日本因何丧失电子业霸主地位?

That is a contrast with the glory days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Japan started to dominate theworld of consumer electronics. As the Japanese economy surged, its electronics conglomerates ruled the market for memory chips, color televisions, and videocassette recorders, while their research labs gave birth to gadgets that would define an era: the Walkman, CD and DVD players.
这与上世纪70年代末和80年代初的情况形成了鲜明对比，当时日本开始垄断世界消费电子产品市场。随着日本经济飞速发展，该国的电子业巨头也开始统治内存芯片、彩色电视和盒式磁带录像机市场，它们的研发实验室开发出了一批定义了一个时代的产品，例如随身听、CD和DVD播放机。

Now Japan's device makers are an afterthought to Amazon, Apple Inc., Google Inc., and Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. No longer the kings of electronics, Sony, Panasonic Corp. and Sharp Corp. combined to lose about $20 billion in the past fiscal year. Compare that to the $6.4 billion in record profits those firms delivered only four years earlier.
如今，日本的电子产品生产商落后于亚马逊、苹果(Apple Inc.)、谷歌(Google Inc.)和韩国的三星电子(Samsung Electronics Co.)。它们不再是电子行业的王者，在上一财年，索尼、松下(Panasonic Corp.)和夏普(Sharp Corp.)共计亏损了约200亿美元。就在四年前，这些企业取得了64亿美元的创纪录利润。

Japan's current weakness is rooted in its traditional strength: a fixation with 'monozukuri,' or the art of making things, focused on hardware advances.
日本当前的疲弱根植于其传统优势──专守“monozukuri”（即制造的艺术），专注于硬件的改进。这一理念是日本民族自豪感的来源，它推动该国的电子公司竭力生产常常是世界上最薄最小的产品或是推出其他渐进的技术进步，但是它们忽视了人们真正关心的因素，例如产品的设计和使用的便利度。

This concept, a source of national pride, pushed Japan's electronics firms to strive for products that were often the world's thinnest, smallest, or delivered other incremental improvement - while losing sight of factors that really mattered to people such as design and ease of use.
以电子阅读器业务为例，索尼专注于销售设备，而亚马逊则专注于销售电子书。结果是，Kindle更加符合人们购买电子阅读器的根本理由──买书、看书。剩下的事情大家都知道了。

In the case of the e-reader, Sony was focused on selling devices, while Amazon was focused on selling books. As a result, the Kindle was more in tune with the raison d'etre for purchasing the device: to buy and read books. And the rest was history.

今年6月份，津贺一宏(Kazuhiro Tsuga)在接任松下总裁的新闻发布会上说道：“日本企业对自己的技术和制造技能太自信了，我们忽略了要从消费者的角度看待产品。”在此之前，松下出现了公司94年历史上最严重的年度亏损。

'Japanese firms were too confident about our technology and manufacturing prowess. We lost sight of the products from the consumer's point of view,' said Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga at a news conference in June upon taking over as the company's new president after it posted the biggest annual loss in its 94-year history.
火上浇油的是，在日圆走强的形势下，日本企业跟上创新技术、同时又要进行必要的成本削减以吸引普通大众变得更困难。在尖端技术产品方面，日本企业常常依赖于在国内生产，然后把产品销往海外。然而，由于日圆汇率上升到接近历史高位的水平，日本在海外销售的商品的利润空间缩窄，但韩国制造商因为韩圆相对疲软而避开了这个问题。此外，利润受到侵蚀也使企业难以对未来产品和技术进行投资。