I was reading this article on the Kindle vs the Sony ebook readerand it occurred to me it’s been quite some time since there was any kind of a “wow” factor from something a Japanese company brought to market.
What happened? Why did the pipeline of super-keen-neato-torpedo devices run dry?
Why make new inventions when they can improve on an already working gizmo!
Really though, I think a lot of the neato things being created in Japan just don’t see much daylight outside of it. The robo-model in another thread was cool, if not creepy, but I don’t expect to see that being sold to average consumers any time soon.
Well, the world has been going ga-ga over this and the innovation it’s brought for the last three years…
Okay, so more than one country was involved with that, but I assume a lot of tech is like that nowadays.
When I see robotic innovation in the news it is coming out of Japan. They also make a pretty mean marine diesel.
That robot is creepy.
A lot of people liked the Nintendo Wii. And the Toyota Prius has been a pretty good success, but I’m not really sure. Not to mention Blu-Ray from Sony beat out HD-DVD competition pretty handily.
Car navigation system innovations are completely dominated by Japanese technology.
The largest GPS companies Garmin and TomTom are US and Dutch based respectively and manufacture their devices in China. I’m not aware that the Japanese are dominant in any aspect of GPS technology.
Well, I think Japan led the way in having the first commercially available car navigation system.
From wikipedia
And then their introduction into common usage in Japan predates the US. When I was in Atlanta in 2004 I’d look inside parked cars as I was walking down the street and didn’t really see a single built-in car navigation system. At that time in Japan there was hardly a car on the road without a navigation system. (Maybe that was just an Atlanta thing? 
If I’m not mistaken Japan was the first to introduce 3D maps and voice recognition. I can’t be sure about that though. While a lot of products are ‘made’ in China, the parts they use (chips, screens etc) are made in Japan and then shipped to China for assembly.
I’m kind of involved in the industry (drafting and prosecuting patents for, among other things, car navigation technologies for a major player). So I see the innovations coming through about 5 years before they hit the market. I definitely think that Japan leads the way in car navigation technology - but I could be wrong. 
The technology behind the GPS is more likely Garmin based and ultimately a product of US military systems. The consumer bells and whistles driven off this technology are Japanese improvements to it.
Japanese companies have a history of taking new technology and exploiting it to it’s fullest potential.
Following WWII, there were a few bad asses who took over Japanese businesses with the goal to rebuild the nation and go out and kick international ass. But they had a fairly non-liberal view of how to get stuff accomplished. Rather than trying to assemble creative people and give them the freedom to go out and do good stuff, the idea was more that there was one guy (at the top of the company) who told everyone what to do, and they went out and did it right then. So it’s one guy’s mission being fully powered by a full company, rather than a few groups each powered by part of a company.
This was very effective through to the early 80s. But it had some underlying issues for long-term business. A good merit system wasn’t developed because individual spirit wasn’t a useful thing. Personal, business, and family connections, what school you went to, etc. had greater relevance than they do in someplace that doesn’t care about anything but whether you can make money. And it also meant that once the old guys (the badasses) started to retire, there wasn’t anyone below them to fill the same chair.
And since connections and so on are a key to getting promoted, if you ever got stationed abroad, like the head of a department in the US, your ability to climb the ladder was frozen. Other guys who are closer to the domestic hierarchy are going to be able to nag and grease the boss better. No one wants to get assigned abroad.
So we’ve got a bunch of huge corporations which are led by people who don’t have a lot of grand ideas, with a bunch of underlings who don’t want to go international. In end story, Japan could have come in and fully taken the cellphone market three years before the push to update the technology happened here. They could have walloped the CD by pushing MiniDiscs abroad ten years earlier. They finally made the push just as MP3 players were introduced. And there are probably several other massive markets that they let slip by, targeting only Japan.
:smack:
The Japanese seem to be ahead of the curve with imagery products: digital cameras (many of which are still “Made in Japan”, as opposed to designed in the US or Japan but manufactured in China) and copying machines.