This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You'll get the whole story, and I'll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you'll

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The 200th episode of Disrupting Japan explores the decline of Japan's software industry, tracing its roots back to economic and political structures established during the Meiji restoration and post-WWII era. The episode discusses the evolution from zaibatsu to keiretsu, the failure to capitalize on the PC revolution, and the struggles faced by Japanese software developers. Despite these challenges, the future shows promise with rising startup culture and changing attitudes towards software innovation.

The forgotten mistake that killed Japan’s software industry

Life as a Developer in Japan’s Dot-com Bubble

The Triumph of the Japanese Software Developer

They have one of the biggest opportunities to bounce back up.
Highly educated citizens, workaholics.
Intellectual man-power as a service.

This is a fairly good and broad view of the Japanese software industry, however I think it gets a bit lost by not drilling down into some more specifics.
A lot of software design focused on maintaining stability at the expense of innovation, which means old tech lingered, because it worked. Improvements were often incremental. In the case of entertainment, you could make small changes and get by changing the content. A lot of Japanese programmers that learned their craft at university also, just didn’t pursue their own projects (on the side), so they didn’t produce a lot of Bill Gates equivalents.
There was also a lot of (primarily American) foreign software entering the market, and there were buckets of money to be made by localizing for the Japanese market. A lot of software that was specific to the needs of Japanese business and later end users was created, too but, some imported titles could fill that role as well, and fat margins were added.
I don’t particularly agree with the title of this article. There is a Japanese software industry. There are a whole lot of parallel industries that develop really innovative software. But it is one among several industries in Japan that was really brought low by the bubble economy and tightening of belts in the early 2000s.

i mean granted, it is a long article, but an interesting one , it tells a long story

They are still peaking at robotics, though. Also, in embedded software, and integrated circuits, their conservative policies can be logically reasoned about. The issue comes when they use one solution to fit all the software industry in.
There were interesting developments, such as the Lean Software Development, adapted from the Toyota’s car manufacturing process to suit the Software Lifecycle, and often mistaken as part of Agile. While processes such as Kanban are convenient, they aren’t enough to grant quality on demand. Focusing on the process and efficiency while overlooking proper testing, relevant metrics, human factors… tend to be suboptimal.