Japan considers programming a blue collar task so pays accordingly (though there are exceptions, like Sony Computer Entertainment). But culturally the companies tend to understand the role of software better and have for a while. Remember how great the Keitei were in the late 90s/early 2000s compared to anywhere else in the world?
The kind of software in keitai (feature phones), car ECUs, and video games is different from the rest of the software industry. They’re good at making gadgets with embedded software and nothing else. In particular, nothing ever gets reused and nothing is ever made more abstract or flexible - that’s why most of the products can’t be exported and the iPhone killed all the Galapagos phones.
There are a lot of interesting lessons in video games though; it’s the only kind of software people love using enough to write emulators for, and game developers seem to exist in a lot more countries than other software businesses do.
There's a famous story in 2000s that Japanese feature phone engineer did hard work for low quality code. Phone manufacturers and telcos just wanted to make a great featured phone, but didn't focus on high quality software. https://lolipop-teru.ssl-lolipop.jp/gunsou/
Finally, they made very crappy Android phone and local industry shrunk. So Japanese consumers now love iPhone because Android phone is a trauma for some of them.
Japan considers programming a blue collar task so pays accordingly (though there are exceptions, like Sony Computer Entertainment). But culturally the companies tend to understand the role of software better and have for a while. Remember how great the Keitei were in the late 90s/early 2000s compared to anywhere else in the world?