I think this is on the right track, Japan has a fantastic hardware oriented manufacturing culture, but this can be a serious impediment when it comes to approaching software development. One symptom is that software teams are seen as part of a product line team rather than having their own org.
Famously this was a major issue at Nokia and Blackberry, who institutionally believed that their competitive edge was in the hardware. Device specifications would change late in the product development cycle due to constraints on manufacturing or cost targets, and the software devs would just have to work around it. Adopting software platform, like Symbian at Nokia, was primarily seen as a cost and resource saving move to speed up development using a generic solution.
Right; when you are good at one thing, you tend to look at everything else through that framework only. If you then have a strict Hierarchical Organization/Society (i.e. thou shalt not question) which enforces that thought pattern, you miss out on "the next big thing".
The success of American Software Companies is a direct result of limited structure, controlled chaos, lots of money to experiment with and loose financial controls pioneered by DARPA and transplanted to Silicon Valley.
This particular point is addressed directly in that the ready access to money made Japanese corporations stagnant. Why innovate if you can continue to get rich doing what you already do?
This is the current failure mode of many automotive companies. As institutions they see software as something you sprinkle on top of hardware platforms using a process optimized for hardware.
It's interesting how that ties into some of the famous missteps from Japanese video game companies in the past.
Nintendo went overconfidently into the 5th console generation with the cartridge-based Nintendo 64, allowing Sony to step in out of nowhere and eat their lunch since Nintendo alienated developers who obviously wanted the format where they weren't bound to the small storage sizes on cartridges. Including their bread-and-butter partnerships like Capcom with their Mega Man games and Square with the Final Fantasy series, both defecting to make PlayStation games.
Albeit their lunch was eaten by another Japanese company, but Sony made an overconfident hardware misstep themselves a couple generations later after feeling invincible with the success of the PS2, releasing the PS3 which was technically impressive from a hardware standpoint, but difficult to develop for, causing them to alienate developers (see Gabe Newell's famous comments) and lose steam for a lot of that generation.
Famously this was a major issue at Nokia and Blackberry, who institutionally believed that their competitive edge was in the hardware. Device specifications would change late in the product development cycle due to constraints on manufacturing or cost targets, and the software devs would just have to work around it. Adopting software platform, like Symbian at Nokia, was primarily seen as a cost and resource saving move to speed up development using a generic solution.