>Also, owing to this being computer hardware sitting right next to food, the things are almost always grimey. Proper menus at least are ostensibly cleaned betwe

>Also, owing to this being computer hardware sitting right next to food, the things are almost always grimey. Proper menus at least are ostensibly cleaned between customers. This isn't a problem specific to Japan, though. This is Japan: if any place cleans things reliably, it's here. If you think most American restaurants clean menus between customers, I have a bridge to sell you. Many don't even bother cleaning the table, in my experience, and then get mad if you point out the table is dirty. >it's just faster to call a waiter over. American waiters absolutely hate this, but they still expect a huge "tip". But yeah, in Japan it's perfectly acceptable and normal. >Yeah, they have that since at least the 90s or something. Nothing new. It's not new in Japan, but the rest of the world still hasn't heard about them apparently (or just doesn't care about hygiene), so it might as well be new. >They're great, but the world is starting to move ahead of them with everything moving to smartphone NFC and in a way that is carrier and brand and network agnostic. I don't see that at all in the US. Transit systems there all have their own separate cards that haven't changed in 20 years. > If it wasn't obvious from the toilets, Japan is great at hardware engineering. The problem is this doesn't translate to software engineering and high tech in general. There's more to "high tech" than just software and microservices or whatever. Most software is pretty useless without hardware to run it on. Sure, if you're just focusing on stuff that's only online, you'll just use commodity HW and Japan has nothing much to offer here, but most of us have a little more to our lives than just sitting in front of a PC and surfing the internet. >LINE is a perfect example of Japan's irrelevancy in software. Why? Because LINE is a South Korean product. Sure, but that's irrelevant. What's important is what's actually used, which is what my whole post is about: what technology is actually used day-to-day by average people in Japan? Japan: LINE. US: SMS. (And it's just US/Canada that are dinosaurs here; all other countries use some kind of modern chat app.) >Bad news for the maglev since that's being held up in political power struggles, though. I haven't seen anything concrete here, just the one thing about Shizuoka prefecture (I think) complaining. >They've become such a mundane commodity thanks in no small part to South Korean and Chinese mass manufacturing that Japan is hardly relevant there anymore. They're relevant in Japan, where they're fairly common (and made by Japanese manufacturers mostly). Back in the US, they're almost completely unheard of.