> ...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence working 
> aginst each other, rather than working together towards a common goal?

Not only that, but seemingly horizontal communication to different 
departments is actively discouraged in Japanese culture - so you end up 
having to go up several layers of management and then back down another part 
of the tree to get an answer.  And it's not as if managers are really that 
interested in (or have time for) the discussion of detail design.  So as you 
can imagine, each department is quite isolated.

> Shouldn't the freeze date be set far enough forward that it doesn't matter 
> if they change something the *day* before the freeze?

Sure, in theory, but in reality the Engineers are usually not sat around 
doing nothing during this time.

> Still, I guess you can't really do this for an external "customer". If you 
> invent something off the top of your head and try to sell it to them, 
> presumably they will suggest that you take a long walk off a short 
> cliff...

The customer will have at least asked for some minimum set of parameters, 
like brightness, contrast etc.  So the major design decisions are based on 
this.  Usually however they will ask for much more detail, often running 
into hundreds of pages with references to thousands more pages in other 
documents.

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