Japanese don’t hate apple. The apple store here in Osaka is jam packed everytime I walk past, iPhones are common and the reaction of Japanese friends when they see my 17 MacBook Pro is pretty much always “cool laptop”. Apple is perceived as a desirable luxury brand by every Japanese I’ve met.
I also thought that the iPhone wouldn’t be popular in Japan and flip phones would be everywhere, but when I went to Tokyo it seemed everyone had an iPhone and there were plenty of ads for Macs in department/tech stores.
Blah blah blah stop talking you only went on vacation there. But it was awesome!
Yes, and I was pointing this out for people who seemed to think that Cracked has factual information.
Cracked is not The Onion. It is written in a humorous and entertaining style, but a large portion of its articles are about factual matters.
But you do recognize that no one is fact checking and they’re passing along silliness if not stupidity?
No.5 must have been a pun, i.e. wordplay: Fax = ファックス ＝Fucks = “Some sort of … sex toy?”
I doubt there’s a business in Japan with more than twenty employees that doesn’t have a fax machine.
But “fax” in Japanese sounds a lot like “Fucks” in English. I wonder if that’s what threw him off. 
The Japanese Mac vs PC ads are adorable.
(Sidenote: Is the PC guy one of the guys from Ramenzu?)
ETA: Yes, it helps to read the video description.
Poor example. That movie was chock full of “Japanese” who were Japanese-American and judging from their accents weren’t fully fluent. The whole movie was about as Japanese as a California Roll.
Depending on the place, it is. I didn’t have an air conditioner for the first seven years and four apartments that I lived in. In the first two places, I didn’t have hot running water. There was a boiler for the tub that would take about 20 minutes to heat a bath. I had no heater for the kitchen tap until I bought one at the first place. The second had a kitchen tap heater, at least. There was also no insulation in those places. About 15 minutes after the heater went off, the inside of the house was about as cold as the outside. I bought a very good sleeping bag to sleep in and during the winter regularly woke up with frost from my breath frozen on the outside of the bag.
Granted, these were places in the “country”, or about as country as anything in Japan gets. Seventy-thousand people living asshole to elbow with the glimpse of an occasional field along the side of the road is not my idea of “country”, but it is by Japanese standards. Even in the Tokyo area where I live now, there are apartments and “mansion” that don’t have AC units installed. You can buy your own, but the housing regulations mean that you’ll have a big-assed plastic hose shoved through your wall and stuck in place with putty as an installation. There’s no such thing as unobtrusive heating and cooling, no central anything, and no provisions in the planning for even the multi-million dollar-equivalent high rise buildings for such things. I know, because my father in law has an apartment near the Haneda airport that probably cost a few million, and that’s the setup there, just like the shitty little apartment in the ass-end of nowhere I had when I first came here.
The Cracked article isn’t even exaggerating much. If you lived in Tokyo from the beginning, you might not have been quite as shocked, but the experience of the author was pretty close to mine for the first several years. There wasn’t a 24 hour ATM available anywhere near me until around 2006, and none of them worked with my bank until at least a year or more later. I got caught my first Golden Week with about ¥4,000 to last nearly a week, and was paranoid about it happening again for years after. Bank ATMs are still limited in hours, and there are only a handful of convenience stores that have the universal units, even in Tokyo.
Hey, at least I’ve always had a flush toilet. I know more than one person for whom that was not true, including one friend in an “older” house (late 60s or early 70s vintage) in a Tokyo suburb who was pleased as punch when she finally got a connection to the municipal sewer…in 2004.
So anyway, as far as the OP goes: They don’t, really. Softbank, the carrier that Apple partnered with for the release of the iPhone 3G in Japan (the first one available here) saw an enormous increase in profitability and subscriber base in the years following. For the iPhone 5 release the Apple store in Ginza had a line stretching down the street for a couple of blocks.
It is true that iPhone penetration isn’t as extensive here because of some confounding factors, like features that are very much Japan-only: deco-kara (decorative characters) or Suica integration (an IC chip payment network) that require hardware and protocols that are only available in Japan. The change from feature phones to smart phones caught every single Japanese company flat-footed. Right now, besides the iPhone, the best selling line of smart phones is the Korean-made Samsung Galaxy series. The Japanese handset makers apparently don’t have a clue as to how to make a smartphone.
