitized by the Anglosphere FLOSS communities (and are somehow invisible there), but I am continually struck by the almost complete absence of FLOSS in doujinshi media & the survival and massive popularity of closed-source software, where this argument should not apply and where FLOSS practices would entirely appropriate. Websites are simply ugly; Oliver Reichenstein:

OR : Japanese web or app design is not comparable to Japanese art, graphic design or architecture. I could fill a page explaining why. It has to do with the way Japanese read, with the corporate fear of doing something different, and with the generally low level of design for the masses. One reason why Japanese web and app design feels weak is that technology requires good active and passive knowledge of English. English is the lingua franca of contemporary web and app development, both of our tools and our discourse. Even if you master English-based Objective-C or JavaScript, if you are not able to communicate with the international community of developers and designers, you miss out on what is desirable, even what is possible. Japanese developers and designers that don’t speak English are trapped within the relatively low level of tech and design that currently reigns in the Japanese corporate world…The average web site, app, advertisement… it’s usually really badly designed. That might be hard to believe from the outside, because only the best of the best of Japanese design reaches the rest of the world, but with the web it has become more obvious how bad basic design is in Japan. Yes, the standard for Japanese design in general is as low as for Japanese web design. Why? Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making. Why? As I said, to most people good design is invisible. Group decisions focus on the visible, bad aspects of design.

There have been attempts to justify the existing set of web design practices, but I find them unconvincing: this fits a general trend, has a clear origin in slower computers & weaker Internet of decades ago and attempts to mimic completely different media like paper, existed in other countries but have been superseded, are gradually waning in Japan, anecdotes from website designers indicate objective inferiority in A/B tests & conversions, and the practices have not spread worldwide (while rival paradigms do seem to be spreading or be copied).

The Japanese IT industry is fairly dysfunctional, even if its inefficiencies result in cute Easter eggs. For example, the SMS-inspired Internet service cited as integral to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster recovery was not a Japanese service, but the American Twitter.

In the 1990s and earlier, near-total Japanese domination of consumer electronics and video games in particular was simply a fact of life; but in the 2000s, the trends began to reverse (with Nintendo particularly slipping) and by the 2010s, there is open discussion of what once was an insane proposition: that Japan was not making good or innovative computer or video games and had succumbed to Galápagos syndrome. This may be a consequence of Japanese preference for video game consoles over computer games (what best-selling Japanese computer games there are seem to fall into the visual novel family of genres), but even if this is not a post hoc explanation, it is still passing the explanatory buck: why, then, was there a Japanese preference for the consoles in the first place, and why didn’t the equivalent huge popularity of consoles in America or Europe lead to any similar disease? Why was the Japanese ratio of console:computer above a fatal limit, but not also the American or European percentages?

Nor are the doujin and FLOSS scenes much better, as previously mentioned: Touhou Project games remain always closed-source and are not distributed outside Japan; Westerners would never tolerate a common animation tool like MikuMikuDance being only freeware, and would insist on it being opened—if only to deal with abandonment issues & make bug-fixing and extensions easier. For every major Western closed-source platform or technology, there is someone trying to make a FLOSS equivalent, even when the alternative is noncompetitive or the task would seem impossible (eg. Diaspora vs Facebook). It’s interesting to note that the only visual novel I have ever heard of being under a CC license (albeit a highly restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND one) is the Western Katawa Shoujo. Of the 5 major visual novel engines—basic game infrastructure that cries out for open-source licensing—only 2 are so licensed. I’ve wondered if there’s a ethnic or nationalist thing going on here: there has always seemed to be an ambivalence in the anime industry about selling overseas (one creator of Serial Experiments Lain expressed surprise & dismay that it was popular in America , as did for Evangelion ), one echoed in other areas like Touhou doujin music . (In contrast, I have a hard time even imagining any American company like Disney having the slightest compunction or concern about selling overseas to non-Americans, much less stating their ambivalence.)

Japan, while originally the leader in cellphones has forfeited its lead and has been outcompeted by Finnish and American cellphones, with surprisingly low smartphone adoption c. 2011, perhaps related to the continued use of fax machines (whose Japanese popularity peaked at around 60% of households 2007–2012); other parts seem trapped in amber—how surreal to discover in 2020 that Amazon.co.jp supports COD as a payment method, which in America hardly existed in 1990. Gibson’s article seems laughably out of date in this age of the iPhone (part 2), but it was true! One could also wonder why Internet cafes are an institution in South Korea and an obscure niche in Japan? (Patrick McKenzie makes multiple interesting remarks on the parlous state of Japanese IT and cellphones which are too lengthy to quote here.)

Another curious case is the Japanese robotics industry—their walking robots and competitions have been presented triumphantly as the culmination of Japanese technological development, but the odd thing is, the R&D programs that produced ASIMO or HRP-4C are already looking quixotic and ill-fated, re-runs of the Fifth Generation project. Industrial robots were a very successful field for Japan, but that was decades ago. What robots has Japan produced that were as useful as a Roomba? Why were the robots at the Fukushima plant American? (And then there is the exploding field of aerial drones and swarms, which Japan seems excluded from. One thinks of Edsger W. Dijkstra—“The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.” Or walk, as the case may be.)

