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Japan is very impressive in some ways and very...unimpressive in others. It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expe

Japan is very impressive in some ways and very...unimpressive in others. It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US. That and their strange insistence on using fax machines and cash for everything. But yes, when it comes to taxi cabs and those amazing toilets that warm your ass-cheeks while playing music, if feels they're easily 75-100 years ahead of us. http://www.theonion.com/article/earthquake-sets-japan-back-to-2147-2240 http://www.theonion.com/article/earthquake-sets-japan-back-t...

jackschultz 11y ago
I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. The streets were immaculately clean, but they put their bags of garbage right on the curb where everyone could see them blocking the way. We saw a demonstration of Asimo, the human-acting robot, which could hop on on leg at this point. And then we would go to get food and they only accept cash. There were "smoking only" areas on the streets (Shibuya for example), as a way to corral and even shame smokers. And yet most places accommodated indoor smoking. We could go to restaurants and pre-order from a vending machine and give the ticket to the chefs, but in those same shops, along with most coffee shops (even the western ones), they didn't have easy access wifi. Habits are difficult to change. Cultures must be even more difficult.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. I don't know that it's the right way to put it — after all mayhaps things are just as odd the other way around — but some things were definitely jarring, like the ubiquitous vending machines (cheap and with cold and hot drinks) next to houses with no central heating (heated room by room mostly with kerosene heaters) or the weird ubiquity of "busybody" jobs (e.g. any form of road encumbrance having one person on each side directing traffic, and we crossed a lot of roadworks).
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    The busybody jobs are actually a social policy. At some point the government decided it was better to have full employment than idle hands, which is why Japan has such a low crime rate.
    - derefr 11y ago
      How much does that cost? Could the US afford to do that? Why aren't we talking about "the successful example of Japan's public stimulus in job creation" as an alternative to e.g. basic income?
      - Cyberdog 11y ago
        I guess it's only successful if you're one of the types that think that government debt doesn't matter.
  - jackschultz 11y ago
    Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around. I definitely noticed the busybody jobs. Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess? Trash collectors on the streets sweeping leaves into their collections. People guarding semi-obstructed parking exits to make sure no accidents occur, no matter how easy it is for the drivers to see the sidewalk. Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about.
    - ansible 11y ago
      Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess? They act as "pushers" during rush hour. Actually shoving people in so that the train doors can close.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      > Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around. […] Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about. And that you don't make the other way around, was to note that others may see some of the things in our own cultures as way out of date while others are surprisingly futuristic, we wouldn't know because for us that's just the normal "now", we've grown with these things there or developing so them meshing together is normal
- bane 11y ago
  It's probably easiest to think of current Japan as being the highest culmination of mid-80s technology and thinking. The rest of the world moved to the next three major technological revolutions: personal computers, the internet and smart phones. Japan's entry into the PC market was timed in sync with the 80s boom economy, which meant every conglomerate on the islands turned it into a fractured, incompatible mess. Even imported standards, like the IBM PC standard, were turned into incompatible islands of technology like the FM-Towns. MSX was the big hope for a standard, but for various reasons failed to get to market in the U.S. (the biggest market) and died like everybody else did when IBM PCs came to market (notable exception Apple). This meant there was no real PC market in place for the internet to attach to. While everybody else everywhere in the world was getting PCs specifically to send email and surf the early web. Japan funneled the internet into impossibly limited flip phones, turning it into not much more than an AOL-like information portal that the carriers could have just provided themselves -- but also meant it took longer to become the kind of full-on cultural phenomenon it became elsewhere. Smart phones are, in many ways, a miniaturization and untethering of both previous technological waves and Japan, stuck using very limited internet on flip phones and the occasional PC didn't catch on to this trend. Thus the first wave of PCs caused a boom in the U.S., the second wave of the Internet caused a wave everywhere but Japan, and the third wave caused a boom in the U.S. (Apple again) and now caught up South Korea (which coincidentally imported the Internet and PCs as a single phenomenon during their later economic boom so they had the environment where smartphones made sense) and to some extent Taiwan. Japan missed all of this stuff and the catchup efforts never made it off the islands. Even in Japan, the top smartphones are iPhones and Japanese Internet sites look like late 90s design. Developing export channels for physical goods is almost hilariously expensive. If you haven't just been doing it, getting a new channel going is very hard -- and having few channels for export of PCs and smartphones and an already well developed and competitive global market meant that the incentive to export Japanese made PCs and Smartphones no longer existed (this combined with a general downswing in the Japanese economy making access to capital investment for export pushes more difficult). Japan also spent the 80s dictating how the rest of the world was supposed to do business with them, while other export driven economies were more pragmatic in their dealings with everybody else and so the kinds of relationship building everybody else does was foreign to aging Japanese businessmen. This all combines for the both the very inward looking domestic market only focus Japan's tech industry has taken over the last 10-20 years and the lack of general technological and cultural development clearly visible in Japan. It's not that the Japanese are stupid or not creative, just that fortune didn't favor them and their stuck waiting for better conditions to coincide with the next technological wave.
- markburns 11y ago
