> Experts say government offices prefer faxes because they generate paperwork onto which bureaucrats can affix their stamps of approval, called hanko.
This is likely a much more key point to the article than it lets on. In much of Japan's society, the physical personalized stamp is used in the same way the West uses signatures, and not just within the bureaucracy.
Same in Germany. Letters sent by fax legally count as "written" correspondence while email does not. I am 23 and I can remember times, when I (theoretically) had to cryptographically sign a PDF to send even an invoice by email.
In private homes fax machines are the exception but in businesses of every size, they are still pretty common.
Our chancellor famously said in 2013 "The internet is new land for all of us." [0]
We keep inventing technologies like De-Mail [1] or the chip on our ID card [2] to authenticates you online - if you could only find a services that implements the protocol and you would have the required card reader. I guess most of this audience would not even understand the need for an offline ID card …
Focus on security is a good thing - especially when I read stories about how criminals claim refunds from other people's IRS accounts in the US, but email is in no way easier hackable for the average person than postal letters are. And postal addresses will not give you unique identification either.
I also love when I ask the German version of the IRS a quick question by email and get the answer back by postal letter with my email printed and attached to it. Gives me the warm feeling, that you can count on some things to stay the same. :D
I'm a bit surprised that you don't seem to have an equivalent of the Handysignatur [0] (eID based on mobile phone) we have in Austria. It's getting more and more popular here, I guess because all you need is a mobile phone (who has a card reader after all?).
I find it incredibly convenient as it gives you immediate access to a growing list of e-government services [1], as well as signing PDFs and even things like a service for cancelling subscriptions online [2].
Correct me if I am wrong, but these services seem to be designed by the private sector for people to use, while the government implements it, where it makes sense. Meanwhile in Germany these services are designed by the government and implemented by the private sector and are therefore hopelessly outdated and bureaucratic.
Handy-signatur.at seems very convenient. You know, something must be wrong, when even Austria is moving faster than you ;-) I guess our most realistic bet to get something like this to work here is to count on the European Integration and wait for other systems to take over.
Wow,this gives real insight into why they may be more attached to hard copy. Sometimes traditional techniques maintain order, stability and arguably security at the expense of expediency and efficiency. I wonder how technologies are evolving to incorporate some of these traditions.
My feeling is that high tech Japan is a myth of the past, that never truly realized itself. Part of the myth probably originated from the futuristic anime that it produced in the 80s and 90s.
If you look at Japan today, there is quite a bit of pretense of high-tech that I suspect to be nothing but pseudo-science and marketing crap to drive consumerism (Phiten for its "health" accessories, and a bunch of well-known brands like Panasonic jumping on the alkaline water bandwagon).
Nah, man, I first came to Japan (from the Bay Area) in 1989 and it totally was like a science fiction movie. I then moved to Tokyo in 1994.
• weird giant TV screens all over the city, bleating ads at you while you ate in a grubby hand-built noodle shop next to a skyscraper (Blade Runner)
• super-advanced mobile phones COLOR SCREENS that you could PLUG INTO YOUR PDA AND DIAL INTO BBSes WITH! (Star Trek)
• toilets that sensed your motions and flushed for you (never saw this in a movie but I always imagined after seeing them that the toilets on the Death Star had to be like this)
• elevated trains and highways that passed through buildings and let you peep into tiny apartments so small they might as well have been Battlestar Galactica living quarters
• the badass cassette walkman i bought with an extra D battery attachment
• robotic vacuum cleaners doing the airports and stations while playing a creepy melody so they didn't scare you
... plus tons more like that. I had never seen any of that stuff in the USA in those days. It just doesn't really sound high-tech and futuristic anymore.
That's sad. Futuristic stuff often gets to the prototype stage in Japan, such as maglev trains, mobile robots, and vertical/horizontal elevators, but large scale deployment isn't happening.
If you have a cool idea for Japan, there is now a well-funded "Cool Japan" venture capital fund.[1] The government of Korea is funding K-pop, and the government of Japan wants to catch up. So far, they've bought a translation/subbing company, started up an anime streaming site (daisuki.net), and are funding a food court in Singapore and a green tea restaurant in the US. They need more advanced concepts to fund.
