So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, or indeed criticize their goals and failures. Like all of their contemporaries they boldly went where no-one had gone before, and like the vast majority of their contemporaries (and most everyone since) discovered limitations in both the technology of the day, and their own abilities.

The important thing is not that they failed. The important thing is that they tried.

Some stuff has worked pretty well. I registered for a MyNumber card after years of dragging my feet. Now I can check how much tax I've paid, how much I have in my retirement fund, health insurance things, and a bunch of other stuff from my phone in like 10 seconds all from a single app. Previously I'd need to take a half day off, bring my wooden stamp to the appropriate government office, and wait for 10-30 minutes in order to make sure my stuff is in order.

I'm actually amazed how well it works.

Japan also builds infrastructure really fast.

It's not perfect, and some things lag behind other countries, but some things blow some other countries out of the water. If anything, I'd say the government moves pretty quickly with a lot of decisions (one consequence of being what's effectively a one party state, I suppose). Companies, particularly big ones, are more risk-averse.

The first is that the folks that immigrated decades ago tend to hold on to the perception they had upon arrival to the country, and the various impressions, for the rest of their lives there, and these impressions inform all future observations they have about the country. For example in Taiwan a lot of older American immigrants will talk about things like crime or the police as if it was still the KMT era when Taiwan was basically a different country, and their thoughts are really strange to hear when considering modern taiwanese police (who are basically teddy bears) or crime rates (extremely low).

The second is that, having spend decades in the country to which they immigrated, which is probably longer than they lived in their origin country, they seem to view everything that strikes them as odd, inefficient, or bad, as unique to their new home country. In this case such as your perception of Japan as being lead top-down by bureaucrats, when that description to me applies to basically every liberal democracy on earth. Thus:

> The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not.

imo, this is true for most government-led initiatives in nearly every country on earth. Not that I'm arguing against government-lead initiatives because they do result in sometimes incredible things like train infrastructure, spaceships, the internet, medical breakthroughs etc, but for the most part it seems politicians make big pitches to get elected and then just maintain status quo.

Obviously Japan has some uniquely bureaucratic things about the culture as a whole (lol faxes), but on the other hand this doesn't seem to be an obstacle considering they have some of the safest pedestrian-friendly streets in the world, some of the best public transit, an excellent healthcare system, low crime rates, low homelessness, low unemployment, etc. On the ground they're doing much better than many countries.

What do you think? You probably know much more about such things given your time in Japan as well as the fact that you work at a university.

As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly why Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz (and that too is on its way out).

So why did the Japanese fail? It's very simple: Lack of cooperation. The article describes the project "was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry" but the results could not put any more mud on that thought.

Japanese companies HATE cooperating, they will not create nor utilize common standards nor share knowledge with each other. Japanese companies will strive at every turn to create a captive market, hoping that once you've set foot in their little quagmire you will stay stuck with them.

If you ever wondered why Canon camera lenses do not work on Nikon cameras and vice versa, why Kenwood microphones do not work with ICOM radios and vice versa, why Sony insisted on Memory Stick over SD card, why Toshiba threw out NAND flash technology, and so on then this is why. Try naming even a single international industrial standard to come out of Japan, you probably can't and I don't blame you. Sharing is not in Japan's DNA.

Contrast the US computer industry where our companies besides Apple can and will cooperate to create and utilize common standards and push the market wider and forwards. PCI is a foremost example, but the very foundation of the industry is built on IBM PC-compatibles.

All this means Japan will always be stuck with a bunch of small, individual pies nobody will care about, losing to the rest of the west who cooperate (and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint) for a much bigger pie. You can't win when you're all trying to drag each other down in a zero sum game.

The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk.

VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers.

Then there's the MSX standard...

Japanese industry is no doubt somewhat different and may have its issues. But I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint... some external factor is often required to force large companies to cooperate. Those factors may be more common outside Japan, but I don't see that the fundamental issues are very different.

