Peter Thiel: Japan ain’t copying us anymore

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Originally Posted by mk378
Japan was never in position to copy the USA's way of industrialization because their islands don't have massive coal, oil, and mineral resources. Their economy has always been centered around two-way trade.


Very funny. They do copy (ok, reverse engineering alright) a lot of our stuff for sure. However they fund them to win at all cost, i.e. when Intel has 1 floor of engineers developing one generation of DRAM, the Japanese would fund 4 building full of them for the next 4 generations. They spend enough to surpass us because dumping for cheap isn't viable.
 
Originally Posted by emg
Originally Posted by PimTac
Japan is very much affected by the aging society demographic. They have less young people due to a declining birth rate. A lot of their current economy is focused on aged care.


Have you seen American demographic predictions lately? Japan is doing well in comparison: at least it will still be a first-world country in twenty years.

On the ageing front, my guess is that rejuvenation tech is one area where Japan will definitely be copying the US in the future; it's one of the few areas where US R&D still leads the world, though China make take over if the FDA doesn't relax its restrictions on testing.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what they would copy? Silicon Valley is now basically an enormous ad agency and spyware factory, Boeing jets have trouble flying, Intel is having trouble building new CPUs. The areas where the US used to lead the world have mostly rotted away over the last twenty years.

Reusable rockets, maybe?


One of the biggest problem with Japan's R&D is always how much risk they are willing to take on an individual level, and the nimbleness of their direction.

2 years ago I went to Taiwan for a business trip, a program manager I worked with told me the Japanese culture is to never break a promise, but also never promise you anything, and sandbag as much as they can so they never break a promise. This is the complete opposite of the Silicon Valley culture, and you can definitely see it in the resulting technological lead each is in. They never broke a promise, but they can never jump in to work things out fast like American or Chinese either.

Japan: high investment and high barrier to entry field like cars, flash memory, lens, semiconductor equipment, cameras, high speed rail, mission critical components

US (at least silicon valley): software, startup that "disrupt" an old industry, uber, airBnB, self driving, fabless semiconductor, virtualization / cloud, pharmaceutical, AI / Machine Learning.

Both need to absorb enough foreign tech expert to jump start / accelerate their tech lead and reduce their manufacturing cost. Yes, you can immigrate to Japan if you are an engineer, or if your ancestor is a Japanese that went to Latin America as a laborer.

South Korea has been taking away a lot of Japanese business because they are cheaper and other geo political reason as well.
 
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Japan has had very few original ideas in the automotive world, but they are very, very good at reinventing and developing others failed ideas...the Mazda rotary being a good example. The early '70's fuel crisis and American emission rules were the perfect storm for Japanese cars, they were able to hammer in the last nails on the coffin of the failing British motor industry and leapfrog the US who were slapping air pumps and other patches on grossly bloated and inefficient cars....the rest of the world were in catch up on the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla forever.

I love this quote from a motorcycle magazine from the early '70's when we were awestruck from what the Japanese were turning out...

If one bolt will hold it,
And two will do,
But three will make sure....
Then use four.
 
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