Something I think may be related, but I don't have strong evidence for, is that I think some of the high Quality shown in Japanese work is also evidence of a tendency towards not trying to do everything. Things I've noticed in a lot of Japanese products, both software and hardware:

1. Barebones UI/UX that I would guess isn't very accessible for blind/non-traditional users. 2. Poor user manuals and often even worse translations. 3. Proprietary systems where there's no interoperability outside of that company's ecosystem.

To me, this points to a system that does a very good job making things for the 80% case, and often doesn't even try to accommodate the 20% case.

I have another hypothesis. Japan is a nation of craftsmen. As such, Japan excels at enterprises involving the manipulation of physical objects, like producing cars, cameras, knives, industrial equipment, computer hardware, etc. If you've ever been to Japan, you'd notice that it is a nation where physical objects/systems are very much prized.

On the flip side, Japan doesn't seem to do as well with abstract objects. I'm specifically thinking of software here.

You see, the modern practice of software development is heavily tied to American/European culture, where technology norms, though ostensibly universal, find a natural home in the English language. Consider concepts like generics, devops, dependency injection, static vs dynamic typing: all of these were conceived in English-centric environments. Sure there's nothing linguistically specific about them, but they reflect discourses that happen primarily in English-speaking spaces.

If software development were more mathematical (and maybe more like electronics... somehow less tied to English), I suspect the Japanese would do much better than they are doing right now. (Ruby's Matz is a notable exception, and I suspect his fluent English had something to do with it)

But the fact is, the practice of software development is as much sociology as it is engineering. Large swaths of it are inextricably linked to the culture, norms, and languages of Americans/Europeans. Without a good command of English, one finds oneself merely consuming content but unable to influence the discourse.

Video games is a pretty big counter example to that hypothesis. Japan has been a huge leader and pioneer in that industry, which is all software + art. Another counter example is robotics, which is software + hardware.

I don't know about robotics (still pretty physical, and robot software is very bespoke and specialized).

But video games definitely defeats my hypothesis, as well as anime/manga.

That point might be valid, but it could be simpler than that. It just might be too expensive to design and document for the world.

Documentation is often very complete; but at an extremely technical level, and not always translated. Japan is a nation of engineers. I think that they expect users to have a certain level of proficiency, and that is reflected in their UX and documentation.

I find that Japanese equipment can be very polished and aesthetically designed, but can be quite intimidating. They produce pretty space shuttle cockpits.

Translation is a fearsomely expensive and fraught process. I have done a lot of localization work. Chinese companies have a similar affect, where their customer documentation is often quite sparse. It's quite possible to get detailed documentation, but it will be in Chinese, from the company. I found that out while I was working in ONVIF (surveillance stuff). The docs that came with the cameras were terrible, but the engineers would be quite helpful, if I could track them down and ask questions.

Yea, I don't mean it to say there's no reason for it. That underlying issue tracks with what I'd expect.

This comes back to another point that's been made elsewhere in this thread - it's always going to be easier to design and build things for a community that's smaller and more homogeneous. A lot of the countries we think of as being good at building things are also fairly small.

There's probably a term for it, but it's almost the inverse of Economies of Scale. It's easier to make good country-wide standards when most of your country wants the same thing.

Well, my experience is that some (not all) Japanese companies are quite good at making high-quality stuff at enormous scale.

The company I worked for is renowned for making really nice cameras, and have been doing it for 100 years. People all over the world have wrapped their entire careers around the products of this company (I don't call them out by name, because I don't really want my social media rants to end up on their radar).

As noted above, however, I found that their production magic didn't really work so well for software. As I was one of their software managers, this was challenging.