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The story
A thread on 5channel’s Nnews VIP board kicked off with the question: “Domestic brands had a near-total monopoly during the flip-phone era, so why did foreign brands come to dominate once smartphones arrived?” Replies pointed to factors like NHK demanding license fees from phones equipped with One-Seg (mobile TV) tuners, and the enduring pull of the Apple brand. The discussion then expanded into the current standing of Japanese home appliances, with posters citing image data on global market share for products like refrigerators — opinions split between “Japanese products can’t compete globally anymore” and “No, white goods and cars are still trusted.”
What people said
Well, PCs were already foreign-made too — Windows or Apple — so once the already-familiar Apple brand put out a smartphone, idiots jumped right on it.
Also, early Japanese smartphones were clunky and overpriced.
NHK started demanding payment for One-Seg (mobile TV tuners), which was a strength of Japanese handsets,
so everyone ripped the One-Seg feature out — and once that happened, there was no real difference from foreign phones anymore.
What a dumb era that was.
That's not quite right.
Mobage (a mobile gaming/social platform) was massively popular back then.
Yeah, that's what Matsumoto was yapping about in those Tu-Ka commercials.
Though white goods (home appliances) still have some edge for Japanese-made products, don't they?
The fact that they barely sell worldwide is the answer right there.
Japanese-made products have been totally crushed by Chinese and Korean makers.
Even in 2021, this is the state of things:
Looking at world rankings doesn't really tell you much — expectations for appliances differ by country.
But for actual use within Japan, by Japanese sensibilities, domestic brands are still better.
They won't break within a few years, and even if they do, there's a repair network to fall back on.
An answer to what, exactly?
There could be all sorts of explanations — a bad economy, shifts in what customers prioritize — so this data alone doesn't tell you the "reason."
It's a fact that Japanese appliances, which used to sell well globally, have declined.
Isn't it more important to think about why they stopped selling?
You don't even know what each company's flagship products are now, or how things have shifted since then, do you?
You should stop trying to talk about things you don't actually know.
Okay, sure, let's take a look at refrigerators, for example.
Where exactly is this supposedly becoming a "developing country" product?
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
NHK’s policy of demanding license fees even from devices equipped with One-Seg (mobile TV) tuners surfaced around 2016, and some manufacturers subsequently dropped the One-Seg feature from their models — the thread’s comments appear to reflect this history. As for the turning point in smartphone adoption, the 2008 domestic launch of the iPhone (exclusively sold by SoftBank at the time) is often cited. Meanwhile, it’s widely known that Japanese makers’ global market share in flat-screen TVs and white goods was largely taken over by Korean and Chinese manufacturers from the 2000s onward — but “global market share” and “domestic trust and strength of repair networks” are fundamentally different metrics, and this mismatch in perspective is likely behind the split opinions in the thread. Note that the original thread also contained a good deal of unrelated personal sniping, and this article extracts only the portions of the discussion concerning technology and the market.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nnews VIP) thread “Thinking about it now, it’s amazing that basically every Japanese citizen used a domestically-made flip phone during the feature-phone era, right?“.
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