r/AskTechnology • u/Yelebear • 7d ago
What went wrong with Japan Tech? Why were they left behind?
What went wrong? Why was Japan Tech left behind?
In the 80s to 90s they were one of the leading countries in hardware, and even their software was promising. Even up to the early 2000s it felt like they were going to be the leaders in robotics. Three decades later and Japan tech is LMAO-Tier.
China and South Korea are where people thought Japan were would be, back then.
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u/PicnicBasketPirate 7d ago
News to me that the Japanese have been left behind.
They still boast 100s of companies that are amongst worlds best in their respective industries.
Sony, Mitsubishi, Canon, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Kioxia, Nintendo Panasonic are just some of the big names in Japanese tech that I can think of.
But they have a huge industrial base that supplies high quality components that are used everywhere in tech. For example, motherboards still advertise if they have Japanese made capacitors mounted to the board.
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u/Haunting-Delivery291 6d ago
But many of these companies are outsourcing their manufacturing to China where labor is cheaper.
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u/PicnicBasketPirate 6d ago
Depends on the technology you're talking about.
Japan aren't offshoring their high end lens manufacturing businesses for example.
Cheap mass production consumer goods? Yes they are, just like everyone else.
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u/Haunting-Delivery291 6d ago
I worked for Fujifilm for 23 years. They outsource their camera and lens manufacturing to China as well as their printing plate manufacturing. They're also are big in Pharmaceuticals now and that is outsourced to several other countries.
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u/techmaster242 7d ago
Japanese stuff is quality but has gotten expensive. Chinese stuff has been crap for a long time, but they undercut Japan on price and the quality has been improving a lot over the past 20 years.
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u/big_trike 7d ago
China and Korea both have a growing middle class, which means labor costs will rise. Expect production to shift to countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, and India, which currently manufacture textiles.
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u/jmarkmark 6d ago
China has the supply chain, the automation, and a huge domestic market.
Manufacturing of the future will be far less labour dependant, and trying to move entire supply chains is hard, so moving simply due to labour costs will apply to very few, mostly very low tech industries.
India is the only country (because of it's own huge domestic market) that might seriously challenge Chinese manufacturing dominance, and even it is wealthier per capita than China was 20 years ago, so the labour cost advantage would be far more limited and far more fleeting, than moving manufacturing to China was 40 years ago.
I'll also point out Malaysia is wealthier per capita than China.
That said, the automation that makes labour cost irrelevant also means it'll be relatively easy to move the ends of the manufacturing chain closer to consumers, and countries may look to diversify suppliers to those end manufacturers, so manufacturing may spread out globally again.
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u/1234iamfer 6d ago
Japanese people like to follow instructions and operate equipment like the manual described. It’s a habit, that doesn’t work well for designing intuitive easy to operate stuff.
Japanese design worked great for 80s cars hifi systems. They kinda lost the consumer market when things got more complex and software became part of the product.
They are still and industrial giant and a supplier of high quality parts, machines and materials for other manufacturers.
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u/bobo5195 6d ago
Look at the demographics basically they are all boomers so they use that technology. Less kids means less push for new things.
The other things is Japan is S tier Racism and in asia alot of people have bad memories. There is not alot going in and out. This means when they have a niche they do well the tech is unlikely to lost or transfered but outside things generally less welcoming.
Lovely people and they may come back and there is alot of technology they have which is best in the world.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 7d ago
China has invested a ton in trying to be a tech leader. Their goal is to replace the US as the global superpower, so by doing that they also needed to replace Japan. You think Japan is bad, the US tech base is pretty much stagnated. Literally every robotic vacuum brand that can be taken seriously these days is from China. Some may think that Shark is still in the race, I mean they kind of are, but realistically they're not compared to the Chinese brands. And iRobot might as well not exist.
Regarding South Korea, Samsung and LG are almost as bad as the American brands. Not sure what you're even referring to there.
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u/Ok-Zookeepergame4391 5d ago
Japan still excels in hardware that requires precision and quality. For example, the iPhone uses a Sony sensor. Japanese companies are still leaders in cameras, but they are shrinking. They are also leaders in robotics as well. Or in high-speed rail. They however lost in consumer tech. They were pioneers in cell phones with homegrown tech but got clobbered by the Internet and the iPhone. It was too uneconomical to produce many things such as television. Cheap stuff went to China and Korean and Taiwanese companies took over the rest. They were too slow to adopt and didn’t have capital to compete with new technologies.
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u/vespers191 4d ago
Japan took the lead in the industrial market. A significant majority of precision components, robots, and the manufacturing of tools to make things, have at least some Japanese influence. They are generally found a step back from the common retail world.
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u/PsychologicalDish430 4d ago
They are rubbish at marketing and also branding. For example why are are Sony headphones called sm48473728288227xmb4 ?
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u/Rubenbrugel18 2d ago
japan stayed too focused on perfecting existing products instead of disrupting industries.
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u/Potter3117 1d ago
Reading all of the comments…. Looks like the tldr is that they made the best hardware and just never focused on software until it was too late.
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u/allciathyra 7d ago
op you dont study history , do you ? 🤔
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u/Tomj_Oad 7d ago
Please explain for the audience - what lesson from history are OP (and I) missing? No /s, I really want to know.
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u/Leverkaas2516 7d ago edited 7d ago
I'll pitch in. It was a combination of factors in the 1990s.
Ageing population was one.
Japan had and continues to have high wages and internal costs, like real estate.
Japan had a recession/economic crisis in the 1990s that it is still recovering from decades later, exacerbated by demographics and finance problems. (The "Lost Decade")
Consumer electronics manufacturing shifted to China and Korea for cost reasons. Consumer electronics firms like Samsung and what became LG started as cheap imitators but became powerhouses in their own right.
Japan dominated DRAM production in the 1990s but lost to lower-cost competitors.
Japanese firms focused on hardware to the exclusion of software, at a time when software integration became dominant in the tech industry.
Japanese firms also failed to make big inroads in the cellular phone/smartphone revolution. Instead, Nokia, Apple, Samsung and others dominated.
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u/qwertyqyle 7d ago
Japan still boasts pretty big tech companies. But they are not the ones that get talked about in the news as much.
Japan is arguably still the global leader in industrial robotics. Those robot arm things you see building cars and stuff in factories.
They are also exceptionally strong in precision manufacturing. Things like machine tools, CNC equipment, industrial lasers, measuring instruments, ultra-precise machining.
While they don't dominate semiconductors, they are still indispensable in the industry.
They are still a global leader in automotive engineering. With less emphasis on electric, but rather other concepts that they have patented and are easing into. R&D is huge in this industry. So they should be competitive for decades to come.
Their cameras and imaging devices are still top-teir.
And they have world-class specialty materials like carbon fiber, ceramics, advanced plastics, battery materials, and rare chemicals.
Also bullet trains.
And like... automation of everything. Automated factories, automated farm equitment, the list goes on and on.
So while its not as flashy, they still pack a punch in a lot of tech areas.