Why Apple Isn’t Japanese

The strict hierarchies of Japanese companies discourage people with radical new ideas. As James Mok of the Tokyo software consulting firm Apriso notes, "In the U.S. it's much easier to spin off the results of a particular project as a separate business." In Japan, a risk-averse culture makes it harder. Mok recently penned a study called "How the Japanese IT Industry Destroys Talent."

One notorious case in point involves Shuji Nakamura, the brilliant scientist who invented a revolutionary energy-saving blue-diode light source only to find himself mired in years of litigation as he struggled to extract royalty payments from the company that had profited from his invention. Nakamura ultimately abandoned Japan for California. Fasol recalls asking scientists at the University of Tokyo if they considered his departure a blow. " 'No, not at all,' they told me. 'It might be good to have someone more ordinary'." Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the youthful, productively offbeat cofounders of Google, wouldn't have stood a chance in Japan.

Nor would Google's remarkable culture of chaotic cross-pollination. In Japan, boundaries between groups (even inside companies) are clearly defined and hard to cross. Carl Kay, a U.S. consultant who has spent years analyzing Japanese service companies, recalls encountering several representatives of a leading Japanese computer maker at an Internet conference back in the United States in 1995. "We went to Starbucks together, and they said, 'We don't get it. Why would we want to use the Internet to talk to people outside of the company?' "

Insular Japanese companies are evidently ill poised to craft the sort of personalized, culturally specific content that is at the heart of much of technology and telecoms development today. But even straight-ahead research

is problematic. Stodgy government labs and big corporate research centers don't have great track records. Back in the 1980s the Japanese government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a now forgotten project called the "Fifth Generation Computer." Americans, still reeling from Japan's stunning rise in cars and consumer electronics, watched with anxiety. In 1984, one U.S. computer magazine pronounced portentously: "The Japanese are planning the miracle product. It will come not from their mines, their wells, their fields, or even their seas. It comes instead from their brains."

Apparently, it's still there. Indeed, all too often Japan's technological prowess comes to a screeching halt when it comes to developing computers or the programs that run on them. "Japan was a technological powerhouse in the predigital world," says Keith Woolcock, a global tech strategist at Westhall Capital in London. "But they've never been a dominant computer maker. And the computer, linked with the Internet, is now the armature around which the whole world revolves." There are no Japanese operating systems; Toshiba, the laptop pioneer, is no longer a player in the PC market.