I wonder if the Hanko has something to do with it as well. A hanko is a small personal seal that you use to sign documents, you can't hanko an email and although you could print the email up, it's not quite the same experience and that physicality is not implicit like it is in the fax process. E-signatures and the like haven't taken off there, and having to go to various institutions to hanko the paperwork in the flesh is still part of a lot of processes.
At the very least, the hanko is another example of holding on to old processes for reasons other than efficiency and effectiveness.
FWIW the government announced they are trying to ween Japan off the hanko. It became abundantly clear during lockdown, that requiring people to go to various government agencies to get official stamped documents to do work, sign contracts, etc, and to have to pass documents around that require hanko is something that has to be changed if Japan wants to head into the future.
I work for one of the big Japanese banks in the US. Up until covid, whenever we had to get documents approved by Tokyo, we had to get it stamped, then overnight the physical paper to Japan for management to review and stamp it. Depending on the situation/document, they'd overnight the paper back to the US.
Only after covid did the bank start implementing electronic signatures.
It is incredible how wasteful the corporate and bureaucratic world is, all the while individual consumers are exhorted to give up random things in the name of doing good for the environment. "Carbon footprint" my @ss.
What is interesting is that I've never heard of hanko until today. It seems like it's usage is widespread, everybody carries one in case they need to sign something official. It's surprising how I never heard of or seen these seals ever.
A big reason is of course the possibility of using arbitrarily complex letters or symbols, thus allowing Kanji (and Hanzi) to be used.
I'm reading a book right now on the difficulty that Hanzi brought to the developing china of the early 20th century [1]. The difficulties are all mostly predictable - cultural attachment, the fragmentation of languages and dialects, transliteration of tonal variants, finding a large enough keyboard etc.
But there are some interesting things I didn't know, for example that there were attempts to decompose symbols into radicals that could be combined.
Crests, coats of arms, flags... these things kinda-sorta died out in America. (Indeed: people came to America to escape the Nobility's culture from Europe). But Japan has a lot of families with "samurai" lineage, the old Nobles from 500 years ago... as well as a connection to their families crests, emblems, flags, etc. etc.
Culturally, its important to at least enough of them, to keep those traditions alive. Fax works for that. Email doesn't seem to quite do the family seal/mon justice.
After all, if you've got this stamp that's been in the family for the past 300 years, you're gonna want to keep using it for tradition's sake. (Maybe not the actual 300-year-old family relic, but replications of it on modern rubber).
You might actually be thinking of hankos, which are widely used in every-day paperwork, and they are usually a personal seal rather than a family seal. I don't think they're high culture, as almost everyone has one and they're used for day-to-day document signing of many types of documents, like opening a bank account or filing taxes and so on.
They're also part of some important business practices. One such practice called nemawashi, which is a "peer consensus" required for big decisions in some companies. A document outlining the change or project you want to undertake circulates to all peers or superiors it would reasonably affect, and they must all sign with their hanko in order for the process to be accepted.
Although there are some high-culture elements to them, such as having a bigger hanko if you're in a higher position in the company, some etiquette around hanko placement on the page depending on your rank in the company. There is also a tradition of giving a fancier hanko as a coming of age gift, those used to be of ivory (and still can be, Ivory in Japan is a fairly fascinating topic in itself).
You mean e-signatures? Which is what I use in my office whenever we sign documents around here?
I'm sure Japan knows about e-signatures. The problem is that of "culture" perhaps? I'm not entirely convinced that this stamp-thing is a bad thing for Japanese culture, or that this is an issue that needs "fixing".
-------
But "if it does need fixing" (and again, I don't think I agree with that mindset...), e-signatures are readily available and easily done in Adobe-PDF readers, backed up by public/private key infrastructure given out by your company's smartcard system (or whatever).
A number of government regulations still require hankos, which is one of the reasons e-signatures aren't more heavily used. The government has been aiming for digitalization, and part of that is eliminating regulations that require hankos, so e-signatures have been becoming more usable lately.
Hanko culture, however, is harder to kill off. Part of that is things like more senior employees having larger hankos, needing to tilt your hanko signature to "bow" to your managers, etc. Japanese E-signature platforms generally have seals, and offer features to change the size of the seal, and to rotate it, to support the cultural aspects of hanko culture.
