Like most people here it's all just opinion.<p>I'm happy someone is pushing for more innovation in Japan but ... there's huge issues<p>(1) Japanese people generally only speak Japanese. That tends to limit their reach to Japan only. Sure there are exceptions, I'm just saying it adds a hurdle. It also adds a hurdle to importing people.<p>(2) Japanese culture doesn't encourage sticking out. There's a reason one of the most famous Japanese sayings is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Nearly ever part of Japanese is set against innovation. From the culture of "life time employment", the culture of "cram in high school for a college, party at college, arrive at job making $25k a year because you have no skills but company will train you, hired based on which school you went to". There's the "seniority issues where you're required to defer to anyone hired before you" (apparently that's even worse in Korea to the point my Korean friends say you can't ever truly be best friends with someone a few years old than you because you're required to treat them as your elder, not your peer). There's whole business legal issues where for all kinds of business transactions you're require to go to the local business administration office and have them print out officially stamped forms which you then submit it contracts etc..., You can add in the financial system here is not friendly to new ventures. I don't know where to point to how risk adverse things are here but I can point concretely for you to look at interest rates on savings accounts, certificate of deposit, etc to see it's vastly different than the USA.<p>(3) Japanese culture for various reasons still produces a much smaller number of career women. If you thought the representation of women in STEM (or pick your career) was low in some country in the west, it's 2-3-4-5x worse here. I'm not going to blame any particular thing but it is the current culture all around. The point is their missing a large pool of talent<p>(4) There's not much talent here. I don't mean that Japanese people are not talented, I mean rather it's impossible to hire talent. I have friends running companies and they can't find anyone even in Tokyo Metro (34 million people) and Osaka Metro (19 million people). Some of that is cultural, people don't switch jobs. Some of it is truly lack of talent (see education issue above), some of it is low salaries. Example: Top pay at Sony Japan for a software engineer is ~$70k. Most places pay much less. A few cash rich companies might pay more, (Cyber Agent, Mercari, are rumored to pay above $100k).<p>(5) If software engineers are the leaders of most innovation now, maybe they aren't, but if they are, Japan's attitude about them is they must be 21 to 35 and they are just replaceable cogs. After 35 they must be managers or else they move into some other field.<p>(6) Overtime is ridiculous