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Comment by mrschwabe | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company. For people who aren’t familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to US companies. They’re very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker – but almost everyone has veto power.

If you read Patrick McKenzie's recent article on "Doing Business in Japan" you can get some better context of just how rigid these 'Kyoto-based' must be:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

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FWIW, I've heard the same thing, verbatim, about Nagoya companies. Just like every town in Japan thinks that it is the one that discovered that great water makes great soba and great sake, and that all other towns' soba and sake is deficient due to lack of the proper water for it, I think it may be possible that every town in Japan not-so-secretly believes that only their companies are still Japanese and that all other Japanese companies have succumbed to weird foreign influence.

I work with companies both in Kyoto and Tokyo and honestly there's not so MUCH of a difference between them. It depends much more of the company culture than the location in my experience. You can get over-conservative companies in Tokyo as well. As for the whole paragraph about Nintendo's company culture, it sounds very much like every other Japanese company out there (no individual leadership, everything through the group, veto from top managers) and nothing specific to video games businesses.

I have trouble even listing large Kyoto based companies other than Kyocera and Nintendo. (Hatena is the only prominent web services company there, but it is much smaller).

The reputation I heard from inside japan when I lived and worked there wads that of "weirdness" rather than being necessarily more heirichical. I don't think it's a linear "even more Japanese compared to USA standards" thing going on. They're known for being more cultish and wacky in their own ways, like Kyocera employees' fanatical effort into their annual all company sports tournament.

I can see how this weirdness and cultishness might be seen as being "more hierarchical" from a non domestic person's eyes though.

You never heard of Aiful and Wacoal? Sagawa express, too.

All this really is is "I don't work in head office" syndrome. Generally everyone outside head office is either aware of how opaque the goings on are or they have been deluded by the koolaid.

Western companies are just as bad in these respects as their Japanese counterparts.

would the creative people be a part of the rigid hierarchies?

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