＞Japanese culture and work culture is very hierarchical/top down.

This, and the 'rise or climb to the top' is more about seniority and social standing than anything else, especially at large Japanese conglomerates. The result us that there are almost none of the software competencies in senior management, and even if there were those would be software competencies from the 1970' and 1980's who are still leading while being 80 years old. There is also a 'filter' put in place at most organizations which are sufficiently large or diverse, such that middle-management is moved across multiple divisions every two or three years during their career. This is presented as a cross-training/cross-competency, but has an effect of preventing those with the most direct contact to the production staff from building enough localized social capital and systemic capability which would enable changes to the workflow not directly from the top. The middle stays in the middle, and the top gets to keep their seat well past any reasonable capability to adapt to the changing world of business.

This leads to the situation, where if leadership were changing with incoming capacity and points of view, there would be a motive and opportunity to admit to company errors; such as acquiring an international subsidiary which produced a faulty product that directly harmed people, because the newer leadership could say: "Sorry, that was a series of bad decisions, and as new leadership my role is to correct the course of business operations."

However, when the leadership is still the same clique that made the errors in either acquisition, oversight, response to the negative outcomes, then that "Sorry" statement would be a career ending move and result in massive social penalties beyond simply a forced retirement which would have lasting socio-economic impacts on the entire clique's family in every facet of business and later prospects. Combined with the strict social responsibility of a large enough scale of harm could lead to actual, not-figurative, suicide.

So, no, there's not going to be any 'mea culpa' for the direct actions of a foreign subsidiary, because those negative outcomes of those poor decisions are not in the direct social awareness in Japan of those surrounding the entrenched leadership and thus do not impact the daily social standing of that clique to the extent that a formal 'taking responsibility' would.

Instead, there will be very public announcements of improved capability which has the indirect and implied meaning of: "Engineering a way to make a better product will keep that from happening again" without ever directly addressing the existence of the faults. Social and economic uplift to counter any negative pressure in the local social awareness equals a success, not a failure.

In order for Japan to actually become successful at software in the near and medium time-frames, there will need to be a large shift in the work-life balance and internal social structure of new startups. This is beginning to happen in small scale, and to the extent that those newer 'brands' can avoid becoming subsidiaries of the larger established conglomerations will determine the slope to that success.

The groups which can empower and embrace a 'star' network topology inside and among organizations instead of 'waterfall' hierarchy will both; struggle to reach the social equity available through corporate-government-financial integration that is strongly entrenched in the established systems, and will outperform those entrenched systems in terms of real productivity through reliable delivery of improved capacity.

The socio-economic inertia of the giant keiretsu-gaisha are immense, but the geriatric cliff is already here and the nation and it's business cultures are at an 'adapt or cease operations' threshold. It's questionable whether any of the globally well know names will remain operational in their prior fields of production over the next 50 to 100 years without a significant shift in developing a way to build direct connections to capacity and applied skills at every tier of each company.

The 25 to 30 year old employees group in every main workforce is barely a fraction of what it used to be, and handling that small group as if it needs a 'filter' to keep the authority concentrated at the top is a significant risk for these organizations.

Those workers at the start of their career who are looking hard at the work-life balance aspect of employment have an inertia which is at odds with that of the organizational behemoths. Many of them are in a position to be drawn out of the crowded city, embrace a rural lifestyle and remote work without the centralized office and it's toxic overwork for underproduction culture. The rural municipalities are developing stronger incentives to attract this mobility, including relocation assistance and direct support with childcare and family building resources. Some prefectures and town offer up to several years of basic food and housing subsidies, low to zero cost fibre internet; next-generation FLET'S Hikari Cross or NTT's eqivalent 10Gbps in a HOUSE instead of a tiny apartment. The major central large conglomerates are going to find that the local in-office work pool will stagnate as the most capable and best informed no longer flow in directly from university and fill every available desk from a waiting list.

The "bigs" have insulated the ledger books with massive foreign investments, so they have the capability to stay 'in-the-game' for quite some time, so long as those investments continue to be productive, but the hollowing out of the main offices in Tokyo is pretty much guaranteed in the next two generations as rural Japan's liveability and economics for raising a family continue to grow, because the 80+ hour workweek labor staff in the city has no incentive to pair up and have kids, and the kids who are graduating in this and the next generation's rural school graduates are less and less likely to stay in the city after university if they want a family.

It's pretty much Japan's only way out of the population crisis that is still worsening. So, either they will adjust and become a productive, blended high tech semi-rural powerhouse without the high stress office culture that developed in postwar recovery, or they risk becoming a history lesson about over-concentration of inflexible management culture and loss of productivity.

The third option: succeed AND keep hyper-concentrated power is dependent on the types of moves that Fujitsu et al. are making today, find a way to automate more and more capacity via Machine Learning and robotics in the hopes of not actually needing an influx of skilled workforce for production.

If this 'hail Mary' play actually were to succeed it only cements a productive income for the shrinking population without resolving any of the causes of that shrinkage, i.e. the population still works 80+ hours a week in a socially disconnected state that in antithetic for raising healthy youthful progeny.

Taken to an 'in extremis' view: Within another 60 to 80 years, this might result in a well funded country of the elderly being waited on by robot butlers with until there is no one left to be waited on or fed the produce grown in automated fields.

I think that he most likely path will be a mixture of all three, in varying measure and with an array of outcomes. We live in interesting times indeed.

Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA