A month of coding the “Japanese way” showed me why tiny daily improvements beat heroic rewrite.
If Silicon Valley’s motto is “move fast and break things,” Japan’s quiet reply is “move carefully, and let it last.”
I thought I knew how to code cleanly. I’d read Clean Code, memorized half the Google style guide, even argued in Slack about tabs vs. spaces (sorry, still tabs). Then I wandered into a Japanese open-source repo and it felt like I’d walked into a completely different world.
The README wasn’t two lines of npm install && npm run dev. It was an essay. A tour guide. A “here’s how not to screw this up six months later” manifesto.
- Variable names stretched like sentences.
- Comments read like they were written by someone who cared about the junior dev inheriting this project in 2035.
- Even edge cases had little breadcrumbs pointing to them.
At first, I chuckled. “Who writes a manga chapter into their repo?” But a week later, I realized something strange: I never got lost. I didn’t need to Slack a teammate with “how do I run this again?” And when a bug appeared, the breadcrumbs were already there.
Japanese devs approach code like Toyota builds cars:
- Monozukuri → making things with obsessive care.
- Kaizen → improving by 1% every day.
- Jidoka → “stop the line” if something’s broken, no “we’ll patch it later.”
In Japanese factories, if a defect appears, the assembly halts until the root cause is fixed. In software terms: no “we’ll patch it later,” no YOLO-merge. Quality gates are sacred.
And the results show up far outside GitHub. Consider the Tokaido Shinkansen: in 2023, Japan’s busiest bullet train averaged just 1.6 minutes of delay per train, including weather. That reliability mindset bleeds into everything from trains to vending machines to, yes, code.
So I decided to go all in. For one month, I coded “Tokyo style.” No cowboy commits. No one-letter variables. Documentation treated like product, not homework. What happened was equal parts hilarious and humbling. Some habits drove me insane. Others rewired how I’ll code forever. Some fun facts & stories I loved and want to share from Japan’s Tech Culture:
- Shinkansen: CI/CD on rails Since 1964, Japan’s bullet train network has carried billions of passengers with near-zero accidents.
- Vending machines with five-nines uptime Japan has more than 5 million vending machines, selling everything from ramen to umbrellas. They rarely break down, embodying the same reliability mindset you see in Japanese codebases.
- Nintendo’s culture of maintainability Nintendo may not be shipping unmodified 1990s code, but they are famous for designing consoles with backward compatibility. Old titles keep running because maintainability is treated as a feature, not an afterthought.
- LINE and Nemawashi in code reviews Japan’s messaging giant LINE published engineering guidelines that explicitly echo Nemawashi small, early, consensus-driven pull requests, written with context so everyone understands. Less cowboy, more ceremony.
- Sony’s FeliCa: invisible code, global impact Sony’s FeliCa contactless system, first released in 1988, still powers Suica transit cards used by millions daily. It’s embedded software at massive scale, running for decades with legendary robustness.
- Ruby: happiness by design Ruby’s creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, famously said his goal was developer happiness. That philosophy shaped not just a language, but global frameworks like Ruby on Rails — proving Japanese coding values can ripple worldwide.
This article is your guided tour through that journey the principles, the wins, the trade-offs, and why I think every Western dev should steal at least one Japanese habit before their next sprint.
Documentation: Breadcrumbs for Future You
Confession: my READMEs used to be garbage. Two lines of setup instructions and maybe a note to “figure out migrations later.” Future Me always hated Past Me and Past Me never cared.
Then I saw how Japanese devs wrote docs. These weren’t setup notes. They were onboarding guides. They explained not just how to run the project, but why it existed, the architecture’s mental model, and the edge cases everyone forgets.
At first I rolled my eyes. Who has time to write 1,500 words for a side project?
Two weeks later, I opened my own repo and actually thanked myself out loud. The answer to a migration bug was already sitting in my README, written by Past Me after copying the Japanese style. No Slack messages. No “where did I leave that?” moments. Just quiet relief.
Docs aren’t homework. They’re breadcrumbs. They’re the only reason you’ll remember why you wrote that cursed regex six months ago. And when you start treating them as part of the product, they stop feeling like busywork.
I’ve started writing my docs like walkthroughs the way a senior dev would guide a junior on day one. Not because I’m kind, but because I know who that junior will be most of the time: me.