Surely everyone can type Kanji now though? I could see that being an issue adopting to typewriters from handwriting, but now I assume those issues have been fixed. There's not many symbols you can't represent in Unicode and people aren't making up new symbols commonly.
Like, these faxes are still typed and printed first, right? People aren't just handwriting everything. About the only advantage of faxes in such a situation is the ability to personally sign/stamp something easier.
I used to work for a company doing Japanese handwriting recognition, and we would sometimes get request "can you support kanjis not in unicode" and "lost" contracts because we could not. This is especially the case for rare Kanji for family names, etc. I still have no idea how those customers actually handle those kanjis in their systems, must be fun.
Ummm.... China/Japan was making up new symbols constantly. Which is why UTF-16 failed. We Westerners have small alphabets and less of the image/iconography culture than the Eastern world.
I can absolutely see this "iconography" culture in China/Japan being a major reason for fax machines.
To be pedantic, what failed was UCS-2, the enconding formerly known as just 'Unicode'. UTF-16 was introduced with version 2.0 of the standard and can encode all codepoints thanks to the surrogate pair mechanism.
I'd expect print to standardize on a subset originating in the days of physical type and manual setting, when every character removed from the printing set would ameliorate very real costs at just about every stage of production.
In my younger days I started a project to create Han characters from radicals in Metafont. It was an ambitious project which, sadly, was beyond my skills. A smaller-scale idea, assembling Hangul from individual letters was more feasible, but the realities of school and work were enough to keep any of this from getting beyond initial demonstration coding. In a parallel universe, this was my senior project in undergrad and was finished in 1990. Some of my parallel universes are really amazing places.
Japan is both the most advanced and the most backwards when it comes to technology it seems. You've got incredible rail systems and smart payments. Then you have ATMs and banks that turn off at night or around new year. Documents that must be stamped. Did you see how during the pandemic that was a nightmare where the stamp was only in the office in a lock box? Fax machines, paper, single use plastic on everything, etc.
It's like the country is trying to move forward, but still do things the old way because of culture.
What's wrong with the toilets?! The Germans put a useless poop shelf in theirs, but are otherwise identical, and the Japanese make you squat over a porcelain trough. Or are you referring to fancy electronic Japanese bidets? Have those taken over "the trough" so thoroughly?
When your hands are dirty do you just wipe them with a dry towel or do you wash them? Why would you just wipe the shit off your ass with dry paper instead of wash it?
Note: If I understand correctly, most muslim people wash instead of wipe (happy to be corrected)
It's funny to me. For example doctors, when told they needed to wash their hands before surgery all freaked out, thought it was bullshit, complained, thought people were over thinking etc...
Now we have washing your ass instead of just wiping it. To those used to washing, just wiping seems barbaric, the same as doctors not washing their hands.
Similarly walking down streets and parks with shit and grease and oil and then tracking that shit into your house instead of taking off your shoes at the door. It's like that saying "Were you raised in a barn". I want to say it every time I see someone track outside shit through their house.
Washing your hands implies rubbing them together under running water. Definitely not just letting water run over them. So you're going to need some friction to get the area clean. You could just wet some TP and wipe with that, to me that's just as hygienic as a bidet with no wiping, but what do I know.
The author takes a very narrow claim— that fax machines are popular in Japan— and expands it into a weak orientalist takedown of Japan’s objectively advanced society. They even go so far as to acknowledge infrastructure masterworks like Bullet trains only to discount them because of a (still globally used!) piece of office hardware that has fallen out of favor in the US tech sector. Whatever, dude…
And...fax machines are heavily used in the medical and legal professions in the US. I have a doctor's card on my desk right now that has a fax number on it, because medical records and forms often need to be faxed. Anyone who's ever had to file a worker's comp or long term disability sort of deal knows the fun of playing fax tag between the company their employer contracts that to and the doctor's office.
That's not even touching on the cult of the magic signature. A piece of paper is suddenly special because someone scribbled something that looks roughly like their name on it, even though that doesn't prove anything.
