Japanese Efficiency and K-On!

One way for companies to prosper is to be more efficient, finding ways to use technology to get more work done in the same amount of time. Over the past decade or so, J-List has been able to make use of various new technologies in order to be much more efficient, and I look back with amusement at how things were done even 15 years ago, before Internet-based conveniences like Skype, instant messaging and sending PDF files through email existed. Sadly, one of the major themes of Japan seems to be the triumph of inefficiency, and there are whole industries where people seem perfectly happy being less productive. When you drive into a company's parking lot, for example, there are often a few older men in uniforms who will guide you to an empty parking space, even though most would be able to find it unaided. Banks are another area where they just seem to do things differently. While my local branch in San Diego can get by with 4-5 employees, a Japanese bank feels the need to have 20 or more behind the counter, yet somehow the time each customer is made to wait is longer than in the U.S. I love the scene in episode 2 of the anime K-On, when Yui wants to buy a guitar and the other girls decide to help her earn money. The scene where the girls sit and manually click off a counter as cars drive by is classic Japan -- although it could be done cheaply and accurately with some kind of sensor built into the road, it's a time-honored tradition to hire people to count the cars manually instead. Today is the end of our company's fiscal year, the day the J-List staff has to count every item in inventory. Until recently, this work had to be done laboriously by hand, written up on paper and re-entered into spreadsheets, but finally the Japanese tax office decided it was okay to automate the process, which saves us a huge amount of time.

Of course, you can be too efficient, in which case there's only one person doing all the work in any given country, which wouldn't be fun either. What do you think about the inefficiency-as-sort-of-socialism that's practiced in Japan?

The girls from K-On get a job counting cars that pass by on the street, a common job here.