Weirdly this never came up for me (and I'm in a similar situation). I suspect what documents are ask for varies a lot by who is assessing the application.
For the benefit of anyone else doing this in Japan, these are the documents I had to submit. It will be different depending on circumstance, in particular I think the author may also be born outside the UK which may require other/more documents.
Anyway I had to submit:
Certified copy of my birth certificate, order from the UK general register office.
Original (not photocopy) of Japanese family register and translation.
Certificate of acceptance of notification of birth, original and translation.
Original Marriage certificate and translation.
Colour photocopy of every page of my childs Japanese passport.
Copy photocopy of the passport of an American or British citizen who confirms that child is mine.
The process is pretty unclear, and in general you seem to have to just keep submitting documents until they are satisfied.
The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk.
VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers.
Then there's the MSX standard...
Japanese industry is no doubt somewhat different and may have its issues. But I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint... some external factor is often required to force large companies to cooperate. Those factors may be more common outside Japan, but I don't see that the fundamental issues are very different.
Essentially all medium to high-end ham radio brands are Japanese. Cheap Chinese radios only dominate at the low end, and often have emission issues. I doubt the Japanese manufacturers are interested in competing here...
Chinese radios do not dominate in Japan, I suspect almost nobody in Japan uses a non-domestic radio. Possibly the primary reason being that they generally have not passed the local emission certifications (which is annoyingly required for all ham radios).
I don't see the incompatible microphone thing as an issue unique to Japan. Pretty much every 1980s computer had weird propriety interfaces. I suspect it was competition that forced them to standardize. You can find similar issues more recently (Apple/Lightening port, Dell/IBM laptop chargers, docking stations etc.)
If you want to point to issue with ham radio in Japan, I'd go with the certification issue, which helps lock non-domestic players out of the market...
The number of negative comments here seems odd to me.
If you actually want practical and safe self driving cars widely deployed it seems obvious that instrumenting roads and making them a better platform for self-driving vehicles is an important part of this process.
To me this work seems like a part of the process of evolving roads from a Ad-Hoc and poorly documented system involving a lot of human guess work into a more robust and reliable platform for self-driving and human driven cars.
When they were released in the 1990s they were pretty capable machines. The OS had its issues, but I don’t think it faired badly against DOS/Windows 3.11. They were however largely limited to the UK marketed, and had a more limited selection of software.
I’m not sure it’s really fair to characterize them as “crappy”.
The irony is that the ARM architecture was also developed in the same way. A custom CPU, for a new machine, with an operating system specifically designed for it, and applications written specifically for that OS (the Acorn Archimedes/RiscOS).
The platform ended up failing, but they spun out ARM. If ARM end up overtaking Intel on the desktop, it gives the story some entertaining irony/symmetry.