Japan is often thought of as the country of cutting edge, futuristic technology, but that might not always be true. I recently read that lots of people in Japan still use fax machines and a lot of Japanese companies still use Geocities for web design.
Can anyone who’s been to Japan or knows more about Japanese culture say if this is true or not? And if it’s true, why does Japan use outdated technology?
The thing I remembered that that everyone uses cash for everything. Nobody uses a bank card at a store.
Credit/debit card usage is getting more common. During my most recent trip (last fall) we used cash for little things like snacks at Lawson’s, but for most of our meals and other shopping, we used a credit card. Oddly, you don’t swipe/insert your own credit card like you do here in the US: you hand it to the clerk, and they do it for you, even though the keypad and card slot are facing you.
There is now a smartphone app for purchasing Shinkansen tickets. So instead of standing in line at the ticket counter, you can use the app at your convenience to reserve specific seats. Shortly before boarding the train, you visit an automated ticketing machine, insert your credit card (the same one you used to buy the tickets in the app), and type your password, and it prints out your tickets.
I think internet commerce is at least partly responsible for the rise in popularity of credit/debit cards in Japan, and now brick-and-mortar merchants are being forced to come around on the issue.
Smartphones themselves are finding increased usage for payments as well, including for access to trains; hold your phone to the scanner at the turnstile, and you walk on through without breaking your stride.
Fax machines were more widespread in Japan than it ever was in the US. According to this article, by year 2002, over 50% of households had fax machines. 71% had personal computers and 87% had mobile phones, but nevertheless, the fax machine became one of the standard tools of communication, not just for businesses but for personal use as well. So there was a lot of momentum to keep them in use.
Also, there are a lot more elderly people in Japan than in the US (median age of the US population is 38, Japan is 47). That means a lot of people who learned to use fax machines, but never moved on to e-mail.
As for cash being common - there is less security concern about carrying a lot of cash. I remember seeing an elderly man on a Tokyo subway take out an envelope, count ten 10,000 yen bills (~$100 each) and put it back. I don’t think anyone would feel safe carrying that much cash in the US or Europe, let alone show it openly on a subway.
I am sick and tired of people sneering at fax machines and claiming that they’re outdated technology. You personally may be smart; I don’t know. I’ve never met you. But you hold some mighty ignorant opinions.
On average, 90% of my purchases in the past 12 months were “cashless”. There are still quite a shops and eateries that are exclusively cash these days. But I use Google Pay on mobile and my Japanese credit card most of the time.
I haven’t been in the country in, probably, a decade.
Japan likes gimmicky things. They are less fond of practical things. They’ll invent a toilet that sings to you but they won’t use a clothes dryer, let alone improve upon it.
A possible reason for this is that the country has a built-in low-cost underclass, in the form of women. Banks, for example, use women to file documents and look up documents and if you computerize all of that…what will all the women do? Do you give them real jobs? It would massively disrupt the social system. Or if you cut them out of the system entirely, then you don’t have all the pretty girls around the office any more.
Granted, ideally, the country is less sexist these days and is moving away from that style of thinking. They already seemed to be getting better when I left, but I’m not sure where things are at now.
The TV show, Shomuni, is a good watch by the way, for anyone interested in a funny The Office style show.
They are as outdated as CD’s, floppies, and women wearing only dresses.
Why? It’s true. I literally cannot remember the last time I used a fax machine. If I’ve got a hardcopy of a document that I want to send to someone, I scan it and attach the electronic version to an email.
The fax machine in the office where I work has been gathering dust for years now.
The traditional attitude in Japan is that women aren’t supposed to work, at least not once they get married. Japan still thinks that way: labor shortages are being solved by importing foreign workers. Walk into a conbini these days, and the odds are good that the person behind the register barely speaks Japanese.
Japan tech research is quite good. Better in some research areas than others, but at least in the world top five, I guess.
But businesses are slow to change. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. If fax is broke, show me why.
Does a technology become “outdated” as soon as a better alternative becomes available? Is it “outdated” even when 40% of households still use it? Are land lines “outdated” in the US?
It wastes paper, on both ends of the exchange.
It’s an extra machine to purchase - or an extra capability to incorporate into an existing machine (at an extra cost).
If a new technology is truly better, the old technology can only persist because of inertia and cultural reasons. Example, I pretty much only listen to MP3 music files, but I confess to maintaining and growing a large collection of CDs, which I can only justify for emotional reasons. I use them as the source discs for the MP3s; I can’t remember the last time I listened to music directly from a CD. Still, I don’t know if I’ll ever want to get rid of my CD collection.
Poking around the internet, it seems Japan has its own reasons for clinging to fax machines long after other nations have abandoned them.
Do you own a fax machine company or something?
It’s outdated the same way 8 tracks are outdated.
I would bet that you aren’t in the medical field. The vast majority of doctor’s offices, nursing homes, clinics, hospitals, etc. all use fax machines on a daily basis.
ETA. At least those in the United States.
That in no way makes them not outdated.
Moderator Warning
Attack the post, not the poster. You have a valid point here. You can easily make it without attacking the poster.
Since this is in effect calling someone ignorant, this is an official warning for a personal attack/personal insults outside of the Pit.
In what way? They aren’t being used due to nostalgia. They aren’t still in use due to all these facilities refusing to upgrade to a more modern technology. They are still used because the other alternatives don’t provide the required functions that the fax machines do. If they are still used because they are the only option available, to me that means they are not outdated.
When Mrs. ToKnow lived in Japan for a while in the 90s, one of the things she noticed was that every time a new cell phone model came out (almost monthly to hear her tell it today), you could buy the previous model for (IIRC) either 1 Yen or 1 dollar. Either way, ridiculously cheap.
As I understand it, the preference is because fax-to-fax communications is point-to-point, unlike email.
:dubious: What functionality is a fax machine uniquely able to provide?