I don't know if it's why they didn't create the iPod but there are some noticeable differences in the music industry in Japan<p>It is (was?) almost impossible to find Japanese music online in legitimate ways. What I means, search for almost any western song and it will be on youtube either by the band itself, their publisher, or VEVO. Search for nearly any Japanese song and you won't find them on youtube, at least not officially. You might find a music video but it will often be edited in the middle with some interruption to basically make it not what you actually want (the full song).<p>I don't know why this is. I assume the Japanese music industry believes they'll make no money if the full music videos are available online. (note: this might be changing but it was true for many songs a year ago).<p>Example: The theme to Demon Slayer: LiSA - Gurenge (紅蓮華), searching brings up "officially" a short edited version, a practice version, and a live version but not the hit full song version.<p>Another example: Spice by Tokyo Karankoron the official music video cuts out after 1:30 and effectively says "buy it"<p>For whatever reason that's very different than the west.<p>Other random examples of differences:<p>* CD stores still exist in Japan (although they are clearly getting fewer in number)<p>* The Mini Disc was huge in 1997-2004ish. Normal models ran for > 200hrs on a single charge something no mp3 players I know of have ever come close to.
There are some interesting ideas in here, but I feel like the author left out a lot of the story and many other possibilities.<p>1. The author basically says that, due to fonts, Japan focused more on “applications” computing rather than system computing up through the 80s. I mostly agree with this.<p>2. The author then completely leaves out the 90s and jumps to the 2001 release of the iPod. Excuse me?<p>3. In the late 80s and early 90s, the computing tech became robust enough to handle Japanese fonts somewhere between well enough to almost perfectly. For example, I fondly remember my Wordtank from the early 90s made by Canon that helped my Japanese studying tremendously. Note that some models had variable memory (e.g., marking something for review) and expansion slots. My Apple PowerBook from the early 90s handled Japanese almost perfectly. Japanese word processors (ワープロ) also seemed to have some basic system level functionality (I rarely used one, but many friends did).<p>4. The above suggests that systems were available and functional in the early 90s.<p>While some open systems like the Mac OS were not made in Japan, open systems existed, so why didn’t they become more widely used in Japan?<p>To me, that is the key question.<p>I think at least one other possible explanation is that Japan’s societal structure didn’t (at least at that time) really leave very much space for people to be able to make a living via these open systems [1], as such, these systems were not broadly in demand.<p>Another possible explanation is that the first “lost decade” (the 90s) saw very little space for innovation.<p>I’m sure other viable explanation are possible.<p>Side note — this is incorrect:<p>“For comparison, let’s look at a few common Japanese characters (these are ranked as the 35th, 64th, and 104th most commonly used characters, respectively):<p>議 選 調”<p>I wonder where they got this info from. Maybe they were thinking of the list of kanji that students start learning in secondary school?<p>[1] Note that some people actually did make a living these open systems, but they tended to be connected much more intellectually, professionally, and economically with folks outside of Japan. TWICS internet was publicly available in 1993, and that helped tremendously imho.
I remember a joke in Homestar Runner[0] in 2006 about Pom Pom making a movie on his phone. At the time it was maybe just barely possible. Some people were watching very limited movies or movie clips on their phones. A few years later, people were doing video calls and streaming to the internet.<p>So yes, there was a period of time where the iPod and digital cameras and other gadgets were tethered the PC. Picasa was a desktop app for years before google photos; but now everything is on the cloud. I've never connected my current phone to a computer. (I did with my previous one, but that was for app development and debugging).<p>0: <a href="http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/technology" rel="nofollow">http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/technology</a><p>STRONG BAD: Originally, tellular cellaphones {indicating Pom Pom's phone} were for sending misspelled messages to your friends, telling them where you are in the food court.<p>POM POM: {makes a few bubbling noises directed at Strong Bad, then resumes his conversation}<p>STRONG BAD: Pom Pom just bought movie tickets with his cell phone!<p>POM POM: {looks annoyed and makes more bubbling noises}<p>STRONG BAD: Oh, he just watched a movie on his cell phone!<p>POM POM: {looks angry at Strong Bad, makes more bubbling noises}<p>STRONG BAD: Oh oh oh! Pom Pom just wrote, directed, produced, and distributed a movie with his cell phone!<p>POM POM: {answers an incoming call and makes a few more bubbling noises}<p>STRONG BAD: ...and he just got into Sundance! High-five, brother!
