> 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 cu

> 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everywhere else, even if everyone finds a thing very useful (or, in the case of fax per the article, hopelessly outdated), the Japanese will reject it without consideration, or cling to it beyond the point of reason, with no justification aside from, well, they're Japanese so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.