The United KingdomvsJapan

イギリスと日本UKJP

Seen from the United Kingdom: each line below describes Japan relative to the United Kingdom.

Swap: see the United Kingdom from Japan

Culture Map: eight scales

Erin Meyer's eight scales, sorted by how far apart the United Kingdom and Japan sit, largest gap first.

Filled dot: the United Kingdom, where you are looking fromHollow ring: Japan

Where you will notice the difference7 scales

Communicating
Japan leaves more to be read between the lines than the United Kingdom (4 steps)
The United Kingdom −1, Japan +3, on a line from −3 (Low-context) to +3 (High-context).
Leading
Japan keeps more distance between boss and team than the United Kingdom (4 steps)
The United Kingdom −1, Japan +3, on a line from −3 (Egalitarian) to +3 (Hierarchical).
Evaluating
Japan gives negative feedback more indirectly than the United Kingdom (3 steps)
The United Kingdom 0, Japan +3, on a line from −3 (Direct negative feedback) to +3 (Indirect negative feedback).
Deciding
Japan decides by group agreement more than the United Kingdom (3 steps)
The United Kingdom 0, Japan −3, on a line from −3 (Consensual) to +3 (Top-down).
Trusting
Japan builds trust through personal relationships more than the United Kingdom (3 steps)
The United Kingdom −2, Japan +1, on a line from −3 (Task-based) to +3 (Relationship-based).
Disagreeing
Japan avoids open disagreement more than the United Kingdom (3 steps)
The United Kingdom 0, Japan +3, on a line from −3 (Confrontational) to +3 (Avoids confrontation).
Scheduling
Japan sticks to fixed plans and deadlines more than the United Kingdom (1 step)
The United Kingdom −1, Japan −2, on a line from −3 (Linear time) to +3 (Flexible time).

Not placed1 scale

These scales are left unmarked: either Meyer leaves a country off the scale or no source places it, and drawing it anyway would be guessing.

PersuadingMeyer leaves Japan off this scale and describes its reasoning as holistic

Positions are read by eye from Erin Meyer's published charts and rounded to seven steps. A step means “further towards that pole”, not a measured distance. How the positions were read

Hofstede: six dimensions

Scores from 0 to 100, sorted by the gap between the United Kingdom and Japan. They describe national averages, not either country's character.

Uncertainty avoidance
Japan scores 57 points higher than the United Kingdom (92 against 35)
The United Kingdom 35, Japan 92, on a line from 0 (Tolerant of ambiguity) to 100 (Avoids ambiguity).
Long-term orientation
Japan scores 40 points higher than the United Kingdom (100 against 60)
The United Kingdom 60, Japan 100, on a line from 0 (Short-term) to 100 (Long-term).
Motivation towards achievement and success
Japan scores 29 points higher than the United Kingdom (95 against 66)
The United Kingdom 66, Japan 95, on a line from 0 (Consensus-oriented) to 100 (Decisive).
Indulgence
Japan scores 27 points lower than the United Kingdom (42 against 69)
The United Kingdom 69, Japan 42, on a line from 0 (Restrained) to 100 (Indulgent).
Power distance
Japan scores 19 points higher than the United Kingdom (54 against 35)
The United Kingdom 35, Japan 54, on a line from 0 (Low power distance) to 100 (High power distance).
Individualism
Japan scores 14 points lower than the United Kingdom (62 against 76)
The United Kingdom 76, Japan 62, on a line from 0 (Collectivist) to 100 (Individualist).

Country averages. About 80% of variation in values is between people inside a country (Taras et al. 2016).Source: The Culture Factor — Country comparison tool (2026).About the Hofstede dimensions

What the sources say, theme by theme

Entries for the United Kingdom and Japan, side by side on wide screens. Each keeps its own confidence label and citations.

Design & quality

United Kingdom3 claims

The GDS Government Design Principles (published 2012, updated 2025) include "Start with user needs," "Do less," and "Iterate. Then iterate again." Iterative development is an official principle of the public sector.
Well attested1 source2025gb-design-1
- GOV.UK: Government design principles (2025)
Point 8 of the GOV.UK Service Standard is "Iterate and improve frequently." It states that a service is never finished and that maintenance such as bug fixes is not enough.
Well attested1 sourcegb-design-2
- DfE: Service Standard 8 Iterate and improve frequently
According to a 2023 NAO report, there have been 11 cross-government digital strategies in the past 25 years. The Police National Computer, introduced in 1974, is still in use.
Well attested1 source2023gb-design-3
- NAO: Digital transformation in government (2023)