Variable names that tell a story
Confession: I used to name variables like I was in a speedrun. x, y, data, maybe user2 if I was feeling generous. My logic was: “The faster I type, the faster I ship.” Which worked… right up until I had to revisit the code three weeks later. Then it felt like opening a dungeon with no map, trying to remember what tmp3 was guarding.
Japanese devs? They name variables like poets. I’m not kidding when I looked through one repo, I found things like:
CustomerInvoicePaymentValidatorV2
At first, I laughed. That’s not a variable, that’s a light novel title. But here’s the twist: when I came back to that function later, I didn’t have to think. I knew exactly what it did. No mental gymnastics. No hunting down definitions across the file. It just… told me the story upfront.
The more I used this style, the more I realized my old variable naming was basically writing inside jokes to myself. Sure, I got the joke in the moment. But future-me? He’s an idiot who doesn’t remember what xyzz was supposed to do. Descriptive names are like cheat codes for your brain self-explanatory, no walkthrough required.
Of course, the downside is your code looks long. My editor felt like it had been invaded by wordy NPC dialogue. But if the tradeoff is clarity vs cleverness, clarity wins every time.
Rename one cryptic variable today
Pick the worst offender in your codebase (you know the one). Rename it to something painfully obvious. If it feels “too long,” you’re probably doing it right. Future-you (and your teammates) will silently high-five you later.
Coding for the team, not your ego
I’ll admit it: I’ve been that guy who YOLO-pushed to main at 2 AM because “it works on my machine.” (And yes, prod went down the next morning. Oops.) Western dev culture kind of encourages this the lone wolf, the 10x engineer, the “look how clever my hack is” mentality.
Japanese devs? Whole different vibe. They code like they’re in a raid party, not a solo speedrun. Every commit feels cautious, deliberate, and consensus-driven. Pull requests are treated less like “show and tell” and more like team ceremonies. No ego flexing, no sneaky cowboy commits.
At first, it drove me nuts. I wanted to merge fast, get my feature out, and brag about it later. But coding in that style forced me to slow down, write clearer commit messages, and actually explain my changes during review. Suddenly, reviews felt less like mini-battles and more like tea ceremonies slow, respectful, and everyone walks away understanding the code better.
And here’s the kicker: when you stop coding for your ego and start coding for the team, two things happen:
- Fewer production fires. (Turns out consensus = fewer 2 AM “why is prod dead?” calls.)
- You stop dreading code reviews. Instead of a gladiator pit, it feels like co-op mode.
I realized that my Western “fast hack now, explain later” mindset was really just passing pain down the line. The Japanese consensus approach felt slower, but it shifted the pain left making life easier for future teammates (and future me).
Treat code reviews like a tea ceremony
Next PR you open, write your description like you’re guiding teammates through the thought process. Be deliberate, clear, and respectful. If you can’t explain the change in plain language, it’s probably not ready to merge.
Kaizen and endless polish
In the West, we often punt messy code down the road “we’ll refactor it in the next tech debt sprint.” Japanese devs take the opposite path: polish a little every single day.
Western approach:
// "Let's refactor this entire module next sprint"
function processUserData(users) {
// 200 lines of increasingly complex code
return results;
}
Japanese approach:
// "Let's improve this function by 1% today"
function processUserData(users) {
const validUsers = filterValidUsers(users);
return processValidUsers(validUsers);
// Tomorrow: extract another small piece
// Next week: optimize one edge case
}
Instead of waiting for permission to “fix tech debt,” they make incremental improvements until the codebase naturally evolves. It feels slow, but future-you walks into a cleaner repo with fewer cursed files.
The safety-critical mindset
One of the biggest shocks during this experiment wasn’t variable names or endless docs it was the mindset behind the code. Japanese developers don’t just write software like it’s for an app; they write it like it might end up running on a bullet train.
That mindset changes everything.
I’ve worked at startups where “testing” meant clicking around the UI once and saying, “Looks good, ship it.” (Yeah… QA found out the hard way.) But in the Japanese repos I studied, testing wasn’t optional. It was baked into the workflow like rice in sushi. Integration tests, edge-case handling, meticulous error checking all designed with the assumption that failure could be catastrophic.
And honestly? That mindset makes sense. Japan builds trains that run to the second, elevators that never hiccup, and vending machines that basically never crash (seriously, when’s the last time you saw one broken?). That culture of reliability seeps into code.