The language discussion is pretty navel-gazey and easily falsifiable. There were loads of Japanese-market PCs in the early 90s (stuff like the MSX). Hell, Apple did huge pushes in Japan as well, thanks to its high-res stuff. If the language was maybe a barrier early on, it's pretty hard to argue that it continued to be so.<p>"Something" was different, of course. And maybe there is an argument for there simply being not very many <i>cheap</i> machines available for the Japanese market.<p>My pet theory is that the US in particular quickly started doing things like asking students to type up essays on computers to get them printed, and that basically served as the uber-excuse for people to all have computers at home in the US.<p>If you want more exoticism, people in Japan are less likely to have home offices because they would just go to their real office or whatever. Less likely to play DOOM on your parent's machine or whatever.<p>The specialized device aside is also super weird cuz it forgets to mention stuff like rental CD markets which make analog-in totally fine as a concept anyways. "Why is this problem not solved in Japan" can often be answered by "this isn't really as much of a problem because of some other incidental technical reason X, and the good-enough thing survives" (just like ACH in the US)
Has the myth that Japan is a uniquely technically advanced society been debunked in culture yet? I see this a bit among laymen but it seems the only Japanese technological advantage today is the manufacturing of factory line robotics and control systems. The large consumer tech companies have been effectively plundered (Sony is a shell of what it was in the 90s) and Toyota and Honda are routinely outcompeted by Tesla and GM in EVs. The rest of consumer tech seems to be coming out of Taiwan, PRC and South Korea now.
The article is from 2008. Anyway I feel like the article makes many leaps which weaken its specific argument:<p>> the direction that the Japanese electronics industry took makes perfect sense. Everything needed to be designed as stand-alone appliance.<p>> By the year 2000, most of the technical difficulties facing computers in Japan in the 80s and 90s had been resolved, and home computers were becoming mainstream. Japanese consumers wanted PC connectivity from their appliances, and the iPod offered a well-designed, highly functional package. So Apple created the iPod, and Japanese electronics manufacturers were left to re-evaluate a new world where the home computer is the hub for digital media.<p>For me, it's really about CD/Mini-disc vs Mp3. Before the Mp3, I remember my friend showed me the mini-disc and I was blown away by it. Crazy better than CD's in terms of size.<p>But then Mp3's showed up, but I think specifically Napster, Limewire etc drove the crazy crazy adoption of Mp3's. Sony and other portable companies took notice and built Mp3 devices. Japan was slow to adopt the Mp3.<p>Why was Japan slow to adopt the Mp3? I'm not sure, could be because of the lack of personal computer? Or was it the lack of rampant piracy? My feeling is music hardware was "good enough" for what the market wanted at the time.<p>Eventually Mp3 became the standard and anyone slow to adopt it was forced to accept and switch over, like Japan.<p>[EDIT]
Quick search shows that Japan had rampant priacy issues, but simply avoided the Mp3:<p>> But as of the beginning of 2004, Japanese record companies have
largely avoided an online file-sharing epidemic.[0]<p>Still not sure why the Mp3's adoption was slow in Japan. Could very well be the lack of personal computer.<p>[0] <a href="https://anthropology.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/condry_Piracy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://anthropology.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/c...</a>
Japan had a major real estate crash in 1989, the Nikkei index crashed from 38,000 to 7,500, and never came all the way back.[1] It's only at 27,795 today. For a while in the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to take over the world. But that didn't happen.<p>The US had a similar crash in 2008, but it wasn't as bad. Although it did seem to result in what's now called "secular stagnation".<p>[1] <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/stockdetails/fi-a9j7bh?duration=Max" rel="nofollow">https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/stockdetails/fi-a9j7bh?durat...</a>
I think Japan's products often miss the bigger picture. They often excel at one specific problem, but lack cohesive strategy to tie back into the whole ecosystem. In this post, there was discussion about SD cards and music hence why they needed some kind of PC connectivity. I view that as a symptom of the lack of a bigger strategy. Apple came out with iTunes that was one answer to the music industries problem, and that allowed them to eventually iterate into the iPod with less need to support alternative ways for PC connectivity such as the SD card.
> The PC-9801 featured a standard resolution of 640×400, which would not be surpassed as a standard in the west until the release of VGA and Macintosh II in 1987.<p>Small niggle: this isn't quite true. The Amiga 1000, released in 1985, supported a graphics mode at 640 x 400 (NTSC) and 640 x 512 (PAL) standard resolutions that on a standard TV would display interlaced (leading to flickering), but could be displayed without the flicker with a "flicker fixer" and a multisync monitor. The Amiga also supported overscan resolutions so these pixel counts could be exceeded on both the horizontal and vertical axes (I forget by how much though).<p>As I say, a small niggle, but a niggle nonetheless.