Japan4 claims

In IPA's DX White Paper 2021, 19.3% of Japanese companies used agile development, against 55.0% in the US. DevOps was 10.9% vs 52.6% and design thinking 14.7% vs 53.2%, a wide gap in the adoption of iterative methods.
Attested1 source2021jp-design-1
- Japan lags the US in DX: IPA publishes DX White Paper 2021 (@IT) (2021)
In IPA's DX White Paper 2023, fewer than half of Japanese companies applied agile principles to organizational governance, in every department surveyed.
Attested1 source2023jp-design-2
- Key points of DX White Paper 2023: the overwhelming gap between Japan and the US (Business+IT) (2023)
In a 2025 LF Research survey, about 90% of Japanese companies expected a response within 12 hours when something goes wrong, even for free open source software. TechTarget Japan described this as treating OSS like a commercial product.
Attested2 sources2026jp-design-3
- Japanese companies see value in OSS but struggle to build the organization for it (@IT) (2026)
- 90% demand a response within 12 hours: the illusion of Japanese companies treating OSS as a commercial product (TechTarget Japan) (2025)
A 2022 Japan Fair Trade Commission report on the software industry's multi-tier subcontracting warned of suspected violations of the Subcontract Act, such as price squeezing and demands to absorb specification changes at no charge.
Well attested1 source2022jp-design-4
- Report on the survey of subcontracting in the software industry (Japan Fair Trade Commission) (2022)

Failure & risk

United Kingdom4 claims

The GDS Way incident management standard requires incident reviews to follow a blameless post mortem culture.
Well attested1 sourcegb-failure-1
- The GDS Way: How to manage technical incidents
GOV.UK publishes incident reports, such as one on increased error rates on 5 January 2022. A former GDS staff member wrote in 2018 that publishing them builds trust and an atmosphere where people can learn safely.
Well attested2 sources2022gb-failure-2
- Inside GOV.UK: Incident report, 5 January 2022 (2022)
- 24 ways: What I Learned in Six Years at GDS (2018)
In a 2019 blog post, the London fintech Monzo explained that it runs on-call with two people and records every incident. The Pragmatic Engineer warns against "blameless buck-passing," where blame is shifted while claiming to be blameless.
Well attested2 sources2019gb-failure-3
- Monzo: How we respond to incidents (2019)
- The Pragmatic Engineer: Incident Review and Postmortem Best Practices
In the Post Office Horizon scandal, testimony that Horizon was "robust" was used despite bugs in the Fujitsu system, and more than 900 people were wrongly convicted. The Court of Appeal found that the Post Office had in effect reversed the burden of proof.
Attested2 sourcesgb-failure-4
- Wikipedia: British Post Office scandal
- Computer Weekly: Fujitsu's role in the Post Office scandal

Japan3 claims

In IPA's DX White Paper 2023, 15% of Japanese companies said that taking risks and trying new things earns respect, against 42.5% in the US. The figures come from a secondary source quoting the white paper's chart.
Attested1 source2023jp-failure-1
- Japan–US comparison of DX efforts (from IPA DX White Paper 2023), part 2 (2023)
In a 2018 engineering blog post, Mercari published a rule to "make the code the subject" in incident reports, so that discussion stays on root causes rather than blaming people. Retrospectives were open to everyone regardless of role.
Well attested1 source2018jp-failure-2
- Incident response guided by Mercari's three values (2018)
A lightning talk at an industry event reported that Mercari's engineering ladder (its evaluation criteria) includes the ability to write postmortems.
Thin1 source2023jp-failure-3
- Learning postmortems together: Lunch LT #LT_findy (Togetter) (2023)

Feedback & code review

United Kingdom3 claims

Meyer writes that the British deliver negative feedback less directly than Americans and far less directly than the Dutch. She describes frequent understatement using downgraders such as "a bit" and "slightly."
Attested1 source2014Datedgb-feedback-1
- Erin Meyer: How To Say "This Is Crap" In Different Cultures (2014)
The Anglo-Dutch translation guide that Meyer cites reads "With all due respect" as "I think you are wrong" and "Very interesting" as "I don't like it." The guide is half a joke, and its authorship is disputed.
Attested2 sources2014Datedgb-feedback-2
- Erin Meyer: How To Say "This Is Crap" In Different Cultures (2014)
- Nannette Ripmeester: We all speak English, don't we?
A study of 44,000 pull requests across 20 projects that compared acceptance rates with the developer's country HDI (Furtado et al., 2020) placed UK developers in the group with the highest acceptance rates.
Attested1 source2020gb-feedback-3
- Furtado et al.: How Successful Are Open Source Contributions From Countries with Different Levels of Human Development? (2020)