Worth noting that the big video game companies in Japan—Nintendo, Sony, Square Soft, etc. are atypical Japanese companies too, run a bit differently than the others. Which is no doubt a big reason for their success.

I am aware of several examples that directly contradict your argument:

- JIS screwdrivers.

- Really, JIS anything.

- MSX computers.

- FourThirds/MicroFourThirds.

And there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts: different camera systems have different flange distances! You’ll even see multiple mounts within the same brand as the line evolves, as seen with the transition from Minolta/Sony A mount to E mount.

You can't drill a hole on the sensor and mount lens body on it, and lenses must be placed at exactly focal distance away for parallel beams to converge on film or farther for diverging beam(from non-infinitely-far objects), so body designers pass a distance measurement from film to a known feature(mounting ring top surface) to be able to design a lens barrel. That's the flange-focal distance, sort of a "design length of body" to subtract from your overall lens barrel length.

It's actually possible to drill a hole on the PCB and woodscrewing lens directly on in cases with webcams and CCTV cameras, and in those cases the distance is 0.

So all of them having completely incompatible mounts is because they wanted to compete based on lock-in to a complete system, rather than compete for bodies and lenses separately.

Even worse, the fact that their flange distances are all within a couple of mm makes passive adapters impossible, since just the bayonet part of the mount is longer than that.

JIS isn't relevant outside of Japan, though. Everyone cares about ISO (USA) and standards like RoHS (Europe), nobody even knows what a JIS is.

>there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts

The reason is irrelevant, it's a camera and a lens and the fact they are incompatible is inexcusable. Japanese ham radio takes this further; when I said Kenwood microphones don't work with ICOM radios I mean they could use the same number of wires and perhaps even the same connector but they keep the wiring positions proprietary.

So you want to use your Kenwood gear with ICOM? Or Yaesu? Well too fucking bad bud, either get out some wire cutters and a soldering iron or buy into one of the ecosystems like a good Nippon-jin.

Imagine if Logitech, Corsair, Steelseries, and Razor all used USB for their peripherals but the wiring is unique to each of them, and imagine if mobos brands like ASUS and MSI partnered with specific peripheral brands and only featured USB ports compatible with them alone.

That's the Japanese ham radio scene and yes it fucking sucks; and yes, they are getting eaten alive by cheap Chinese ham radio equipment that doesn't do that proprietary shit.

If ham radio is too niche for you, don't worry: It expands to stuff like household appliances too. If you buy a Panasonic microwave oven or fridge and it breaks down you bet your ass you will need to buy replacement parts and perhaps even the repair labor from Panasonic.

We all love to complain about walled gardens and planned obsolescence here in the Anglosphere, but Japan is several orders of magnitudes worse. They make Apple look like a paragon of standards compliance and interoperability.

Chinese radios do not dominate in Japan, I suspect almost nobody in Japan uses a non-domestic radio. Possibly the primary reason being that they generally have not passed the local emission certifications (which is annoyingly required for all ham radios).

I don't see the incompatible microphone thing as an issue unique to Japan. Pretty much every 1980s computer had weird propriety interfaces. I suspect it was competition that forced them to standardize. You can find similar issues more recently (Apple/Lightening port, Dell/IBM laptop chargers, docking stations etc.)

If you want to point to issue with ham radio in Japan, I'd go with the certification issue, which helps lock non-domestic players out of the market...

China's software sector was arguably at its most innovative when it was in what can only be described a state of perpetual warfare. During the so called "QQ-360 wars" companies didn't just not cooperate, they pulled stuff like this:

"Qihoo, in turn, updated its software to strip away access rights for key components of QQ, while essentially labeling the program spyware. (The jury's still out on whether Qihoo is right.) In response to Qihoo partially disabling QQ, Tencent then forced Chinese users to choose between using QQ or using 360--you can't use both. This is akin to Apple saying you can't view Google websites on your Mac because some Android phones have multitouch. To add PR-based insult to software-based injury, users of the older web-based QQ found their interface replaced with a letter about Qihoo's alleged misdeeds, creating the impression that Tencent had blocked Web QQ on all machines just to spite 360 users."