The Japanese corporation Toshiba created the drive formfactor that made it possible, and Apple bought exclusive music player rights to it.<p>The Nomad etc. maybe didn't actually lose because of lacking wheel as popularly mythologized, its successors were stuck with a bulkier more power hungry laptop drive because Apple owned exclusivity.
In some ways, the iPod or the iPhone are largely not technical innovations, but political. For the iPod, you had to get the catalog online and digital. For the iPhone, you had to get the data rates in USA low.
One common trope I've heard for the reason why PC gaming never took off in Japan (vs. Korea) is that the PC became home for erotic games so PC gaming was viewed as rather obscene. This explanation however makes more sense.
People criticize USA, a lot for racism and discrimination but the reality is that there are not other country in the planet where immigrant can be integrated so fast to the workforce and don't find themselves trapped under a glass ceiling, it probably happens but with less frequency than other countries, other countries are competing with their limited pool of talent that people in power let succeed against the world itself.<p>Talent can come from everywhere, and USA will continue to dominate the innovation scene for years to come
Past threads from way back:<p><i>Why Japan didn’t create the iPod</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702</a> - March 2010 (88 comments)<p><i>Why Japan didn’t create the iPod</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181224" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181224</a> - May 2008 (4 comments)
Because only Apple could create the iPod? Duh!<p>No, seriously, there were a lot of competent MP3 players before the iPod, but Apple did it the was they do it most of the time: wait until a technology is really ready for mass market adoption, and then present their own compelling version of it. In the case of the iPod, it was the integration with iTunes (the software and the store) which made the iPod easier to use than the competition. Of course, it helped that Apple was also a computer maker and had far more software competence than a regular electronics company. Also, Apple was in an unique position to convince the record companies to "play along" with the iTunes store.<p>And then they did it again with the iPhone...
Very interesting, also would be curious to know how everyday things evolved today: booking travel, ebanking etc? since here in the west we sometimes see the home computer beeing pushed away by mobile/tablets or the home printer starting to disappear.
Is this article true though? I use MP3 players and small pocket computer from Casio and Sharp. Are they not connect to the PC? Or are we talking about the wrong history here.<p>I know their pc standard is different from ours. But iPod is really 2000s things. Many problems solved.<p>It is just like why no one has iPhone. There are smart phone. Just you want to have the genius to reinvent the game. There are MP3 players before iPod. Just wait for a genius or a company that look for user pain points and solved it.<p>I think that discuss reinventing history.
2 years before the iPod, there was the NOMAD digital audio player designed and sold by Singaporean Creative Technology they had offices in Japan, but they promoted MP3, and even encouraged ripping CDs. Sony et al did not like it, Steve Jobs came to their rescue with his thing.
<a href="https://sg.creative.com/corporate/pressroom?id=6225" rel="nofollow">https://sg.creative.com/corporate/pressroom?id=6225</a>
Sony could possibly have ushered in the MP3 revolution years before MP3 did, using their ATRAC audio compression, but being a record company as well as an electronics company, they were presumably concerned about piracy, something which may have also slowed adoption of MP3 playback.<p>Sony already had a successful product line in terms of MiniDisc players and also had the Memory Stick Walkman. These devices supported ATRAC and SDMI DRM. Presumably they could have used the same 1.8" Toshiba hard drive as the iPod to make a higher capacity version (as they later did with the Network Walkman, which initially did not support MP3.)<p>Fast forwarding to the iPod, it was a great way to play stacks of (usually unlicensed) MP3 recordings, and in 2001 "Rip/Mix/Burn" Apple was less worried about piracy because it wasn't a media company.<p>Subsequent to the original iPod, the initial incarnation of the iTunes store incorporated DRM (apparently at the behest of record companies) which was folded into the iPod as well.
> In Japan, however, things were different. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the Japanese market at the time is to imagine that home computers did not exist.[...]It all makes sense if nobody owns a home computer, and when the mobile phone is the dominant form of Internet connectivity.<p>I ellipsed all the SD card mention, but I find this summary of the situation fascinating, as this is pretty close the world we have today for a lot of people. Mobile phone is the dominant form of internet connectivity for a significant portion of the population.<p>An insight from that could be that Japan didn't create the iPod because that global need didn't make as much sense in the context.<p>I personally think it is really Sony being way too confident and stubborn, preventing the digital walkman from being the universal player it could have been. What they had was somewhat good enough for a big span of the Japanese market, but way too clunky and outdated for the rest of the world; and their position as an incumbent made it harder for smaller company.
