Japanese Engineers Really Are Skilled, But With A Twist

I think this is really true, from experience.

That said, the distribution has a distinctive shape worth noting.

Suppose, for example, that the variation in engineers’ skill roughly follows a normal distribution. Japanese engineers are characterized by a high mean and low variance. Put simply: everyone can do things reasonably well, but very few outliers blow you away.

Silicon Valley residents are the opposite. The mean isn’t surprisingly high, but the variance is extremely large. In other words, there are honestly quite a few who are all talk, but the amazing ones are truly amazing, and there are a lot of them.

My former colleague T often surprised me, for instance.

He graduated in computer science from New York University, and when I asked about his career, there wasn’t a single “company everyone knows” in it.

But he really was an engineer who could do anything. His main job was firmware implementation, yet his abilities broadly covered hardware technology too (apparently self-taught), and he taught me a number of things about hardware that went beyond what I, supposedly the specialist, knew. I visited his house a few times, and once there was suddenly a motorcycle sitting in his garage. “This is junk,” he said, “but I’m thinking of taking it apart and fixing it up.” He was, of course, a complete amateur when it came to motorcycles. “Well, I don’t even know how to ride one, haha,” he added. I sighed at this guy who was somehow hard to figure out, while also admiring the breadth of his curiosity as an engineer and his drive to act on it.

Every time I met an engineer and thought “this person is amazing!”, I met roughly an equal number who made me think “this person is genuinely bad (but with a glittering career and probably a high salary).” I kept wondering why this structure keeps getting produced.

One experience gave me my own sense of this clicking into place.

Bowling.

Once I went bowling with coworkers. It was a bit trendy in San Francisco at the time, I think.

There were fewer than 20 participants, three of them Japanese, and the rest, nationality-wise, all over the place.

Everyone was a specialist worthy of respect. Beloved colleagues.

But every single one of them was terrible, to a “are you serious?!” degree.

The way they held the ball was sketchy. Their approach was strange. They weren’t so much throwing the ball as just dropping it.

Well, except for one guy, P, who was ridiculously good and had even brought his own ball.

The Japanese members, meanwhile, managed reasonably well, saying things like “Wow, it’s been 20 years since I last went bowling.”

G, who was Indian, didn’t join. When I asked why, he said, “The only exercise I’ve ever done is walking. I’ve never thrown a ball in my life” (was that a joke? It was a joke, right?).

This is it, I thought.

America has no classes like physical education or art. Anything outside required subjects is handled through extracurricular activities or volunteer support.

Even attending school with everyone else isn’t mandatory in compulsory education. That’s what homeschooling is.

In Japan, by contrast, the social structure naturally demands that everyone handle everything as a matter of basic literacy. Even most humanities students learn calculus, however unpleasant they find it. Even engineers study Japanese history and world history, even if they fail the tests repeatedly. Everyone participates in sports day, and school trips are usually taken together to the same place.

Time is finite. But in Japan, time goes more toward strengthening general-purpose ability than toward specialization.

The result is the distribution I described at the start.

Whether this is something to be proud of is debatable, but I think it’s better to treat it as a characteristic of Japanese people and think about how to make good use of it.

Perhaps helped by this characteristic, Japanese people seemed to me generally well received in Silicon Valley.

In America, people sometimes chat at the supermarket checkout, for example. This isn’t just something you see in TV dramas; it’s a fairly common everyday scene. When I first moved to America, I always carried my passport with me. The reason: buying alcohol got me asked for ID fairly often, and I didn’t have a driver’s license yet at the time. Showing a passport reveals your nationality, and that’s how I’d sometimes get, “Oh, you’re Japanese.” I’m often mistaken for Chinese otherwise.

At coffee shops like Starbucks, they often write your name on the cup to prevent mixing up orders. In America I went by “KUZ.” No matter how you cut up YUICHIRO KUZURYU, it’s hard for locals to pronounce, so I used the part that came out best. Even so, it often got written as “KAZ.” Quite a lot of Japanese people have passed through Silicon Valley, “Kazu-something” is a common Japanese name, and since KAZ is easy for locals to pronounce too, it’s a very familiar Japanese name to them.

One soccer-loving staff member even said, “I know KAZ MIURA!” But either way, it always came back to, “Oh, KAZ. You’re Japanese, then.”

And after that, the line I kept hearing with high frequency was, “Oh really? So, an engineer?”

People who do a lot of business with Japanese people naturally understand that Japanese people in Silicon Valley hold all kinds of jobs, and they probably know Japanese businesspeople and entrepreneurs who aren’t engineers. If someone interacted with Japanese exchange students back in their school days, their perception would broaden there too.

But without that kind of exposure, I sensed, from many other scenes as well, that in most cases the stereotype in people’s minds is that Japanese people are engineers: capable, quiet, and polite.

I remember once, when I showed my passport to a young man at the register, he seemed unfamiliar with how to check my age and was fumbling around, when a veteran woman bagging groceries said, “He’s Japanese. So it’s fine.”

It’s an endearing kind of ignorance, a heartwarming looseness of perception.

Once it comes to scenes involving one’s career, though, the situation changes completely.

Anyone who thinks a Japanese career built in Japan will carry over to other countries needs to rethink that a bit.

This isn’t a matter of how skilled Japanese engineers are or aren’t. It’s that most Americans, unless they’re genuinely rare Japan enthusiasts, simply don’t know and aren’t interested in what’s happening in Japan (though they do like MANGA).

They know about big companies like Toyota and Sony. But that’s the same way Japanese people know about big companies like Johnson & Johnson or Cisco; there isn’t the mixture of respect and awe that, say, GAFA commands.

At a large company, the work spans a wide range and projects are large in scale. If it isn’t clear what position someone held and what they contributed, simply having been at a big company doesn’t carry much informational weight, especially in America, where employment mobility is high.

As for education, among Japanese universities, only the University of Tokyo is really recognized as a “top-tier university.” Among a certain intellectual class, or people with some familiarity with Japan, names like Waseda or Keio might come up, but that’s about as far as it goes.

For most Americans, in the end, Japan is just some vaguely understood island nation across the Pacific (though they do love SUSHI).

I’ve never lived anywhere other than Silicon Valley, but the proportion of Japanese people elsewhere is probably even lower. If anything, then, the picture would only get worse, not better.

For anyone with a global perspective, I don’t think there’s much argument against the idea that Japan is, relatively speaking, a country the world admires. Public safety is good, people are polite, the food is delicious, and the education level isn’t bad either. Diligent, with a strong sense of community and solidarity, it produced the astonishing economic growth of the 1970s.

I even feel it’s almost too much respect for a small island nation in the Far East to receive.

Given that, why is Japanese self-evaluation so low? One reason might be that few globally successful companies have emerged from Japan in recent years. If Japanese startups succeed globally and draw attention, respect for Japan will rise another notch. That would be amazing. Achieving it is the work of our generation.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/08/572/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.