Japan4 claims

Erin Meyer's Culture Map places Japan at the very indirect end for negative feedback and on the side that avoids confrontation. Criticizing someone in front of others is generally avoided.
Thin2 sourcesjp-feedback-1
- Erin Meyer's Culture Map: Where Japan Actually Falls (Accent Language)
- The Culture Map by Erin Meyer (Deploy Yourself)
One Japanese developer writes that "something feels off" can pass as a complete review comment, and that conventions are enforced implicitly in review without ever being written down.
Thin1 sourcejp-feedback-2
- Why High-Context Culture Makes AI Coding Harder — A Japanese Developer's Perspective (DEV Community)
Japanese internet slang has a phrase, "throwing an axe" (masakari), for sharp, forceful technical criticism, and blunt, direct comments do appear online. Whether this is specific to Japan is disputed.
Thin2 sources2020jp-feedback-3
- When strangers pick on you online: how to handle masakari (FJORD BOOT CAMP)
- Hatena Anonymous Diary: On masakari culture (2020)
Some teams describe labeling review comments with tags such as must, imo and nits to show how strong each point is and to protect psychological safety.
Thin1 sourcejp-feedback-4
- Classifying feedback in code review and strengthening psychological safety (BuildersIO)

Hierarchy & decisions

United Kingdom3 claims

In Meyer's 2017 HBR chart, the United Kingdom sits in the same egalitarian and top-down quadrant as the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Attested1 source2017gb-hierarchy-1
- Erin Meyer: Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing (HBR) (2017)
In the public sector, the service assessment against the Service Standard acts as a de facto gate. According to DfE guidance, a service can fail its assessment if it does not publish new source code without a good reason.
Well attested1 sourcegb-hierarchy-2
- DfE: Service Standard 12 Make new source code open
The NAO (2023) identifies as a problem that many digital decisions in government are made by generalist leaders without technical expertise.
Well attested1 source2023gb-hierarchy-3
- NAO: Digital transformation in government (2023)

Japan3 claims

Meyer cites Japan as a culture that is hierarchical on Leading yet consensual on Deciding. Her 2017 HBR article describes nemawashi and ringi as the practices that build that consensus.
Attested3 sources2017jp-hierarchy-1
Japan scores 54 on Hofstede's power distance (PDI), a middling value. The Culture Factor describes Japan as a borderline hierarchical society in which decisions are confirmed at each level.
Attested1 source2026jp-hierarchy-2
- The Culture Factor — Country comparison tool (2026)
In her 2017 HBR article, Meyer writes that American bosses look egalitarian on the surface but seem extremely autocratic to Japanese colleagues in how they make decisions.
Attested1 source2017jp-hierarchy-3
- Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing (HBR) (2017)

Communication & docs

United Kingdom3 claims

According to a book summary, the United Kingdom is on the low-context side of Meyer's Communicating scale but relies on context more than the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Thin1 sourcegb-communication-1
- lifeclub: The Culture Map Summary
"Make things open: it makes things better" is one of the government design principles, and publishing new source code is point 12 of the Service Standard. GDS explained the benefits of coding in the open in a 2017 blog post.
Well attested2 sources2017gb-communication-2
- GDS blog: The benefits of coding in the open (2017)
- DfE: Service Standard 12 Make new source code open
In 2015, Inside GOV.UK published a blog post describing what happens when something goes wrong on GOV.UK.
Well attested1 source2015Datedgb-communication-3
- Inside GOV.UK: What happens when things go wrong on GOV.UK (2015)

Japan3 claims

On Meyer's Communicating scale, Japan sits with South Korea and Indonesia at the most high-context end, and "reading the air" (kuuki wo yomu) is given as the emblematic phrase.
Thin2 sourcesjp-communication-1
- The Culture Map Summary (Readingraphics)
- The Culture Map by Erin Meyer (Deploy Yourself)
In IPA's DX White Paper 2023, 17.3% of Japanese companies said internal communication was open and information was shared well, against 66.8% in the US. The figures come from a secondary source.
Attested1 source2023jp-communication-2
- Japan–US comparison of DX efforts (from IPA DX White Paper 2023), part 2 (2023)
The technical writing site Qiita reached 1.5 million members and 8 million monthly unique users in March 2025. One individual's analysis found that Zenn overtook Qiita in the number of high-quality articles in 2024.
Attested2 sources2025jp-communication-3
- Qiita, one of Japan's largest engineer communities, passes 1.5 million members (2025)
- Shall we tech blog? Comparing Qiita and Zenn with data (2025)

