Maybe they should also find something for those programmers to do as well, while they're at it. The job market for software engineering in Tokyo is equivalent to a Minneapolis or an Atlanta even with 20x the population - and even then I might be overselling it.
Look at the culture and the accomplishments of a place like Rakuten, and plot a way forward from that to a tech powerhouse. I don't see it.
Only 11% of Japan lives in Tokyo, so who cares? It's overpriced anyway.
Japan obviously can find a use for software developers. Japan launches spacecraft, has 2 of the 3 major video game console companies, is well-known as a major place for robotics, has major car companies, and has started to get back into military equipment.
Programming isn't all about web sites and phone apps.
Tokyo metro is like a quarter of the population of Japan. Japan basically is Tokyo, to a degree that probably isn't matched by any other city / nation on Earth. Even if you insist on just looking at the 23 wards it's a big deal - 7% of the population lives in one of the 23 wards. That's like if 22 million people lived just within the one of the five boroughs of New York. (Comparing Tokyo metro with New York/Newark metro, imagine if 80 million people lived there, and how that would affect the influence of that area on the economy of the US.)
To suppose that Tokyo can go in one direction or stagnate while the rest of the country goes in another direction and prospers is just totally unrealistic.
I don't really see what you're getting at. Yeah, the salaries are depressed, but all salaries in Tokyo are depressed, it's part of a general trend.
And Rakuten does a lot of stuff. There are also places like GMO that do things. This is kind of like complaining that Ebay isn't a tech powerhouse. That's totally fine
Point taken, but to clarify I was saying "plot a way forward for Japan to become a tech powerhouse, when a company like Rakuten is about the pinnacle of what they can achieve as far as technology companies go". And you can't really just say "they can do X, Y, and Z" if X, Y, and Z are things that are totally unrealistic to expect Japan corporate culture to do. Even Rakuten is considered "weird" to the point of apostasy among Japanese corporations, and I promise you would not find it particularly enriching to work there either from a creativity standpoint or even just for basic work/life balance.
It's just difficult to imagine how a world-class tech company can rise up from Japanese business culture, at least on time scales that don't span decades. (For me, anyway, YMMV I guess.)
Cookpad also seems to be a nice brain trust of capable coders. It's perplexing to me that Japan isn't better at software. It's practically nerd nation with tons of super talented designers. It feels like it should be easy to push Japan over the tipping point, but who knows why it hasn't happened yet.
Cookpad used to have a lot of foreigners and was considered to be one of the best places to work. From what I heard that has changed about two years ago, now most of the foreigners are gone and what's left is a fairly normal Japanese company with all the cultural aspects that that entails.
To me the average level of developers at most companies I know is just heart-breaking, many times they don't seem to be thinking on the right abstraction levels and instead treat development as something you just persevere through by pure exercise of will (which is of course exactly what you are rewarded for: put in long hours, results don't actually matter as long as you try your best, onboarding/training is limited to manners, how to clean the whiteboard and how to water the plants (not joking), your university education/diploma is considered worthless, hence why lots of people suddenly become "software engineers" with a law degree or a biology degree or an english major degree because tech jobs generally pay better). In the end in my opinion the prevalent culture/values are just not very conducive to becoming better at software (although it kind of works in hardware and on the outside definitely appears to work in services).
Programming isn't just web sites and phone apps!!!
Japan is the source of the world's most popular operating system, iTRON. Never heard of iTRON? Ah, well, it's probably in your microwave or anti-lock brakes or thermostat or coffeemaker or ...
I have to say that the horrendous UI of Japanese consumer electronics in the 1980's and 90's seems quite closely linked to Japan's slide from the top of that market.
Seven years ago, when I first visited Japan, everyone used a clamshell phone with a godawful LCD interface. Today, everyone has an iPhone or iPhone clone (aka Korean or Chinese Android device). Even today, mobile carriers usually have a "Japanese Only" section on their website for the nationalists who insist on buying Japanese, and, sadly, those phones are very underwhelming by any reasonable standard in 2016.
I'd guess mandatory programming languages won't have much impact on the amount of people who go into programming as a profession.
I'm torn on the utility of it; unless you're actively working in it the information degrades very quickly. And unlike spoken languages, if you try to come back to it later very little of what you learned before is still valid.
Classes on general computing - and not "coding" - would seem far more useful than teaching kids Python 2.x for a few years. But at the same time those would be far less accessible.
I guess the Fortran programmers from 1960 might be at least somewhat familiar with Fortran 2008, but I suspect the gulf would be wider than a spoken language change. If I watch an episode of the honeymooners, the parts I don't understand are cultural, not linguistic.
Look at the culture and the accomplishments of a place like Rakuten, and plot a way forward from that to a tech powerhouse. I don't see it.