Comment by hotaru29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hotaru29 | Hacker News Reader

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> USA companies also cover up embarassing failures, until caught our by the public.

I did not say that US companies are evil. But American employees are much less cooperative with evil companies.

Americans in general are much less submissive and obedient to authority figures. Americans also tend the view morally questionable things as wrong or right (evil/not evil), while in Japan it is more gray.

Furthermore, Americans can exit and enter the job market. If you are unhappy with how things are going at your company, you can quit and work somewhere else. That will not happen in Japan: top companies hire new graduates and someone who quit or was fired in middle age is unwanted in the job market.

In America, if your employer unfairly discriminates against you (for example whistleblowing\refusing to do morally wrong things) you can go to court. In Japan problems are solved via the existing power hierarchy, and courts are fairly inaccessible.

In America, a new CEO digs up all the wrong things that the previous CEO did and “cleans house”. In Japan, new CEOs are the previous CEO’s proteges and continue to hide their predecessors secrets (cf. Toshiba and Olympus scandals).

Lastly, in America, corrupt CEOs get send to jail (e.g. Enron). Three years after the Olympus scandal, everyone just retired.

(There is an exception: if you are a foreign executive in Japan, and you have 50 painkillers, you are held for 18 days without charge until you quit and return to your country).

I've never seen somebody hate Japan so much!

> Furthermore, Americans can exit and enter the job market. If you are unhappy with how things are going at your company, you can quit and work somewhere else.

If you're an auto-worker you have two competitors to go work for and they probably do business in almost exactly the same way. Other than that you have to leave the industry.

> In America, a new CEO digs up all the wrong things that the previous CEO did and “cleans house”. In Japan, new CEOs are the previous CEO’s proteges and continue to hide their predecessors secrets

In a Japanese auto-company the new CEO is likely somebody who's worked many of the jobs in the company and has an engineering background. In America the new CEO has an MBA and little idea what their new employees actually do. This is often stated as a bad thing.

> Lastly, in America, corrupt CEOs get send to jail

In America corrupt CEOs usually get golden parachutes. It takes extreme corruption or political enemies to go to jail.

In all of this you've failed to explain why the American auto industry, with our superior company culture, can't make competitive cars.

> I've never seen somebody hate Japan so much!

I don’t hate Japan, I absolutely love it! This country paid for my PhD studies not asking anything in return.

But that does not mean that there are serious societal issues and it should not be criticized.

For example, the culture of forcing employees to work overtime. Is it good that so many men have no relationship with their children because of it? In what world is that good? Power harassment and maternity harassment in the workplace is absolutely sickening.

Corporate Japan’s success is built on the exploitation of its employees. Traditional Japanese companies are absolutely horrible places for most people. Do you think that the level of suicide is normal in any functional society (1)? What about the phenomena of young employees dying of heart attacks(2)?

What about the treatment of woman as second-tier employees? Do you really think the function of a grown and educated woman is to serve tea for men?

Many people have an overly romanticized view of Japan and Japanese. But the fact is that Japan is in serious need of reform in many areas. In some areas Japan competes globally (e.g. autos). But in some areas are seriously dysfunctional. Examples of this is the dysfunctional university/research system. Second example is the small scale unproductive agriculture with its over-sized political influence. Third example it the legal system: 99% conviction rate, and the extreme difficulty of getting access to the courts. Until recently, the supply of lawyers were also severely restricted.

> In all of this you've failed to explain why the American auto industry, with our superior company culture, can't make competitive cars.

I did not discuss the auto industry. One of the reasons that the American auto-industry failed was because of out of control labour unions (as the article states).

Clearly the Japanese auto-industry excels. That is due to many things, such as attention to detail and the responsible actions of employees at all levels. These are some really good aspects of Japanese culture. (Another is cleanliness, the ability to plan and timeliness. Just compare Tokyo’s train system to Paris’ subway).

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi

The reason I accused you of hating Japan is you seem to idealize American business while focusing on Japan's weak points.

From what I've seen and experienced 60+ hour weeks and not knowing your family are common if you're trying to climb the corporate ladder in America. Forced overtime and working yourself into a heart-attack happen here, too. And here the company has no loyalty to you beyond what's forced by the threat of lawsuit.

No offense but maybe RTFA? A lot of it's about how through NUMMI GM learned from Toyota how to treat its employees better. Ctrl-f for I saw a guy fall in the pit, and they didn't stop the line. So much of the article is about how the Japanese auto workers received more respect and how that translated into better cars.

If you want to be an activist why focus on the metrics you're focusing on? In Japan 72% of suicides are men, in America it's 78%. You mention maternity harassment but the alarming gender disparity in suicide is left out, and it's worse in America.

Japan's judicial system may be flawed, but we have 12 times their incarceration rate. In America about 1 in 100 men is in prison, in Japan it's less than 1 in 1000.

We can cherry-pick numbers all day, but I think it's safe to say Japan's engineering excellence is not simply a product of worker exploitation. They're doing some things better than us and we should learn from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

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