As far as computers, well, Apple’s total market share has always been lower than the overall PC market. They have a much higher proportional share of the notebook market, and actually ship more computers of any form factor than any single vendor, but their slice of the total pie is relatively small.
In Japan, if you’re doing something different from other people, you’d better be prepared to do it by yourself, because even more than in other cultures, people here like to do what everyone else is doing. That means comments about how unusual it is to use Apple computers, how difficult it is for you to be doing something different, and of course, no tech support.
I asked for a password and login for the wireless network at one of my old offices, and was given the teeth-sucking answer that since I had a Mac, I probably couldn’t use the network. Uh, I just need the login information. I know how to do the configuration. Took me 20 minutes to convince them that I could connect IF I HAD THE FUCKING INFO. Only took me 20 seconds to connect after they relented.
Everything in my office is very PC-oriented. The drivers for the Canon printer haven’t been updated for anything newer than Tiger, which is 4 point releases back, and so is completely incompatible with Mountain Lion. The NEC printer has — as far as I know — no OS X drivers at all available. The Kyocera one doesn’t work either, and the setup disk has a Windows (XP!) -only wizard. The situation here is kind of like 10 years ago in the US, when IT departments had a stranglehold on the workplace and didn’t want anything they were unfamiliar with around. The change from centralized control to the looser “bring your own if you want to” attitude hasn’t happened here yet, and it may never happen.
Individual Japanese might love Apple’s stuff, but the vast majority of them are stuck on official work laptops, often running proprietary Windows-only (if not DOS) software, with an IT infrastructure that is usually non-standard and obsolete so that it’s difficult or impossible to use even standard networking protocols to transfer files or access networked printers and other hardware if you’re not running the specially tweaked official machines.
It’s a humor site. It’s like The Daily Show; sure, it uses factual things to make jokes about and you might even learn something but it’s primary obligation is entertainment, not education.
Viewers of The Daily Show understand what statements made on the show are factual and what statements on the show are made up or otherwise non-factual.
The obligation of any source of information that is presenting it in a format that looks like it is meant to be factual has obligations other than just being entertaining.
For example, here are some of the articles on the front page of Cracked right now –
“4 Artist Careers That Prove You Can Come Back from Anything” – This is an article about the careers of Robert Downey Jr., Neil Young, Ben Affleck, and Soundgarden. The very presentation of this article implies a certain degree of factuality, such as – These artists actually exist, that they actually did participate in the creative works mentioned in the article, etc. There is, obviously, a good deal of opinion being presented, as well as characterization and humor, but there is some baseline expectation of factuality.
“The 5 Most Baffling Genres of Romance Novel” – Again, Cracked should be held accountable to the extent that the novels mentioned in this article actually do exist.
“5 Seemingly Harmful Things That Make You Live Longer” – This is essentially science reportage, and should be held to the same standard. The article cites to studies by entities such as the Centers for Disease Control. I would expect that this stuff isn’t just made up, even though it appears on a humor website.
“3 Bizarre Ways Animals Have Learned to Speak Like Humans” – This is straight-up journalism and should be held to the same standard. It had better not be made up.
And many, many articles on Cracked are popular science reporting, not entirely unlike the kind of thing that Stephen Jay Gould or Marvin Harris would have done, in a slightly more snarky style:
“6 Mind-Blowing Ways Poop Created the Modern World”
“6 Animals Humanity Accidentally Made Way Scarier”
“10 Famous Unsolved Mysteries Easily Explained by Science”
“6 Animals That Can Get You High”
So, yeah, I expect some degree of care in presenting what looks like factual information from Cracked, and also from The Daily Show – just because some of the material they present is obviously made-up for the purposes of parody and satire doesn’t mean that they get a free pass on information that otherwise looks like it’s meant to be factual.
I actually wasn’t anywhere near Tokyo; I lived in Yamaguchi prefecture, in a city with a population of about 100,000.
While I’d say all the author’s complaints are based in reality, they seem exaggerated to me.