As somebody who had Japanese gadgetry frequently around me 1995-2005 when I lived in Vladivostok, I find the premise silly.<p>Japanese versions of PDAs, and mini-PCs (exactly, PDA sized PCs) had zero problem both with display, and input of their language. 16x16 was the font standard.<p>I frequently got second hand devices with data intact, and I wondered how in the world their font designers managed to pull it out.<p>Second, Japanese devices had superb connectivity to anything from abroad, a completely 180° of the picture the guy draws.<p>Clies, Zauruses were able to go to the internet by themselves in around year 2000, and every trendy gadget came with sync cables for those. I had sync cables for my MD walkman for both Zaurus, and Clie. I even saw Sony digital tape players coming with some digital audio i/o adapters.<p>So, the author feels to me to have zero idea of what he is talking, just pushing the standard trope of "smart, but unimaginative Asians"
For the same reason they didn't create PCs: they had a different idea of what the Japanese market wanted which was calculators, not computers. And this drove the entire Japanese semiconductor and electronics industry during the 1970s and 1980s. Different Market. Different Culture. Different Technology Strategies.<p>And the Japanese are super sure of whatever direction they've picked once they've achieved "consensus" - NOTHING can change it; not other markets, and not situational changes.<p>The consensus part combined with risk aversion also meant they'd sooner duplicate the Moto flip phone or Nokia than step out to the iPhone touch screen button design.<p>Honestly it's easy to grok if you've spent time in Japan and/or doing a lot of business with Japanese companies.
Well, Morita got old and sick in 1993. Before that time, Sony brought out or popularized transistor radios, trinitron tv’s, higher end pc’s and a damn good, overengineered walkman. The one I had in 1989 was metal and plastic, took one aa battery, ran for 3+ hours and had good in ear phones. Followed this up with discmans, but the accountants were making themselves felt by then (cheap plastic).<p>Couple the Kaisen culture with a visionary and things happen. Let the bean counters run things and you get dividends. Sony put lightning in a bottle for a while. So did IBM, so did others from time to time. Apple was rare in that they did it more than once, but have they kept it up?
tl;dr - Language (kanji are hard) and culture (electronic devices as standalone devices, not a digital hub).<p>The iPod was a triumph of consumer-friendly embedded systems.<p>I got interested in iPodLinux, having a computer more powerful than my Mac Plus in my pocket that I could program! Now I'm an embedded software engineer at a medical device manufacturer. If I saw embedded engineering as boilers and fridges, I doubt that my teenage self would have been excited about it (not to insult those working in those essential industries!)<p>Culture in the west has changed since 2008, though. The "digital hub" model has shifted to a cloud-based SaaS subscription model. This is more profitable for service providers, especially phone companies.<p>But it's not because people like the cloud! It's because the iPod had no data input, no social experience. The music community was separate at the time (on MySpace). The iPhone came, threw music to the side, and pushed everyone towards cameras, screens, and sharing photos with each other (Facebook, Instagram). The network effects of community were stronger than the technical superiority of the iPod (larger storage, reliable software, USB disk mode).<p>I believe that these things go in cycles, and personal music will become popular again. Probably in some open-source, decentralised way, which can leverage that community effect. It won't happen until concert tours can restart, but it could be powerful enough to displace the major players (Apple, Google, Spotify) who seem to be neglecting the music community that brought them their market in the first place.
This is very interesting article from 2008. I would be interested to also read one which does an analysis of current trends and market in Japan and compare how it evolved.
(2008), but my first time reading—I only realized when the date when it started talking about Wii in the future tense towards the end, which brings me back!)<p>Previous discussions:<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Why%20Japan%20didn’t%20create%20the%20iPod&sort=byPopularity&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>
> It all makes sense if nobody owns a home computer, and when the mobile phone is the dominant form of Internet connectivity.<p>It did feel more advanced at the time, because phones were ubiquitous. Interestingly the rest of the world is now heading in that direction.
Nah, Sony was hell-bent on ATRAC and their proprietary memory stick standards. Not sure about the other major electronics manufacturers in JP, but the only one that sounds "technological trend setter" in my mind is Sony, so if they weren't doing it nobody else was.<p>And Job's Apple was throwing their hearts into open standards big time, abnormally so compared to the industry landscape.<p>Nope, the iPod could have only been Apple