Real McCoy's are closing down..?

[Big J]

So, to get back to the point, has RMC NZ shut down only? Is the Japanese end still a go?

 

[Fonzie]

That analysis was brilliant, thanks!

 

[Justhandguns]

So, to get back to the point, has RMC NZ shut down only? Is the Japanese end still a go?

RM Japan, or RMJ is a completely separate company, as a matter of fact, they keep on expanding in recent years.

Justhandguns, I meant to reply to this comment, but completely forgot about it until I just re-read it now.

As for the Japanese, I'm going to have to disagree with you. I don't see any creativity (I was just reading today that Japan has fewer Nobel winners this century than the UK, even though it has twice the population to draw on, and limitless 0% interest loans into many fields of research). 'Japan Inc' is famous for sitting on it's hands and preferring to be Overcome By Events than make a difficult decision (see the disaster at Fukushima, where power company workers were sent to the home improvements store to line up with other disaster stricken customers, to buy car batteries to operate critical valves, in a race against the clock, whilst the company helicopter was used to fly cash in from head office to pay for it all). Or how about Sony? What happened to the Walkman? Overcome by iPod and iTunes, and the streaming music revolution, despite the fact that the Japanese virtually invented P2P music file sharing, they failed to comprehend it's significance. In the same vain, take a look at Toyota and the scandals about breaking fails causing accidents; the owner of Toyota (Toyoda Akio) famously told reporters 4 years ago that Toyota was 'the most perfect car in the world' and required no improvement. He is driven to work in an Audi and the Crown Prince of Japan's Toyota has a dedicated team of Toyota engineers who check the breaks every time it goes on the road.
I could go on, how about the Takata airbag scandal, the biggest auto recall in history, whose company president has screaming temper tantrums and goes home for days, when asked by managers what action the company should take.
How about the Olympus accounting scandal, and now Toshiba? Cover-up, deny, 'it's so unfortunate' etc. How about the Tokyo 2020 Olympics logo that was copied from a Belgian theater?

This is a direct result of 20 years of economic slump due to a lack of vision. How do we explain that Japan Inc. suddenly, irretrievably lost it's vision in totality?
The answer is that Japan never had any. It's no coincidence that Japan's economic malaise (known here as 'the lost decade' initially, but now 'the lost decades') started when the Cold War ended. As part of the US 'Reverse Course' there was a concerted effort to pump Japan up economically after the war in the face of Mao's mainland China victory ('interestingly, this was the expressed opposite of Marshall's plan to help Germany recover, but expressed that German should not benefit to a greater degree than it's European victims).

In addition to massive injections of cash to get Japan on it's feet and turned into a functioning consumer paradise, trillions of US dollars poured into Japan during the Korean and Vietnam wars as Japanese companies supplied the US army with everything from uniforms (ever wondered why the Japanese make some good fatigue repros? They made the originals!), rations, jeeps (license built by Toyota and Mitsubishi), and all manner of spares and equipment. And then there's the CIA, who poured money into Japan in all sorts of 'black' ways (virtual one party state since the end of WWII, formed initially of war-criminals).

Dreams? The Japanese learn early on to stamp on their dreams and accept a mundane life of corporate servitude and consumerism to alleviate the mind-numbing pointlessness of life. Work, work, work, buy, buy, buy. That is the dream. The pretense of being able to buy the perfect lifestyle. Of course, now that the conomic slump is into it's second decade, the 'Japanese Dream', the 'Social contract' has been seen to be broken, and random street violence has become an every day reality (One of my uni students had her hand half-severed at the wrist by some crazy guy on the street. But this type of crime is everyday now).

The countries best and brightest (a seriously relative term in a Confucian education system that makes no effort to develop critical thinking; 'the teacher said it, it must be true', 'the TV said it, it must be true') strive to enter the biggest, most backward and glacially slow moving companies in Japan out of fear of change (after Lehmans shock, Japan Railways, was over-run with applications from top university graduates). The only 'Dream' that the Japanese share is that everything isn't as bad as it actually is, and that Japan is still a world leader in robots (based on Softbanks purchase of a French robot company, and Nissans self-driving car developed by Renault).

Japan is trading on it's (frankly undeserved) reputation created as a Cold War remedy to our anti-Japanese wartime propaganda. We were so successful in re-branding Japan that even the Japanese believe it, and can't see that Japan is just a big inflated paper bag of image containing nothing but air.

That is some impressive insight into the recent fall of the Japanese industrial empire! I think there is also another reason on top of what you mentioned. One of the fatal import of Japan from the US is their corporate management style. I think I have mentioned it somewhere here before, new generation of company leaders in Japan have adapted the kind of corporate running style from the US. So instead of having more visions about what their companies can achieve, they look more at the spreadsheets and stock prices. Japanese electronics manufacturers slowly sold off, merged or closed down their non-profit making divisions in the 90s' after their first generation of management from the 50s' & 60s' retired, i.e. lot of R&D departments were gone. Most of these 2nd or 3rd generation of CEOs were educated in the States, and they spend more time on golf courses than in their offices. That basically took the cutting edges of the Japanese superiority built up from the 80s'. Yes, there is a lot less creativity these days in Japan, but compared to the current China, they are still way better.

 

[bentusian]

This is probably the story behind RMNZ/The Few closing down (Masahide Ishizuka being the owner of The Few Mfg.):

http://en.rocketnews24.com/2016/01/...-japan-once-more-in-demonstration-this-month/

Hopefully some other entity would buy out RMNZ/The Few and keep it going..

 

[Monitor]

I miss Big J. ;_; Where the heck is he?

 

[Doctor Damage]

PBS showed a documentary on Bill McCoy which I watched last night. It was interesting to learn the history behind the nickname and cliché "the Real McCoy".

 

[John Lever]

If that took place in 2008 it seems strange that it woukd take 7 years for the company to close. I was told by Paddy Curran that the strength of the NZ $ and shipping costs were the reasons, also after the earth quake they found it difficult to find or keep machinists. All the machines, samples and patterns went into 40 ft. containers and were shipped over seas.

 

[Blackadder]

If that took place in 2008 it seems strange that it woukd take 7 years for the company to close. I was told by Paddy Curran that the strength of the NZ $ and shipping costs were the reasons, also after the earth quake they found it difficult to find or keep machinists. All the machines, samples and patterns went into 40 ft. containers and were shipped over seas.

Heard that story about him spending all his money to restore the plane. I guess that is after the deal fell thru in 2008 and coupled with the devaluation of yen in the past few years.

 

[Otter]

I miss Big J. ;_; Where the heck is he?

I tried messaging him and starting a thread in the Observation Bar, but nothing.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

The reason a personal FL message wouldn't reach him is because it seems Big J didn't make the move to this new version of the forum ( he probably thinks the FL crashed..went down the tubes and no longer exists).