  I completely agree and an interesting way of putting it. Just to think of the counterpoint to this: I think my biggest takeaway from the USA was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. They have dirty streets, but then keep their garbage tidy when throwing it away?! On the one hand, they don't really have robots, on the other hand you can survive completely without cash by paying for absolutely anything by card. Even ordinary little restaurants have free wifi, but nowhere did I see a pre-order machine. They hadn't even heard of them, and we've had those since at least the 70's.
  - jackschultz 11y ago
    Oh absolutely! I think the main issue with the garbage is that there aren't alleys where you can have dumpsters and trucks that run through them. Doesn't mean it's odd to see trash bags on the sidewalk. Their culture of trash seems to go beyond cleanliness too actually. There are no public trash cans anywhere, not even in bathrooms (all blow dryers) and they expect people to take their trash with them. With the robots, I think it's more of an issue of deciding what type of robot is "right". Do we want to focus on robots that can walk and act like humans? Or those that can make ordering food easier? Cash wasn't difficult to deal with, but it's tough to argue that cards and magnets aren't the future. I don't want to come off as someone who says cash is dead in 20 years. It was really easy paying that way, and doesn't have the tracking aspect like the US has, whatever that's worth. But still seems like Japan is missing things.
    - darkmighty 11y ago
      The cash and reservation machines were definitively good examples because those things are simply obsolete. Paying through your phone or with a credit card (apart from tracking you mentioned) is easier and less expensive for the economy (more efficient) no matter how you put it, it's just changing a few bits on some accounts. The same goes for reservations: when you have your smartphone everywhere with you and could do it from anywhere, a whole machine dedicated to it is completely obsolete. Other differences definitively aren't so clear. The trash is a good example, but a more glaring difference is how little crime they have. Crime is almost non-existent and there are no firearms, this can make parts of the US and large parts of the word seem comparatively barbaric.
- jarek 11y ago
  > I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.
- scurvy 11y ago
  The smoking area thing isn't a shaming technique. Japan is (or at one point was) the only first world nation where smoking is not on the decline. Tokyo is pretty dense, so the smoking areas is a way to keep people from getting burned on the street. If you think about it, an adult holding a cigarette down low is eye-height for a toddler. Smoking in Japan is a very sedentary activity, too. You'll see it, but it's not very common for people to walk and smoke at the same time. http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g298184-i861-k6165919-About_smoking-Tokyo_Tokyo_Prefecture_Kanto.html http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g298184-i861-k6165919-A...
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    Smoking is very much on the decline in Japan. It's still much more common than in the West (eg. smoking rooms in hotels are still a thing), but it has vastly improved since 2000 or so.
- greggman 11y ago
  Smoking outdoors is bad because it's crowded and smokers end up scaring kids in the face etc.. In other words they're not looking at from the same perspective as westerners. It's not about smoke in the air.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  > I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. I get what you're trying to say, but that literally means the present day.
sliverstorm 11y ago
This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage. And to that same point, fax machines seem to make sense.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage. I'm reasonably confident you can drop it, because it doesn't make any sense and doesn't actually match the country.
  - hyperpallium 11y ago
    Please elaborate.
    - noblethrasher 11y ago
      Well, for one: QWERTY is not the only mode of input. I have a 23-Key chorded keyboard[1] that can produce all 101-keys of a standard U.S. keyboard. [1] http://twiddler.tekgear.com/ http://twiddler.tekgear.com/
- krapp 11y ago
  Aside from kanji, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. Their language is complex, but it also seems to have a lot of redundancy built in, even if romaji doesn't count as an unofficial extra Japanese alphabet by now. Quora has an illustration[0] of a keyboard with english and hiragana characters mapped, and conversion to kanji by software. It seems awkward, but not to the degree that it would stifle adoption considerably. Admittedly, this is a naive view on my part. [0]https://www.quora.com/How-do-computer-users-type-in-Japanese https://www.quora.com/How-do-computer-users-type-in-Japanese
rdtsc 11y ago
They are infatuated with hardware and appliances. That could be blueray players, toilets, robots, game consoles. Maybe it is a cultural thing, but that's how I see it. Thinking about it, how much software do you know that has been written in Japan (I can think of Ruby, games don't count as they fall under game console, think PC software), compared say to Western Europe or US. It would seem they are at the same level as any of those countries and there would an equal distribution of software written but that's not the case.
greggman 11y ago
I'm unaware of computers being high priced in Japan. Prices on Apple.com or Dell.com are +/- 2% difference. Haven't used a fax machine in Japan since about 2002. Cash ok, but cash = privacy which Japan values more than just about any other culture.
isolate 11y ago
> It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US. High-tech/lo-tech and expensive/cheap are different axes. Everyone in Japan was doing the whole text message thing 15 years ago, back when most of us were just coming to terms with email. The same can be said about GPS navigation.
- deciplex 11y ago
  On the other hand, 12 years ago MP3 players were commonplace just about everywhere, but in Japan Minidisc was still the big thing.
  - isolate 11y ago
    Good point, but then again ATRAC encoding >> MP3 encoding at typical bitrates back then.
    - golergka 11y ago
      But convenience is so much more imprortant than codec quality for mass market.
lhl 11y ago
The predilection for cash is more cultural than technological I think - they've had NFC payments w Suica cards for decades. I don't think their PCs are particularly backwards either - they have some ultrabooks that never make their way to the US that are pretty sexy. Component pricing is a bit more expensive than the US (about 30% even with Yen devaluation) but you can say the same for just about anywhere in the world (heck, I'm in TW right now and even the best pricing is at parity w US pricing, on average it's 20% more even though half the brands are HQ'd here). For a time last year due to the Yen devaluation, prices for Apple products was ~15% cheaper than stateside.

