I'm very curious on where it went wrong technologically, or is it just a case where systems have grown exponentially more complex where they can no longer keep up at the current level of investment? If we look at something like AAM-4, this was the first AAM with AESA seeker, but at this point the capabilities are not on par with PL-15. They also developed their FCS-3 AEGIS-alike AESA based system, but it seems like it was not that capable...
I will always remember MiniDisc. It was a defining moment of the collapse of the Japanese CE industry. I was travelling to HK and a friend of mine had asked me to pick up a top of the line MD player. It was like $500 or something like that. I tried very hard to convince him it was a waste of money, it was better to get an MP3 player. At the time you could get a Compactflash player for $300 with 256MB of memory or a cheap no name CD based player for $150 from random HK-fronted Chinese companies. A year after he told me I was right and his MD player was trash.
Its basically a microcosm of what happens to all Japanese companies/products that cannot secure volume.
The Japanese domestic market is just too tiny to support true cutting-edge tech innovation.
With tech innovation, the first breakthrough products are always going to be a bit crap. It’s only through continuous development and refinement that you grind away the rough edges and truly start to unlock its full potential.
Japan’s domestic market is too small to support reiterative version improvements. It’s only when they can export to a global market that their industry can be competitive. The problem their industry has always been kneecapped with is that whenever a Japanese new gen tech standard went up in direct competition with a western one, the western one always won even when the Japanese tech was superior. This was the same with AESA tech. Even though Japan fielded it first, a combination of their constitution banning military sales and western arms manufacturers wanting their own standards to be dominant meant that there was no way in hell Japan was going to recoup its investment costs in developing AESA, never mind generate sufficient additional income for continuous improvements to sustain its tech lead.
This is actually a really elegant case study to illustrate how Japan’s entire industrial strategy was one that was doomed to fail.
Their entirely industrial strategy can basically be summed up as one driven by pride over reason,
it was a continuous series of moon-shots, where they swung big and invested heavily to be the first to do something, but from which they were extremely unlikely to recoup costs, never mind make a profit because even when they were the first to market with the best tech, the ‘market’ somehow always favoured the white western alternative.
Japan’s national psychology is as predictable as it is stubborn, where they have this desperate yearning to prove themselves as worthy to their white overlords in the vain hope that one day they will finally be truly accepted as equals. It would be tragic if they weren’t so cruel and hateful towards their fellow Asians, partly out of a pathetic racist self-hate defection, and partly because Japanese society never advanced beyond feudalist class structures at its core, where they think it’s the inherent right of the ‘superior’ classes/races to lord over and ruthlessly exploit the ‘inferior’ classes/races like cattle.
