TOKYO—Two unrelated developments seem to show that Japan is continuing to be haunted by its centuries-old brutal samurai bureaucracy shadows, stifling creative and individualistic thinking and demanding obedience – the very causes sapping Japan’s competitiveness in the modern world.
A Vietnamese university team Aug. 26 won an Asia-Pacific robot contest for the second consecutive year while Japan’s University of Tokyo could not even make it to the semifinal, according to the NHK World website of Japan’s national broadcasting station that hosted the 17thannual event. In Russia, Yandex, dubbed a Russian Google, which claims to have already conducted a driverless taxi service test on Moscow public roads, said Aug. 28 that it has started a commercial driverless taxi service in the Russian city of Innopolis – two days after two Japanese companies probably prematurely announced Aug. 26 a ‘world first’ autonomous, driver-in, taxi trial.
The Asia Broadcasting Union (ABU) Asia-Pacific Robot Contest is the largest robot tech event having been held since 2002, when NHK elevated the previous domestic Japanese contest for vocational high school students, started in 1988, as a region-wide event participated by teams from nearly 20 countries. This year, it was held in Vietnam, according to NHK World. (https://www.abu.org.my/ABU_Robocon-@-ABU_Robocon_2018.aspx)
Japanese teams won two past contests though their reigns have been increasingly challenged by Chinese and Vietnamese teams. In the 1980s through the early 2000s, Japan was a champion of robots. SONY’s Aibo pet dog was the envy of children to seniors, not to mention Japanese industrial robots of Fanuc and Yamazaki Masak (now Mazak) working 24/7 on factory floors worldwide. Now, Japan has become one of the robot-manufacturing countries, and it has to import specialty-purpose robots from the United States and Europe for such work as probing the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station that suffered a meltdown in 2011. And Japan is trailing behind other countries in drone technology, only recently has it become serious in drone application R&D.
A small tech upstart, ZMP (https://www.zmp.co.jp) and a Tokyo taxi operator, Hinomaru Kotsu, Aug. 26 announced a driver-in autonomous tax service experiment four round trips a day in central Tokyo Aug. 27-Sept. 8. 2018. The companies’ websites said all trips had been booked full as of Aug. 29. The websites claimed that it was a ‘world first’ s autonomous driving tax trial. It was clearly the first in Japan but dubious whether it was the world’s first. Russian Internet giant Yandex showed a YouTube video clip of a Toyota Prius driverless taxi cruising on the streets of a Russian city of Innopolis Aug. 28 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFmUcc7LSiw) and a driver-in automomous driving Prius on snowy Moscow streets in February 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx08yRsR9ow). Yandex said it would offer the driverless service in Europe soon.
Driverless car R&D was first performed in the United States by tech and auto makers such as Google, Tesla, General Motors and Ford, followed and joined by Toyota and Honda as something like trans-Pacific projects. If the Yandex taxi services are actually commercially available, it’s a defeat for both the United States and Japan. On Aug. 27, Toyota announced that it was investing $500 million in Uber Technologies.The press statement said: ‘As Uber and Toyota look ahead to a self-driving future, this partnership will be critical in realizing self-driving technology at scale. Uber and Toyota anticipate that the mass-produced autonomous vehicles will be owned and operated by mutually agreed upon third party autonomous fleet operators.’
Driverless car technology is evolving fast and researched worldwide so the jury is still out about which countries and companies can prevail to make their technologies as global standards. Even so, a Russian company excelling as a world first is rarely heard except when Moscow sent man’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, into the space in 1957. So Yandex’s Prius may stand out as the first if it becomes truly commercially viable.
The Japanese bureaucracy’s influence has gained significantly over the years after Shinzo Abe became the prime minister. Bureaucrats and their private-sector cronies cooperate and connive with the Abe Company – Abe himself, Finance Minister Taro Aso, and most of his cabinet members – according to feudal era principles of rigid rules and regulations, such as an overtime reduction campaign. Businesses are exposed to a bevy of new workplace rules on top of complex regulations they are required to observe in helping reduce overtime work hours. Important R&D projects about to be completed must be stopped when workers’ overtime limits reach. Small and medium-size company employees, who were replenishing their base salaries with overtime, now have to go to a second workplace to work to make up for the overtime shortfall.
Work-related and other new rules and regulations are sapping creative and individualistic thinking from Japanese society, a key reason why the country is losing its once powerful dynamism as evidenced in the fact that there’s been hardly any blockbuster innovations – like the Walkman and Toyota’s engine-gas hybrid engine – over the past decades since the bursting of the Japanese bubble in the early 1990s. Why driverless car technology development is slow in Japan partly can be ascribed to a classic bureaucracy turf battle between and among ministries and agencies concerned – the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for vehicles, hardware and applications; the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport for roads, vehicles, hardware and applications; the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications for telecommunications and then Internet, and vehicle accidents and fire; and the National Police Agency for all kinds of accidents and crimes related to autonomous driving.
And yet, the bureaucracy and politicians are sailing comfortably no matter how incompetent they may be. A crime suspect escaped from an Osaka police station three weeks ago, forcing police to field as many as 40,000 officers to search but he is still at large – and the officers are getting paid! Police blamed the incident as an ‘unpredictable’ situation, not their sloppy security precautions.
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