jackschultz 11y ago

I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. The streets were immaculately clean, but they put their bags of garbage right on the curb where everyone could see them blocking the way. We saw a demonstration of Asimo, the human-acting robot, which could hop on on leg at this point. And then we would go to get food and they only accept cash. There were "smoking only" areas on the streets (Shibuya for example), as a way to corral and even shame smokers. And yet most places accommodated indoor smoking. We could go to restaurants and pre-order from a vending machine and give the ticket to the chefs, but in those same shops, along with most coffee shops (even the western ones), they didn't have easy access wifi. Habits are difficult to change. Cultures must be even more difficult.

masklinn 11y ago
> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. I don't know that it's the right way to put it — after all mayhaps things are just as odd the other way around — but some things were definitely jarring, like the ubiquitous vending machines (cheap and with cold and hot drinks) next to houses with no central heating (heated room by room mostly with kerosene heaters) or the weird ubiquity of "busybody" jobs (e.g. any form of road encumbrance having one person on each side directing traffic, and we crossed a lot of roadworks).
- rangibaby 11y ago
  The busybody jobs are actually a social policy. At some point the government decided it was better to have full employment than idle hands, which is why Japan has such a low crime rate.
  - derefr 11y ago
    How much does that cost? Could the US afford to do that? Why aren't we talking about "the successful example of Japan's public stimulus in job creation" as an alternative to e.g. basic income?
    - Cyberdog 11y ago
      I guess it's only successful if you're one of the types that think that government debt doesn't matter.
- jackschultz 11y ago
  Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around. I definitely noticed the busybody jobs. Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess? Trash collectors on the streets sweeping leaves into their collections. People guarding semi-obstructed parking exits to make sure no accidents occur, no matter how easy it is for the drivers to see the sidewalk. Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about.
  - ansible 11y ago
    Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess? They act as "pushers" during rush hour. Actually shoving people in so that the train doors can close.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    > Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around. […] Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about. And that you don't make the other way around, was to note that others may see some of the things in our own cultures as way out of date while others are surprisingly futuristic, we wouldn't know because for us that's just the normal "now", we've grown with these things there or developing so them meshing together is normal
bane 11y ago
It's probably easiest to think of current Japan as being the highest culmination of mid-80s technology and thinking. The rest of the world moved to the next three major technological revolutions: personal computers, the internet and smart phones. Japan's entry into the PC market was timed in sync with the 80s boom economy, which meant every conglomerate on the islands turned it into a fractured, incompatible mess. Even imported standards, like the IBM PC standard, were turned into incompatible islands of technology like the FM-Towns. MSX was the big hope for a standard, but for various reasons failed to get to market in the U.S. (the biggest market) and died like everybody else did when IBM PCs came to market (notable exception Apple). This meant there was no real PC market in place for the internet to attach to. While everybody else everywhere in the world was getting PCs specifically to send email and surf the early web. Japan funneled the internet into impossibly limited flip phones, turning it into not much more than an AOL-like information portal that the carriers could have just provided themselves -- but also meant it took longer to become the kind of full-on cultural phenomenon it became elsewhere. Smart phones are, in many ways, a miniaturization and untethering of both previous technological waves and Japan, stuck using very limited internet on flip phones and the occasional PC didn't catch on to this trend. Thus the first wave of PCs caused a boom in the U.S., the second wave of the Internet caused a wave everywhere but Japan, and the third wave caused a boom in the U.S. (Apple again) and now caught up South Korea (which coincidentally imported the Internet and PCs as a single phenomenon during their later economic boom so they had the environment where smartphones made sense) and to some extent Taiwan. Japan missed all of this stuff and the catchup efforts never made it off the islands. Even in Japan, the top smartphones are iPhones