Japan's digital defeat: 'It has ample capacity to recover,' but 'closed thinking must change,' says TRON developer

TRON has been adopted in many electronic devices worldwide as an operating system embedded in equipment, but it is not as visible as Windows. Japan's digital lag is attributed to the fact that the way Japanese companies think is no longer suited to the times, and it has been pointed out that organizations find it difficult to change methods once they have become established.

Although employees on the front lines are highly capable, they tend to get by without changing their systems. As a result, old systems are preserved and optimization of the organization as a whole becomes difficult to achieve. It was also explained that Japanese companies place emphasis on optimization at the departmental level, making it difficult to pursue optimization of the organization as a whole.

Using the Zero fighter as an example, it was pointed out that Japan had difficulty standardizing parts specifications, whereas the United States has advanced mass production and the standardization of parts and manufacturing technologies. It is considered difficult to create a system that becomes a global standard based on a mindset focused on local optimization.

It has been pointed out that Japanese companies are not good at making their own technologies open, working with other companies and creating ecosystems that expand markets, and that they tend to become isolated from the rest of the world. TRON spread worldwide because its developers thought on a global scale from the outset and made the technology publicly available.

Sakamura Ken (坂村健) has argued for more than 20 years that Japan should change its closed thinking, and says that Japan has the capacity to recover in the digital field. However, he concluded that the causes are complex and cannot be addressed by fixing just one issue; Japan must correctly identify its problems and change them one at a time.