Archive for japan

You are browsing the archives of japan.

Quick tips for visiting Japan

Recently a couple of my friends have been asking for tips on what to see and to when visiting Japan. I decided to gather a few of my responses and post them here, so I can just give out this web page to people.
Feel free to add your own suggestions! This is by no means [...]

Product design and manufacturing in a global world: Japan vs America - MacBook Air

Recently I came across this article which sheds a bit of light on Japanese manufacturing methodology vs Apple’s. I think it’s far easier for the Japanese engineers to critique the crappy Taiwanese construction rather than to create their own new device from scratch. But it’s too bad though that Apple doesn’t have a bit more [...]

Shortage of underpaid Japanese engineers: go figure?

Recently I found this article from the New York Times entitled High-Tech Japan Running Out of Engineers. (Warning: free registration and login required to read). It discusses the decreasing numbers of students choosing engineering majors in Japan. I found it particularly interesting because as an American engineer in Japan, I have long fought with the [...]

Starting work in Japan as a lowly new graduate - did someone say COBOL?

From Wikipedia’s COBOL entry:
Critics have argued that COBOL’s syntax serves mainly to increase the size of programs, at the expense of developing the thinking process needed for software development. In his letter to an editor in 1975 titled “How do we tell truths that might hurt?”, computer scientist and Turing Award [...]