and Japanese Internet sites look like late 90s design. Developing export channels for physical goods is almost hilariously expensive. If you haven't just been doing it, getting a new channel going is very hard -- and having few channels for export of PCs and smartphones and an already well developed and competitive global market meant that the incentive to export Japanese made PCs and Smartphones no longer existed (this combined with a general downswing in the Japanese economy making access to capital investment for export pushes more difficult). Japan also spent the 80s dictating how the rest of the world was supposed to do business with them, while other export driven economies were more pragmatic in their dealings with everybody else and so the kinds of relationship building everybody else does was foreign to aging Japanese businessmen. This all combines for the both the very inward looking domestic market only focus Japan's tech industry has taken over the last 10-20 years and the lack of general technological and cultural development clearly visible in Japan. It's not that the Japanese are stupid or not creative, just that fortune didn't favor them and their stuck waiting for better conditions to coincide with the next technological wave.
markburns 11y ago
I completely agree and an interesting way of putting it. Just to think of the counterpoint to this: I think my biggest takeaway from the USA was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. They have dirty streets, but then keep their garbage tidy when throwing it away?! On the one hand, they don't really have robots, on the other hand you can survive completely without cash by paying for absolutely anything by card. Even ordinary little restaurants have free wifi, but nowhere did I see a pre-order machine. They hadn't even heard of them, and we've had those since at least the 70's.
- jackschultz 11y ago
  Oh absolutely! I think the main issue with the garbage is that there aren't alleys where you can have dumpsters and trucks that run through them. Doesn't mean it's odd to see trash bags on the sidewalk. Their culture of trash seems to go beyond cleanliness too actually. There are no public trash cans anywhere, not even in bathrooms (all blow dryers) and they expect people to take their trash with them. With the robots, I think it's more of an issue of deciding what type of robot is "right". Do we want to focus on robots that can walk and act like humans? Or those that can make ordering food easier? Cash wasn't difficult to deal with, but it's tough to argue that cards and magnets aren't the future. I don't want to come off as someone who says cash is dead in 20 years. It was really easy paying that way, and doesn't have the tracking aspect like the US has, whatever that's worth. But still seems like Japan is missing things.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    The cash and reservation machines were definitively good examples because those things are simply obsolete. Paying through your phone or with a credit card (apart from tracking you mentioned) is easier and less expensive for the economy (more efficient) no matter how you put it, it's just changing a few bits on some accounts. The same goes for reservations: when you have your smartphone everywhere with you and could do it from anywhere, a whole machine dedicated to it is completely obsolete. Other differences definitively aren't so clear. The trash is a good example, but a more glaring difference is how little crime they have. Crime is almost non-existent and there are no firearms, this can make parts of the US and large parts of the word seem comparatively barbaric.
jarek 11y ago
> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.
scurvy 11y ago
The smoking area thing isn't a shaming technique. Japan is (or at one point was) the only first world nation where smoking is not on the decline. Tokyo is pretty dense, so the smoking areas is a way to keep people from getting burned on the street. If you think about it, an adult holding a cigarette down low is eye-height for a toddler. Smoking in Japan is a very sedentary activity, too. You'll see it, but it's not very common for people to walk and smoke at the same time. http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g298184-i861-k6165919-About_smoking-Tokyo_Tokyo_Prefecture_Kanto.html http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g298184-i861-k6165919-A...
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Smoking is very much on the decline in Japan. It's still much more common than in the West (eg. smoking rooms in hotels are still a thing), but it has vastly improved since 2000 or so.
greggman 11y ago
Smoking outdoors is bad because it's crowded and smokers end up scaring kids in the face etc.. In other words they're not looking at from the same perspective as westerners. It's not about smoke in the air.
wodenokoto 11y ago
> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind. I get what you're trying to say, but that literally means the present day.

