I'm not from Japan, but I work in the US for a large Japanese company. I know that they have a large software engineering team in Japan, but if it isn't hardware related they seem to have a hard time producing quality software. They seem to have realized this, and now focus on producing hardware and have started up 3 different software teams across the US to build software for said hardware.
They occasionally send some of their engineers to our offices (for 6-12 months usually) to learn about our culture. There is a clear disconnect when they send these people. They work hard, no problem with long hours, but they have a very hard time getting into the collaborative nature of our teams, and I don't think it is just the language barrier. I guess I take it for granted usually, but it made me realize how much time we spend discussing things between developers, questioning management, writing furiously on the whiteboard, arguing, trying things out, failing, trying something different, finding problems with other people's code, fixing said problems, etc. It can take a bit of thick skin to absorb such criticism and engage in this process, but I think it is crucial to good software development. Someone who just sits quietly in meetings, then waits for a task to be assigned, and works at that task until it is complete is somewhat missing the process, because sometimes it turns out the task your manager assigned doesn't make any sense, or can't be done with this framework, or that you would have to use 100 global variables to accomplish the task this way.
I am merely speculating but it's possible that a very rigid social and management hierarchy where it is more important to work hard and respect your position in the company than to solve the problem the right way if it involves bucking authority, could negatively impact the ability of developers to innovate and/or produce a quality product.
They occasionally send some of their engineers to our offices (for 6-12 months usually) to learn about our culture. There is a clear disconnect when they send these people. They work hard, no problem with long hours, but they have a very hard time getting into the collaborative nature of our teams, and I don't think it is just the language barrier. I guess I take it for granted usually, but it made me realize how much time we spend discussing things between developers, questioning management, writing furiously on the whiteboard, arguing, trying things out, failing, trying something different, finding problems with other people's code, fixing said problems, etc. It can take a bit of thick skin to absorb such criticism and engage in this process, but I think it is crucial to good software development. Someone who just sits quietly in meetings, then waits for a task to be assigned, and works at that task until it is complete is somewhat missing the process, because sometimes it turns out the task your manager assigned doesn't make any sense, or can't be done with this framework, or that you would have to use 100 global variables to accomplish the task this way.
I am merely speculating but it's possible that a very rigid social and management hierarchy where it is more important to work hard and respect your position in the company than to solve the problem the right way if it involves bucking authority, could negatively impact the ability of developers to innovate and/or produce a quality product.