Very well done. I lived in Japan for years, love Japan deeply, and this essay rang true in many ways.

Two thoughts:

- Japanese management style and processes are probably fruitful ground for understanding how teams of agents should work. H-firms require inspirational leadership, and agents don't need that.

- There is an interesting opportunity to turn Japanese process knowledge into a trainable environment, which of course should be done in such a way to benefit Japan and the Japanese people ("The type of deep process knowledge that has accreted within companies like Kyocera and Toto is almost impossible to replicate")

I might be gatekeeping, but I consider a mark of actual healthy capitalism, to be creative destruction, the biggest companies of 1 generation are destroyed by the next generation and the churn keeps going on. Nothing ever lasts except the system.

By this criteria, in the entire world, only US and UK seem to do capitalism properly. Whether the current age of tech companies survive till 2050s is to be seen, (we are already seeing signs of OpenAI, Anthropic joining them but it is to be said if the existing monopolies of say Microsoft will be disrupted).

In other countries, big companies have been the same for hundreds of years, from Japan to Germany to Korea to India. This is no longer capitalism as much as it is some soft form of Feudalism, where the same set of families hold power for generations at a time till some major fortune swings occur.

I like watching Paolo fromTOKYO

This paragraph on organizational model is super relevant to understanding how tech companies are responding to LLMs today.

> Aoki’s key insight was that the J-mode had a comparative advantage in environments of moderate volatility: situations where conditions changed frequently enough that rigid central plans would be outdated before they were executed, but not so radically that only top-down strategic intervention could cope. In an environment of stable, predictable demand, the H-firm did fine; in an environment of extreme disruption, where the whole product line had to be rethought, centralized authority was indispensable, and the H-firm also did fine. But in between—where the challenge was to make constant small adjustments in a changing but recognizable paradigm—the J-firm excelled.

See for example https://aakashgupta.medium.com/microsofts-ceo-just-became-a-... or https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-12/zucker...

You can pry my Mitsubishi pencil sharpener from my cold dead hands.

> Hitachi makes nuclear reactors, power grids, railway systems, elevators, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, medical imaging devices, data storage, IT consulting, and industrial machinery.

What, no mention of their personal massagers?

They’re an absolute disaster but I do love that the companies are actually investing in expanding into new things. Shareholders don’t want that, they want cold hard cash. Hence all the buybacks and PE firms destroying companies.

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