Japanese Internet services restrict themselves to Japan either by apathy or by actively blocking foreign IP address via geoip, which may ultimately be a recipe for failure. (The South Korean social network Cyworld failed in its attempts to expand internationally, and now its lunch is being eaten by Facebook. YouTube has done a similar number on Korean competitors. The Japanese equivalent to Cyworld, Mixi seemed to be fending off Facebook, at least until mid-2012 or so.) Another example comes from P2P filesharing, which is rarely done for movies or music (in favor of growing CD sales; “many top [K-pop] artists make more money from one week in Japan than they do in one year in Korea”); this is not due just to a sclerotic entertainment industry as we note a similar obsession with CDs in amateur doujin circles as well. Curiously, Japanese geeks who do fileshare choose to use Winny/Share/Perfect Dark—all of which are closed-source, employ security through obscurity, Windows-only, implementation-defined, are not used outside Japan, and are known to be insecure with multiple arrests & NetAgent claims to have broken Perfect Dark; from the perspective of Western users, these are all fatal objections and they haven’t used such insecure and untrustworthy P2P software since the days of Napster and Kazaa. Even Western hentai porn sites have better implementations and contents than the Japanese sites, though it’s the Japanese who produce all their content!

W. David Marx in 2009 listed other striking aspects of the Japanese intranet, as it were, in his essay “The Fear… of the Internet”; from just one section, ‘User Trepidation’:

A total and comprehensive refusal of Japanese social network site users to post real pictures of themselves (and often, real names)

An obsession with ultra-long and complicated mobile-email addresses as a spam prevention measure, despite the fact that its effect may be minimal, especially when weighed against the inconvenience.

A lack of user generated media—YouTube clips, in particular—featuring Japanese faces and real names. Many performers, despite virtuoso-level skills, wear masks or otherwise obscure faces in their video content. [eg. the entirely masked Nico Nico Orchestra]

The predominance of anonymous sites like 2ch as the main corridors of internet culture.

Blog writers, who have not established fame through other media, almost never reveal real names, even when the information and service provided is of professional quality and not explicitly personal. (More on this here.)

The local discomfort towards Google Street Maps—debated on somewhat cultural-essentialist grounds—vastly outweighed the benefits for the louder section of Japanese users, forcing Google to plan a re-shoot of all the streets with a ‘lower angle camera’.

I was struck by the point that “Newspapers do not offer full content online and quickly erase content lest it become searchable archives.” inasmuch as during my Evangelion research, I had been using an interview published by Mainichi Shimbun online, but the entire site vanished months later in a merger with Microsoft Japan; I assumed it would still be available in the Internet Archive, except the IA had blocked access to every single page ever in the entire domain. More extraordinarily, this was not accomplished via the usual robots.txt mechanism, implying Mainichi Shimbun had privately contacted the IA to ask for a custom block on the domain!

The comments mention that the Japanese Wikipedia is smaller than it should be compared to other successful Wikipedias like the German Wikipedia; and I agree since, despite working on many English Wikipedia articles related to Japan like Fujiwara no Teika or the Neon Genesis Evangelion articles, I have never found anything useful on the Japanese Wikipedia (reading them via Google Translate) and further, my articles have often been better and more comprehensive.

The blogger Spike Japan discusses the state of Japanese bandwidth and offers a similar list (in reply to the oped “The Myth of Japan’s Failure”):

You can access Akamai Technologies’ State of the Internet Report by registering here. The most recent one that seems to be freely available is for 2011 Q2. Our first lesson is on the use and abuse of statistics. That the Japanese city with the fastest average Mbps, Shimotsuma, ranked 3rd in the world, is a small Tokyo dormitory community to which very few Japanese could point on a map, and that one of the Japanese “cities” in the top 50, Marunouchi, is not a city, nor even a ward of Tokyo, but a few blocks of office buildings clustered around Tokyo station, make it readily apparent that if you are a largish country for which Akamai has a lot of data collection points and you have a highish average connection speed, then of course you are going to dominate the city rankings. For a more truthful picture of Internet infrastructure, we need to turn to a country-level analysis. In 2011 Q2, Japan ranked third for average connection speeds, at 8.9Mbps, behind South Korea at 13.8Mbps and Hong Kong at 10.3Mbps. Impressive, to be sure, but not quite the picture of global leadership that Fingleton insinuates it has. Indeed, the broader the metric becomes, the worse the picture looks for Japan: for high broadband connectivity (above 5Mbps), the Netherlands ranks first at 68% of all connections, Japan ranks 6th, at 55%, and the US 13th at 42%, while for good old-fashioned broadband connectivity (above 2Mbps), 10 mostly European countries have penetration rates over 90%, the US ranks 35th at 80%, and Japan is actually behind the US, coming in 39th place at 76%. What’s more, Japan’s high broadband connectivity actually fell 8.9% YoY and its broadband connectivity fell 12% YoY, while the rates of almost all other countries surged. Not all that stellar a performance at the broadest end of the spectrum, especially given how suited relatively small, very densely populated Japan is to the build-out of broadband. …There are hosts of other fascinating metrics that show how tentative the Japanese embrace of the Internet has really been: online sales as a percentage of retail sales are far lower in Japan than the developed country average, due to credit-card security concerns (which interestingly are not shared by the South Koreans), online media time consumption is lower than it is in South Korea, China, the US, or the UK, online advertising spending as a percentage of total advertising spending is likewise lower, the money that is spent on advertising is more focused on display than on (more sophisticated) search than elsewhere, usage rates of social networking services such as Facebook are far below those of peer countries, and the Internet is used overwhelmingly for its old-school features-news, search, and e-mail-rather than more up-to-the-minute features such as online music, online gaming, and online banking.

On music: in 2012, “Japan has surpassed the U.S. as the biggest seller of CDs, vinyl and cassette tapes, with 25.4% of global sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan”.

A Wired writer, investigating a rare bright spot in Japanese Internet culture (“In Search of the Living, Purring, Singing Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex”), writes: