TOKYO, Oct. 7, 2023—Sociologist Ezra Vogel in his 1979 book ‘Japan As No. 1’ glorified the country for leaping out of the World War II rubbles to the global forefront in government, education, and more visibly, science and technology that had helped create the Sony Walkman and Honda’s Asimo robot.
On March 31, 2022, Honda Motor Co. held Asimo’s retirement ceremony at its Tokyo head office, ending its humanoid robot R&D that it began in 1986 for good. Toyota Motor Corp. had scrapped its toy-size pet robot project earlier. Sony unveiled its first-generation AIBO pet robot for sale in 1999 and ended in 2006, but it introduced a different version in 2017.
Those Japanese robots were touted as the world’s first commercial robots but basically for the companies’ media blitz. They were displayed at motor shows and other events but visitors were discouraged from directly engaging with them, such as touching them.
Immediately after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear power station meltdown, disaster experts recommended using Asimo for proving into nuclear power plants. Honda remained mum and the idea never flew. Tokyo Electric Power Co. eventually used French and U.S.-made robots for the job.
Sony’s Walkman cassette player, first released in 1979, was a range of the 1980s to early 1990s. It has become ‘one of’ many music players that uses flash memories and other devices, so the market was leveled for all manufacturers.
In a nutshell, U.S. and other foreign companies caught up and outdistanced what Japan boasted as the world’s first technologies in a few decades as they actively exploited computer and information technology, the area Japan lags behind.
Robots are not the only tech that Japan has relinquished its Japan As No. 1 slot:
–It was on narrow Tokyo streets where tne of the world’s first public road driving EVs were the Tama, manufactured by engineers of the now-defunct Tachikawa Aircraft Co., and in the 1970s, golf cart-size tricycle EVs for delivering bottled milk every morning. In 2001, A team of Keio University scholars manufactured the ‘Kaz’ EV that raced to the top speed of 300 km/h but the project was killed soon after. Now, Tesla, BYD and other foreign makers are stealing the EV show, while Japanese automakers struggle to catch up;
–Japan’s Supercomputer Fugaku, developed by Fujitsu and the government research lab Riken, was ranked in 2023 the fastest multiple major high-performance computer in certain segments, though it placed second and third in other categories, Fujitsu’s announcement said. According to the New York Times July 20, 2023 article, Silicon Valey startup Cerebras’s AI supercomputers seem to outrun Fugaku in AI related processing jobs;
–Until several years ago, Japan ranked net-to-neck in space development with other G7 countries, trying to catch up with the United States. Until the 2010s, Japanese government officials once told me that japan and the United States shared a common view that Japan would ‘cooperate but not compete’ with the United States in space technology. With that tacit understanding, Japan developed its H2 rocket and earlier this year experimented H3, which, to the Japanese horror, exploded soon after the liftoff, scrapping Japan’s space program back for years and forcing it to use H2 to launch a moon probe this summer – while India and China successfully sent their advanced space probes in orbit.
Japan’s post-war booming society cratered in the 1990s after the bursting of its bubble economy in 1991. It was the period when then-developing economies, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China got the first taste of industrialization by hosting Japanese transplants of electrical products, toys, textiles and later auto assembly. Even after the Tokyo stock market crash, most Japanese thought they had caught up with U.S. technology and societal models and interacted with the developing world with degrees of arrogance and complacence, typically happily transferring Japanese business models to them. The developing world caught up Japan in less than two decades.
Are there other sectors of Japanese society that have surrendered their top spots or plainly died? There probably are many. What’s left for Japan at the end of the day?
MU.
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