The Chinese tech sector was full of mutual sabotage like this and while it was at times annoying for users, the absurd level of competition arguably benefited the ecosystem overall. I'd argue Japan if anything doesn't compete enough, there's often not strong enough of a focus on growth and clawing market share back.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/11/10/the-secret-win...

Although, in hindsight, that wouldn't have been as terrible as it sounds. VISA payWave would have been even more DOA than it is today in Japan if it was done that way.

Also, note that JCB is the only Japanese one of those universal payment systems. All the others are either American or Asian ex-Japan (PayPay which is South Korean, Alipay which is Chinese).

JCB is also a card brand, not a payment system. System is more like payment networks like CARDNET.

If you were trying to design a system to produce proprietary silos, you'd struggle to beat large Japanese corporations circa 1980.

IMO, that after series of economic downturns and corporate restructurings during 80s-00s in turn created excessively risk-averse Japanese corporate culture; now that they can be fired, psychological safety was gone, and now maintaining hire-for-life eligibility was seen as crucial. It may have been implicitly reinterpreted as eliminating others is a must for survival.

That's clearly one of major contributing factors to counter-productive behaviors causing stagnation of traditional Japanese tech companies; outright refusing sales, exports, opportunities, that may affect internal politics and justify job terminations.

It sucks to watch a lot of cutting edge technologies slowly evaporating from such fear of terminations. Hopefully someone figures a way out.

The only realistic solution I've seen so far is placing Japanese companies under foreign control.

Kioxia is an absurd example. It went from being Toshiba's rejected-and-dejected NAND flash division to a world leading company literally overnight once it was bought out by an American investment firm (Bain Capital).

On that note, Toshiba proper is in the process of getting bought out and chopped up by Japan Industrial Partners, which is really just a front for an American investment firm (Bain & Company) among others. Olympus also suffered the same fate several years ago.

Another is Sharp, which managed to claw back from bankruptcy once China/Taiwan (Foxconn) bought them out.

Yet another is Nissan, which became relevant on the world stage after getting effectively bought out by France (Renault, Carlos Ghosn). Nissan probably would have gone even bigger if Ghosn and Renault had succeeded in totally taking them over.

Even 7/11 (Seven & i Holdings) which was a rare reverse success story of Japanese management bailing out a failing American business is now in dire straits and risking a hostile takeover from a Canadian business (Couche-Tard).

Japan has the technology, engineers, and designers; what Japan doesn't have is an appropriate culture.

It's frustrating watching as a Japanese-American.

However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.

When the Netherlands has too much debt politicians and civil servants alike go into panic mode.

Where exactly would the tech sector have moved to? There's no other country that's really able to absorb high-skill immigrants the way American can and put them to work in that field.

It would have been much more decentralized.

Entire generations of Indian, Korean, Chinese, Canadian, Israeli, and European origin founders and executives helped build the US tech industry.

Heck, a lot of prominent Chinese and Indian startups got their start due to the GFC era layoffs and hiring freezes in the tech industry.

Look at Flipkart and Ola in India, ByteDance in China, and Coupang in SK/US for example

COVID and the recent layoffs had a similar impact on the startup scene as well.

Yes, but they would not have built such companies if they were stuck in their own countries. There's a reason they left those countries. Europe, for instance, is notorious for being extremely unfriendly to startups.

>Look at Flipkart and Ola in India and ByteDance in China for example

I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. As for ByteDance, TikTok is likely to be banned in the US and maybe elsewhere because it seems to be a tool for the CCP. It would be difficult to impossible for any Chinese tech company to achieve the status of Google or Microsoft for this reason. Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance.

