The IT Industry in Japan Is Not What You Think

When I first came to Japan, I thought I was entering one of the world’s technology powerhouses.

The country of Sony.

Panasonic.

Toyota.

The Shinkansen.

A place known for engineering and manufacturing excellence.

Naturally, I assumed the IT industry here would be modern.

Efficient.

Highly optimized.

Full of cutting-edge technology.

Then I started working.

And honestly, I was confused.

I saw projects running on technology that was already old.

I saw source code nobody wanted to touch.

I saw documents longer than the actual implementation.

I sat through meetings that lasted longer than the work itself.

And I kept asking myself:

Why do they do things this way?

The longer I stayed, the more I realized I was asking the wrong question.

A better question was:

How has this system survived for so long?

One thing that surprised me was hiring.

In many countries, software companies look for people with strong technical backgrounds.

In Japan, it’s not unusual to hire graduates with little or no IT experience and train them from scratch.

At first, that seemed strange to me.

Today, I understand it a little better.

The system values reliability, communication and long-term growth as much as technical skill.

Sometimes even more.

Another thing that surprised me was how much legacy software exists.

Many systems have been patched, extended and modified for ten or twenty years.

As engineers, our instinct is often:

“Let’s rewrite it.”

But businesses rarely see it that way.

If the system is still making money, changing it introduces risk.

And risk is expensive.

Then there are the processes.

Approvals.

Reviews.

Documents.

Meetings.

Checks.

More meetings.

Sometimes a small change can take far longer than expected.

As a younger engineer, I found this frustrating.

I wanted speed.

I wanted efficiency.

I wanted to build.

Over time, I realized the Japanese IT industry is optimizing for something different.

Not speed.

Not innovation.

Not engineering elegance.

It’s optimizing for stability.

Predictability.

Risk reduction.

And business continuity.

That doesn’t automatically make it better.

And it doesn’t automatically make it worse.

It’s simply a different set of priorities.

Many developers from overseas arrive expecting a technology-first culture.

What they often find is a business-first culture.

Technology exists to support the business.

Not the other way around.

After more than ten years, I no longer see this as right or wrong.

It’s just one way of building software.

A very Japanese way.

And it’s probably not what most people imagine when they think about the IT industry in Japan.