When I applied that to my own project, I caught a nasty bug before it hit prod one that would’ve blown up on launch day. My usual self would’ve brushed it off as “we’ll patch later.” The Japanese mindset had me write an extra test suite that exposed the issue. That single save was worth the extra hours.
The tradeoff? Shipping feels slower. If you’re hacking together a weekend MVP, this style will suffocate you. But if you’re working on something mission-critical fintech, healthcare, infrastructure this level of paranoia is exactly what you want. It’s the difference between “our SaaS dashboard looks broken” and “the train didn’t stop at the station.”
Test like it’s running on a train
Next feature you build, write tests assuming your code will control public transport. Sounds silly, but it forces you to catch edge cases you’d normally ignore. Future you (and your users) will thank you.
When this style doesn’t fit
Coding like a Japanese dev isn’t always sunshine and bullet trains. Sometimes it feels like wearing full samurai armor to a dodgeball game protected, but way too slow.
In startup land, nobody cares if your variable names read like JRPG quests. You just need a working demo. I learned this the hard way: one weekend I spent hours writing README chapters and refactoring instead of finishing the actual feature. By Sunday night, I had beautiful docs… and half a product. At a hackathon, that’s game over.
That’s the tradeoff: Japanese habits shine in safety-critical systems trains, fintech, healthcare where mistakes are unacceptable. But for MVPs, game mods, or scrappy SaaS projects, over-polish can kill momentum. Sometimes “good enough” really is good enough.
Table: when to use which style
Action step
Before coding, ask:
“Do I need a bullet train, or just a skateboard?”
If it’s mission-critical, lean Japanese. If it’s just a fast prototype, don’t over-polish speed is the feature.
Steal like a dev (the hybrid playbook)
After a month of forcing myself into full-on Japanese coding mode, I realized something: I don’t want to code 100% like a Japanese dev. But I also don’t want to go back to my cowboy, YOLO-commit ways either.
What I actually want is a hybrid. Think of it like building your own class in an RPG: take the best abilities from each style and leave the rest. You don’t need to cosplay as a Tokyo salaryman to benefit from Japanese coding discipline you just need to steal a few habits and slot them into your own workflow.
Here’s the cheat-sheet I came up with:
Documentation → Doc like Japanese devs. Treat READMEs and comments as onboarding guides, not afterthoughts.
Variable naming → Name like Japanese devs. Longer, more descriptive names save hours later.
Teamwork → Review like Japanese devs. Respectful, detailed PRs > cowboy commits.
Polish → Refactor like Japanese devs. Small, daily Kaizen beats giant, painful refactors.
Shipping speed → Ship like Western devs. For prototypes, speed is the feature. Don’t overdo it.
Think of it as “steal their powers” mode. You don’t have to go all-in just grab the buffs that make sense for your context.
When I blended the two, my workflow actually felt balanced for the first time. My side projects shipped and they didn’t rot into spaghetti. My team reviews felt calmer. And my future self finally stopped cursing past me.
Action step: build your hybrid checklist
Before your next sprint, pick two Japanese habits and commit to them. Maybe it’s better docs, maybe it’s more descriptive variables. Try it for one cycle, then see if your codebase feels less cursed.
Conclusion
After a month coding like a Japanese dev, my repos were cleaner, my PRs calmer, and future me less angry. Slower? Yeah. But slower in a way that saved time later.
I won’t ditch Western speed sometimes you need duct tape and prayer. But living in that chaos forever? No thanks. Japanese habits proved that reliability, clarity, and teamwork scale better than ego-driven hacks.
My hot take:
If Western teams borrowed even 30% of these practices, we’d see fewer 2 a.m. outages and way less burnout. “Move fast and break things” gave us unicorns, sure… but also spaghetti. Maybe it’s time to move smarter.
Try one habit this week. Write better docs, name variables clearly, or polish a messy module. Then see if your future self buys you a coffee.
Helpful resources
- Clean Code by Robert C. Martin Western bible of clarity
- Kaizen in Software Engineering (Research paper) how continuous improvement translates into code
- Hacker News thread: Japanese coding culture devs debating these differences
- Japanese OSS example repo dive into the style yourself
- Reddit thread: variable naming horror stories because we’ve all been there
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