Also, buses actually works in Europe :p

But yes, the startup scene is strong in Israel, and that's thanks to the Israeli diaspora in SV and Boston funding startups in Israel in the 2000s - especially Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks and much of the team at Akamai.

Pay and upskilling. But domestic tech salaries have risen across Asia now, and the US has gotten much harder to immigrate to.

Most people who joined the tech industry in the US from China and India in the 2000s felt they were getting a bum deal at the time in those countries because of a lack of domestic options, but that's changed since 2008 - especially after the 2008-10 layoffs (I remember those - they were scary, lots of my middle school friends had to move back to China and India because their parents lost their H1B or EB1/2 sponsor).

The next generation of Chinese and Indian startups are now being founded by former diaspora members after the hiring freezes during COVID.

> I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. for ByteDance

That's on you tbh. Not everyone is expected to follow every industry trend per country, but these are all unicorns or exited unicorns that were founded by cohorts in the late 2000s who had the option to move abroad but chose to remain in their own countries.

ByteDance for example had PMF in China well before it entered America as "TikTok", and Flipkart generated $7B a revenue a year - which isn't shabby by Indian or even American standards.

> Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance

First, Big Tech (FAANG) is not representative of the tech industry as a whole, and does not have strong PMF in plenty of markets and sectors abroad.

Secondly, this also underestimates the fact that most tech companies have strategy and R&D making parts of their organizations abroad now.

Plenty of NLP work that became LLMs came out of research done in Microsoft China and India, Google Pay's development org is largely in India, Apple's R&D labs in China and India played a major role in developing the manufacturing process and chip design respectively for the iPhone, etc.

It's not? Android is the most popular OS in the world with Apple and Microsoft making up the bulk of the rest.

>As of September 2024, Android, a mobile OS that uses the Linux kernel, has 45.38% of the global market and is the world's most widely used operating system. This is followed by Windows with 25.61%, iOS with 18.39%, macOS with 5.53%, and Desktop Linux with 1.64%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Take instant messaging as an example.

In the US, iMessage and FB Messenger are fairly prominent messaging services.

Yet in Japan+Taiwan+Thailand it's Line, in Korea it's KakaoTalk, in Vietnam it's Zalo, in China it's WeChat, etc.

Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue. The other $4.6T are spread across multiple decently large companies globally.

In addition, the stereotypical big tech companies are NOT market leaders in plenty of very large market tech sectors. For example, Cybersecurity, ERP, Payment Processing, CRMs, etc.

Big Tech is big, but the world is big as well. There are plenty of markets where a regional competitor or a specialized player can outcompeting big tech. For example, look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.

Big Tech is big, but it is not an end-all.

Notice how none of those companies in the second line have anything close to a globally dominant position? They're only popular locally. LINE is probably the best here since it's dominant in more than 1 country, unlike the others. Meanwhile, people all around the world use Facebook (though this is falling off lately admittedly). If you want to chat with friends in another country, FB Messenger is probably the go-to chat app for this; your friends in Europe or the US aren't going to be using LINE or KakaoTalk if you live in Japan or Korea, and pretty much no one outside the US/Canada uses SMS messaging (and thus iMessage) for talking to friends/family.

>Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue.

MAMAA (because of Microsoft) builds the infrastructure most of the tech industry is built on. This infrastructure isn't going to come from China; no one in the western-aligned nations would trust infrastructure tech from there.

>look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.

Inside their own countries, sure, just like KakaoTalk dominating Korea. But just like KT, they have no exposure outside their countries. Amazon is huge not just in the US, but many other countries: Canada, various European countries, Japan, etc.

I kind of agree with him, there definitely are region-dependent lunch combo of dominant players rather than there's the single universal set. You seem to have an impression that FB Messenger is globally dominant, and frankly a lot of people do feel that way, my hunch is that's where disagreement is.

My broader point is that US big tech companies have global reach, and also tend to set standards. I think the chat stuff is really a red herring; there's far more to tech than chat apps, and those tend to be very regional/national as we've discussed.