Cool Japan is just ridiculous. A concept started by politicians to make it seem they are doing something but they don't even understand why their culture is attractive in the first place. They are completely oblivious to it, and then you get these companies sucking money from them for easy profit and no oversight under the "Cool Japan" brand. Another good example of silly Japanese politics.
The Cool Japan fund just got started a few months ago. Since this is a forum for startup people, maybe someone has an idea that they might fund. They clearly need some new ideas.
Since this article is about faxes, consider better apps for dealing with faxes from a phone that are compatible with fax practice in Japan. Maybe a system where you tap your seal against your phone, a piezoelectric energy harvesting part in the seal generates enough energy to power a key exchange over low-energy Bluetooth, and you've signed.
Eh, I've lived in the US for four years, so maybe I'm missing the latest development, but the popularity of K-pop or Korean dramas has little to do with government funding. It's just that Korean entertainment business somehow found a good opportunity. And honestly I doubt a government can play a major role in developing any entertainment industry: that's how you end up with disastrous propaganda movies.
(Also, I'm never a big fan of K-pop myself, but I guess its popularity is dwarfed by all the Japanese anime fans in the world?)
K-pop fans are more relevant consumers than foreign anime fans, because they spend tons of money that goes back to the original producers, and tend to live in other Asian countries where the agencies will can more easily communicate with them (or are even capable of realizing they exist).
Meanwhile anime's business model relies on selling less than 10,000 copies of any one series at about $30 an episode. Nobody outside Japan is going to put up with this, and they're afraid of going out of business if they change strategies, so growth is not very good.
Manga does well worldwide and is healthy, though. America can't compete in this market because our comics industry is a monopoly that only produces one genre[1], whereas the main genre in manga[2] is much more relevant to any reasonable person. I feel Japan has no fundamental advantage in this area, though, and other people will eventually figure it out.
[1] Weird cosmic fantasy stories about people wearing underwear over their clothes getting in fights all the time.
A friend of mine who recently went on a trip to Tokyo said that it looked like how people in the 80s/90s thought the future would look like. I guess he was spot-on.
Thanks for your confirmation - I've been almost a decade in Japan and been following its unfortunate technological decline for a while before I moved here.
I don't think it was a myth based on anime or otherwise. Japan did seem genuinely high-tech when I first arrived here 20 years ago. Talking elevators and high-tech toilets. Consumer electronics that were at least two years ahead of what was available in the US. Car navigation and mobile phones were way more advanced than in other countries at the time.
The individualist view of history would argue that the individuals behind the innovations aren't with us anymore, or based in Japan. For example, some argue that Sony has not seen any Walkman-scale consumer innovations/global successes since Morita. I read somewhere, many years ago, that as many as 11 could be directly traced to him.
The macro economist (e.g. see "The Volatility Machine" by Pettis) would argue that there was fabulous amounts of FDI right until 1991, and one side effect of cheap capital is a lot more R&D into "useless" and "risky" things some of which become groundbreaking consumer innovation. As the FDI dried up so did the keiretsus' spare cash for risky ventures, or it went elsewhere (here in Singapore we see a lot of Japanese VCs like Gree).
I do wonder if it has stopped outside consumer electronics (which are the most visible). In my now 5 trips in the last 2 years alone, I've been consistently impressed by the quality of the engineering (particularly civil and systems) all over the country.
Two trends come to mind: 1) Japan has been mired in an economic malaise for nealy 20 years, and 2) much of tech innovation has migrated from hardware to software, and Japan is more of a hardware innovator.
Of course, back then Japan had or adopted cooler tech than most of the rest of the world. The problem is that, at the same time, a high-tech, futuristic vision emerged and it was much grander than what was happening. That vision is the "myth" I am talking about. And then people were fixated on that vision while the means to achieve that vision was nowhere in sight. After a while, people give up and do these other things to pretend the future is here.
> Of course, back then Japan had or adopted cooler tech than most of the rest of the world.
