The industrialisation of Europe and Asia leads to the development of innovative and reliable technical complex products. Industrial nations like Germany and Japan were going separate ways to highly developed industrial nations. This leads to different goals and philosophy in terms of reliability and safety design regarding product, process development and the efficiency of the product in the use phase. This paper shows essential aspects of the differences in German and Japanese reliability and safety engineering. Base of operations is the fundamental difference of the realisation of the principles “innovation” versus “optimisation”: German products functionality contains often innovative solutions, Japanese products functionality shows often optimised solutions. These different designs are caused by different impacts: Historical impact, society and social interaction impact, education System and work environment impact and geographical and location impact. This leads to the different technical reliability and safety engineering solutions in engineering and product use in Germany and Japan. Finally, the findings are substantiated using the example of the long-distance train transport system in Japan and Germany.