[zeptonaut22]

Definitely have never heard anything about that aspect of Japanese culture - thanks for sharing!

I have experienced the bit of "Japanese working folk being willing (or perhaps expected) to commit their lives fully to their jobs", and I wonder if putting your own health on the line comes as a byproduct of that? Definitely not an aspect of the culture I'd try to encourage.

[PaulHoule]

(1) The UAW is maybe the best union in the world (been on their picket lines) so that makes American auto factories exceptionally safe

(2) As someone whose obsession with anime even annoys people at anime conventions, my take is that irony has a special place in Japanese culture. For instance they say they have filial piety but they have high rates of elder abuse. Allegedly they have a pacifist constitution but they have a large “Japan Self Defense Force”. There is always an outsider and insider view of a situation which is fertile ground for “normalization of deviance”, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchi–soto

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

(3) “Continuous improvement” optimizes the happy path at the expense of resilience to exceptional events. For instance just in time production was crippled by the supply chain shocks of the pandemic. At Tokaimura they were mixing nuclear fuel and were (a) making a higher enrichment than they ever did before and (b) had modified their tools to speed production up. (b) is a competitive advantage in most places but in nuclear fuel processing you have to always avoid forming a critical mass and that is done through applying rules to the process. They got away with it… Until they didn’t.

[zeptonaut22]

Thanks for sharing your insight in #2: definitely an interesting view that I wouldn't have access to myself!

As for #3, the same thing occurred to me with regards to the supply chain shortages during the pandemic: the highly optimized, just-in-time supply chain that we'd work so hard to build meant that there was almost no room for extraordinary events. When those events do inevitably happen, they're far more disastrous than they would otherwise have been.

I don't think that _all_ continuous improvement needs to be this way: the classic example of "letting the factory floor worker work with a toolsmith to design a better wrench for their job" probably doesn't have negative consequences in extraordinary situations. However, I do think keeping in mind "is this a pure improvement or are we making a tradeoff, and at what cost?" is a worthwhile question to ask.