Key word being 'adopted'. I guess there was a time when Japanese culture enthusiastically adopted technology and culture from outside of Japan, but I don't see this too much anymore. Remember that Apple had to go to great lengths to even get the iPhone on sale here - up to that point, while mobile phones here might have been great in the 90s or whatever, innovation had basically stagnated in that space. There is the fax thing in the article. I can tell you that in the financial sector here there are a great number of customs and practices that were abandoned by the rest of the world twenty or thirty years ago in the name of efficiency. Remember that MiniDisc remained a big deal here well into the 2000s - even ten years ago few people in Japan knew what an MP3 player was (again, until Apple basically forced the iPod onto the market here).
So new tech can be adopted here, but you really have to go to unreasonably great lengths to prove it out before shops and distributors will work with you - and the price of being wrong is really high. And you can multiply this by a factor of ten if your company is not Japanese. Japanese remind me of the Amish in this respect, actually - of course, it has nothing to do with religion. I think it is a side effect of Japanese exceptionalism and various Nihonjinron bullshit that continues to be a big deal for the Japanese. In fact, I suspect this is getting worse, although it's certainly possible I just notice it more now. Even if a thing is successful everywhere else, even if everyone finds a thing very useful (or, in the case of fax per the article, hopelessly outdated), the Japanese will reject it without consideration, or cling to it beyond the point of reason, with no justification aside from, well, they're Japanese so obviously things that work everywhere else can't work here, and vice versa.
It is an exceptionally stupid meme and it's holding back the entire society. And while I could definitely be wrong (and hope I'm wrong), it seems to be getting worse.
I can't say who created it, but such vision certainly emerged (which is why I changed the wording in my original comment shortly before you replied).
Giant, versatile robotic war machines that can fight on land, in the air, and in space; space colonies; space shuttle for the masses.
(Gundam, Patlabor, Macross)
Cyborg prosthetics; instant detoxification from alcohol.
(Ghost in the Shell)
None of these have been achieved.
Meanwhile, we got ASIMO, which fell down a flight of stairs during demo.
Oh yeah ? where are the robots then ?
It's so high tech that:
- they actually waited YEARS to embrace smartphones when they came out.
- All electronics makers in Japan have lost to Chinese and Korean rivals
- Most of the "innovations" in Japan never make it to the western market because they are so much made for Japanese only (the Galapagos problem).
- In about every field of Research now the US is ahead, and by far.
Being high tech is not about making dots of new stuff here and there among an ocean of non-innovation, but actually integrating what you improve into everything else. Japan has been particularly bad at that.
I agree. It was cool back in the 90's but when I went there the talking elevators, butt walking toilets, and mobile phones didn't seem that new to me.
I love how Japan is such a beautiful country, how most streets are clean, vending machines are everywhere, and they have a great subway system thanks to the U.S. building them up after destroying them in WW2 but you're right that high tech Japan is a myth.
Actually once you get past the facade in Japan, you realize they haven't innovated in decades and their economy is going nowhere fast with all the quantitative easing the BOJ is doing.
Japan is a beautiful country but without innovative new companies driving their economy it will eventually catch up with them.
Representative anecdote of the day: Shibuya ward in Tokyo became the first city in Japan to approve registered civil (same-sex) partnerships last week. They received over 1,000 complaints from all around the country... most of them by fax.
Nobody pays at a cafe with checks anymore, and I expect most cafes won't actually accept them.
We use paper checks to pay things like rent and the gas bill, or for person-to-person payments, because the banks refuse to provide a better system for that kind of payment. ACH exists but it's very difficult to use: it involves filling out forms and signing wavers.
Funny thing about US checks, too: as long as you put the bank's routing number and your account number on there, along with a few other key bits of information, any old piece of paper can be a valid check. You could carry a blank pad around and use it for the same purpose, though convincing the teller to accept it is a bit more difficult.
He's not talking about checks specifically, but about the idea that there is some technology or institution in Australian culture that seems perfectly normal, maybe a bit old-fashioned, that outsiders see has hilariously behind the times.
I'm American, but unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with Australian culture to really see what such a "fixation" might be.
“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” said Mr. Sugahara, 43.
A quote from the article. Never in my life have I imagined nostalgia power of the fax machine.
This is likely a much more key point to the article than it lets on. In much of Japan's society, the physical personalized stamp is used in the same way the West uses signatures, and not just within the bureaucracy.
More information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqeuM3vo3GU