When a person at X decided to review Japan based on his own perspective after spending two weeks there, he unexpectedly received support from Katsuhiro Harada, the driving force behind the Tekken series. He recently left both Bandai Namco and Tekken behind to try his luck at SNK instead.
It was primarily one of the points Harada commented on, and it concerned what it's like to live and work in Japan, which is notoriously demanding because high loyalty is a requirement. Harada believes this has been taken to extreme lengths, causing individualists to be suppressed and incompetence to often be rewarded. He appears to be strongly critical of Japanese work culture and writes, among other things:
"As for living in Japan, I do think it can suit some people more than others. It's true that work tends to occupy a relatively large portion of people's lifestyles here, and more importantly — although this exists in every country to some extent (this is an important premise, and I'll say it again: this exists in every country) — Japan comparatively tends to reward "personal relationships and internal politics" over pure competence when it comes to promotions.
"In other words, there's definitely a "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" culture, and I think a lot of people struggle with that.
"(And by the way, situations where someone who 99 out of 100 people would consider completely incompetent — someone basically unknown in the industry except for endless stories about their incompetence — somehow gets promoted into an absurdly high executive position, leaving entire organizations shocked and dumbfounded... those situations genuinely exist around us. The kind of unbelievably bad personnel placement that feels like it belongs in a movie scene.)"
Even though he doesn't spell it out, one can suspect that he is at least partly referring to Bandai Namco, known to be his employer since the '90s. In any case, it's certainly fun to see that one of Japan's most outspoken game developers has now kicked it up a notch, and we suspect we'll be hearing more remarkable statements from him in the future.