sliverstorm 11y ago

This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage. And to that same point, fax machines seem to make sense.

masklinn 11y ago
> This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage. I'm reasonably confident you can drop it, because it doesn't make any sense and doesn't actually match the country.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  Please elaborate.
  - noblethrasher 11y ago
    Well, for one: QWERTY is not the only mode of input. I have a 23-Key chorded keyboard[1] that can produce all 101-keys of a standard U.S. keyboard. [1] http://twiddler.tekgear.com/ http://twiddler.tekgear.com/
krapp 11y ago
Aside from kanji, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. Their language is complex, but it also seems to have a lot of redundancy built in, even if romaji doesn't count as an unofficial extra Japanese alphabet by now. Quora has an illustration[0] of a keyboard with english and hiragana characters mapped, and conversion to kanji by software. It seems awkward, but not to the degree that it would stifle adoption considerably. Admittedly, this is a naive view on my part. [0]https://www.quora.com/How-do-computer-users-type-in-Japanese https://www.quora.com/How-do-computer-users-type-in-Japanese

rdtsc 11y ago

They are infatuated with hardware and appliances. That could be blueray players, toilets, robots, game consoles. Maybe it is a cultural thing, but that's how I see it. Thinking about it, how much software do you know that has been written in Japan (I can think of Ruby, games don't count as they fall under game console, think PC software), compared say to Western Europe or US. It would seem they are at the same level as any of those countries and there would an equal distribution of software written but that's not the case.

greggman 11y ago

I'm unaware of computers being high priced in Japan. Prices on Apple.com or Dell.com are +/- 2% difference. Haven't used a fax machine in Japan since about 2002. Cash ok, but cash = privacy which Japan values more than just about any other culture.

isolate 11y ago

> It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US. High-tech/lo-tech and expensive/cheap are different axes. Everyone in Japan was doing the whole text message thing 15 years ago, back when most of us were just coming to terms with email. The same can be said about GPS navigation.

deciplex 11y ago
On the other hand, 12 years ago MP3 players were commonplace just about everywhere, but in Japan Minidisc was still the big thing.
- isolate 11y ago
  Good point, but then again ATRAC encoding >> MP3 encoding at typical bitrates back then.
  - golergka 11y ago
    But convenience is so much more imprortant than codec quality for mass market.

lhl 11y ago

The predilection for cash is more cultural than technological I think - they've had NFC payments w Suica cards for decades. I don't think their PCs are particularly backwards either - they have some ultrabooks that never make their way to the US that are pretty sexy. Component pricing is a bit more expensive than the US (about 30% even with Yen devaluation) but you can say the same for just about anywhere in the world (heck, I'm in TW right now and even the best pricing is at parity w US pricing, on average it's 20% more even though half the brands are HQ'd here). For a time last year due to the Yen devaluation, prices for Apple products was ~15% cheaper than stateside.