> It seemed that logic programming was a key missing connection between knowledge engineering and parallel computer architectures

This is still missing. And both ingredients, "logic programming" and "parallel computing" are rather arcane and underdeveloped, so many decades later.

The current AI hyperventilation illustrates the impact quite nicely (algorithms and models have no connection to "ground truth", they need expensive and hard to use HPC hardware etc.)

On the other hand we had in the meantime the internet and mobile revolutions. While those are not so fundamental from a pure computing perspective, they have increased the utility of the digital domain tremendously.

It is conceivable that a fifth generation architecture is lurking somewhere in the chaotic mess that is the current technical landscape. E.g. the internet does enable a certain form of massive parallel processing on commodity hardware. And overtures toward "logic programming" are even long-time W3C standards...

But in the end we know by now painfully well that digital technology is not progressing monotonically. By its nature it gets embedded deeply into societies and thus its state reflects progress (or regression) of society as much as technical breakthroughs.

But hey lets keep web sites with links like that off Hacker News, what do you say?

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Fifth-Generation Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080365 - May 2023 (1 comment)

The Fifth Generation Computing Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569098 - July 2019 (49 comments)

'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16630174 - March 2018 (47 comments)

The Fifth Generation Computer Project in Japan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8256961 - Sept 2014 (3 comments)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...

As the OP article mentions much (most? all?) of the software developed in the project was freely released (under an MIT-like license? https://www.ueda.info.waseda.ac.jp/AITEC_ICOT_ARCHIVES/ICOT/... ) and it seems to be available for download (in source form) from here: https://www.ueda.info.waseda.ac.jp/AITEC_ICOT_ARCHIVES/ICOT/... most of it would only run on the prototype computer they wrote, but some of it was ported to Unix.

It's like trying to make Star Wars technologies happen by sheer cash flow and technological optimism. All fever dreams.

1. It hasn't really required or designed new computer architecture. Instead it repurposed hardware that was designed and tuned over years by the game industry.

2. It's more empirical. Little to no theory building and more "throwing stuff at the wall to see what fits"

3. Not really "proudly national made" right? I don't think Washington minds being world leading on AI, but from where I'm standing it doesn't seem to be something that's been championed nationally.

That's not to say it's not a bubble

https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...

As for "The important thing is that they tried" : would you give them credit for "trying" to invent real-time, neuron-by-neuron brain imaging, in 1982? And giving billions of taxpayer Yen to the effort? How about quantum computers?

Or would you have been justified in saying that there are projects with a better prospect of success right now, and we shouldn't waste the taxpayers' money on things guaranteed to fail?

So what ARE your limits? Or are there any?

So I guess you're saying there are no limits? Every project should be funded to the max?

and since you're against taxation, does that mean ordinary people are to be compelled to "voluntarily" fund them? Or where is the money supposed to come from?

Honestly, not interested in going any deeper on this topic here on HN. It won't lead to anything productive and will just start a flamewar. In the off chance that you are actually especially interested in hearing my opinion(s) here, drop me an email at prhodes@fogbeam.com and we can continue there. If not, then I'm satisfied to drop this here.

I believe that MITI's success made it a political target, and politics can kill anything. My friends from MITI tended to share a similar opinion.

> MITI bureaucrats attempted to deny fledgling Sony the $25,000 the company needed to license transistor technology from Western Electric.

> In a sense, Japan's ability to stay the course in pursuit of a long-term payoff-- usually considered one of the country's strongest assets-- turned into a liability.

Japan is an expert at public-private partnerships. Their entire economic development story was based on the government and private enterprises working together. They didn't take an ideological approach to development. They ignored both the neoliberal route and the socialist route.

This model works well to supercharge initial growth if done correctly, but eventually you can’t really become richer through exports alone and have to pivot towards more consumption, which can be difficult to pull off.