Work & careers

United Kingdom4 claims

According to the ONS, full-time workers averaged 36.6 actual hours per week in 2024. The figure covers all occupations, not only engineers.
Well attested1 source2026gb-work-1
- ONS: Average actual weekly hours of work for full-time workers (YBUY) (2026)
In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 31.9% of UK respondents work fully remote and 25.8% work hybrid leaning flexible. Median salaries were $136,141 for engineering managers and $108,913 for back-end developers, about 60 to 70% of US levels.
Well attested1 source2025gb-work-2
- Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025: Work (2025)
Making 20 or more people redundant requires collective consultation. Consultation must start at least 30 days before the first dismissal for 20 to 99 redundancies, and at least 45 days before for 100 or more.
Well attested1 sourcegb-work-3
- GOV.UK: Redundancy: your rights — Consultation
In a 2022 four-day week pilot (61 companies, about 2,900 employees), 56 companies continued afterward and 71% of employees reported less burnout. Most participants were small companies, and the pilot was not limited to tech.
Attested1 source2023gb-work-4
- Autonomy: The results are in: the UK's four-day week pilot (2023)

Japan5 claims

In the 2020 census, 73.6% of Japan's IT workers were employed by IT companies. In the US (2021) the figure was 35.1%, with about 65% working outside IT companies, such as at user companies.
Well attested2 sources2023jp-work-1
- IPA press release: DX White Paper 2023 print edition PDF (Japan–US comparison of IT workers) (2023)
- MIC White Paper on Information and Communications 2018: Comparing ICT workers in Japan and the US (2018)
In a 2022 Japan Fair Trade Commission survey, 25.9% of responding companies said they had noticed middlemen that take a margin without doing any work (nakanuki); among companies at the bottom of the subcontracting chain the figure was 33.5%.
Well attested2 sources2022jp-work-2
- JFTC investigates multi-tier subcontracting in information services (IT Leaders) (2022)
- Report on the survey of subcontracting in the software industry (Japan Fair Trade Commission) (2022)
OECD data put annual working hours in 2023 at 1,611 in Japan and 1,872 in South Korea. Averaged across all industries, Japan is no longer an outlier for long hours among OECD countries.
Attested1 source2024jp-work-3
- Visualizing Annual Working Hours in OECD Countries (Visual Capitalist) (2024)
In the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's FY2023 telework survey, information and communications had the highest share of employed teleworkers of any industry, at 72.8%.
Well attested1 source2024jp-work-4
- FY2023 survey of the teleworking population: results (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism) (2024)
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' 2018 white paper notes that Japan's IT workforce has low mobility because of differing employment practices. A 2024 LAPRAS survey, however, found a growing group of engineers who were considering a job change but had not acted on it.
Attested2 sources2024jp-work-5
- MIC White Paper on Information and Communications 2018: Comparing ICT workers in Japan and the US (2018)
- IT engineer survey 2024: a growing share of latent job seekers (Mynavi News) (2024)

Open source & community

United Kingdom3 claims

According to Octoverse 2024, the UK has more than 4 million developers on GitHub, up 19% year over year. Octoverse 2025 projects about 11 million by 2030.
Well attested2 sources2025gb-oss-1
- GitHub Octoverse 2024 (2024)
- GitHub Octoverse 2025 (2025)
An estimate by the industry body OpenUK (2023) attributes 27% of the UK tech sector's gross value added in 2022 to open source.
Attested1 source2023gb-oss-2
- OpenUK: State of Open: The UK in 2023, Phase Two Part 1 (2023)
The public sector has made publishing code the default. The Skills Funding Agency reused GOV.UK's Smart Answers code and finished in under a week work that would otherwise have taken at least two months.
Well attested1 source2017gb-oss-3
- GDS blog: The benefits of coding in the open (2017)

Japan4 claims

According to GitHub Octoverse, Japan had more than 2.8 million developers in 2023 (up 31% year on year) and more than 3.5 million in 2024 (up 23%).
Well attested2 sources2024jp-oss-1
- GitHub Octoverse 2023: The state of open source and rise of AI (2023)
- GitHub Octoverse 2024: AI leads Python to the top as the global developer population surges (2024)
In a 2025 LF Research survey, Japanese companies cited IP concerns (52%) and the lack of an internal policy (51%, against a global average of 28%) as barriers to contributing to open source. 41% had an OSPO.
Attested1 source2025jp-oss-2
- LF Research "The State of Open Source in Japan 2025" (Think IT) (2025)
In the EF EPI 2024, Japan ranked 92nd of 116 countries and regions, in the "Low" band, the second lowest of five. IPA's FY2024 report also lists a psychological barrier around English as an obstacle to contributing to open source.
Attested2 sources2025jp-oss-3
- Japan ranked 31st in digital competitiveness, 92nd for English skills (The Japan Times) (2024)
- Challenges for Japan's open source strategy shown in the IPA report (FY2024 edition) (vonxai blog) (2025)
Ruby, created by Yukihiro Matsumoto and released in 1995, is the best-known open source project from Japan.
Well attested1 sourcejp-oss-4
- About Ruby