Yesterday, I wrote about Nippon Professional Baseball’s professed “reason” for adopting a pitch clock: allowing the establishment to both publicly disrespect the players union and serve as an excuse for March’s World Baseball Classic quarterfinal exit – Japan’s worst finish to date.

In that post, I mentioned that Japanese organizations are incredibly slow to adopt new things, something that surprises many visitors to the country, who expect a nation constantly aspiring to stay on the cutting edge of technology – a description that fits South Korea far better than Japan.

There are at least three reasons for “Japan speed”: a requirement that traditions carried forward from predecessors be properly respected, that no one within the organization takes sufficient individual responsibility to easily be held accountable, and that subgroups often do not play nice with each other, often pursuing their own selfish interests over that of the whole enterprise.

Paying one’s respects

Unless under extreme pressure, Japan’s innovation model is to make continual improvements to established ways of doing things, a practice known as “kaizen” that superficially respects the achievements and efforts of those who tackled the same issues before and pays homage to their vision by not saying, “Sorry, what we’ve been doing for years has been a waste of time.”

I often tell guests on my guided history tours of Tokyo that politeness in Japan demands a set of complex rules, and Rule No. 1 is never criticize rules. Doing so implies disrespect to not only those who follow the rule in question but to everyone who ignores the rule but pays lip service to it.

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