I don't know for sure, but after living in Japan for 5 years now, whenever something in a Japanese business feels antiquated, inefficient, or just plain backwards and wrong, it's usually because some manager in an office who has been there longer than everyone else decided that it's good enough.

It probably sounds like I'm exaggerating, but loyalty to the hierarchy goes deep here. I don't know how many times I've had to hold my tongue and not state a fact because if I did, the manager would "lose face". Not an insult, a criticism, or even an open question, just a fact-- if I know it's contrary to what a manager thinks is the right way, he gets to sit back and keep his ego puffed up for no good reason.

Once my manager asked me to aggregate a list in excel to find a final count for a range of parts used in our blueprints. I used a pivot table in Excel. It took me about two minutes. He snapped back, "How are you doing this so quickly? It must be wrong. Do it like this:" and he proceeded to take a screenshot of each page of the sheet, send the screenshots to chatGPT, and ask it to aggregate them. Dear god I wish I was joking. It took him over an hour and still left room open for human error (or AI error I guess). I showed him the pivot table method, he just scoffed and walked away.