I think the use of faxes is related to the Japanese obsession with personal business relationships. You can't open a bank account without an introduction to the bank manager. You can't rent a cellphone without having a man in a suit hand-deliver it to you, show you how it works, and remind you that it needs to be returned promptly. Faxes are more personal than e-mail; you know that the fax you receive is the result of somebody hand-feeding a piece of paper that they physically signed into a machine, and it went over physical wires connected to a telephone. There's also the Japanese spiritual tradition that every object has a spirit; it's hard to feel spiritually connected to software.
Related is the importance of the exchange of business cards. In Australia if you gave me a business card, it's entirely pragmatic, it's for me to call you later. I pocket it and never think about it again.
In Japan you often see an intentionality in the inspection of the business card, as if to suggest that you appreciate this very important step in our upcoming business relationship, and I am very impressed by your card and it's credentials.
In reading through the comments, I wonder which generalizations can be drawn about the US habit of paying by cheque. This paper slip that is covering just .1% of all cashless transactions in Germany these days.
I'm amazed at Americans shaking their heads about using fax machines, while sitting over their monthly cheques for rent, etc.
On the other hand, there was a legal obligation for fax use for signature transactions in Germany until legislation said a scanned pdf is equivalent. And fax is still considered privacy conserving, while email is not, so in medical contexts they wind send you a PDF (could be eavesdropped), but they will send you a fax with e g. your lab report.
American check use has been dwindling for decades. It was the elephant in the room when I worked for a transaction risk management firm based on checks in the mid-90s, even. Back then, even as an employee of TeleCheck, the ONLY time I used a paper check at point of sale was my dry cleaner (because she didn't take credit cards and I rarely had much cash only).
Mailed checks -- rent, utilities, etc -- have held on longer, but it's probably been 10 years since I even OWNED checks. My wife has some, because until recently it was the most convenient way to pay her student loans, so if for some reason we needed a check we'd just have her deal with it.
I'm almost 52, and our approach here is pretty normal. All our utilities are paid online. I guess taxes are the only thing we still need a check for.
So, yeah, we shake our heads a fax machines, and the people doing so are also shaking their heads at checks, too.
The notion that fax is somehow safer or more secure than email is utterly laughable, and has been for 20 years. A huge chunk of corporate fax numbers are just gateways to a system that routes a PDF to email. It's literally the same thing. And if it's not, fax is WORSE since it relies on the physical security of the fax machine.
Good I'm glad to hear that cheques are used less now.
Regarding security, the logic/claim is that the long distance transport between the organizations is "safe" via phone. The in-house processing on the recipients last mile is their security problem. And the pdf to fax in-house infrastructure "is safe, IT said".
That public internet, dark and sinister, in between the two, is not to be trusted, though. That's the legislatures position over here.
Well, it depends, doesn't it? If you have plain old phone service on either end, that's not the same network -- which is possibly the case with small, older companies and individuals. Not everything is VOIP.
I've been led to believe that many telecoms use voip on the backend and your pots phone call is actually going over the internet. I don't know how much of that is true.
It's definitely being routed over fibers, sure, but while faxes in theory can routed over the internet (T.38, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38, which what Google Fiber is using https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/6377387), in most POTS cases it's still done outside internet because of latency and compatibility concerns (unlike VoIP that human perception can mask small jitters), it's just transformed into light and back for long-distance calls (or if the machine at the end uses EPON T.38).
> I'm amazed at Americans shaking their heads about using fax machines, while sitting over their monthly cheques for rent, etc.
Many Americans no longer pay for their rent by check. Heck, I had to go to the bank last year when somebody wanted me to pay by check...because I hadn't used one for a few years. Many of us don't use cash either...its fun just carrying a phone around these days.
> And fax is still considered privacy conserving, while email is not, so in medical contexts they wind send you a PDF (could be eavesdropped), but they will send you a fax with e g. your lab report.
You just don't login to something like Mychart and see the result?
Point being: no Germans are sitting over cheques, for anything. They virtually don't exist any more for private persons. The last cheque I've got was from an insurance, a few years back, and it could only be cashed into a checkings account, not cashed out.
I get your MyChart hint. Anyhow, the "digital health file" prototypes were hacked again and again and it's been delayed several times to get to tight privacy.
I lived in Switzerland before so I know kind of how it works: the blue/pink slips for paying things are really convenient, you just don't need checks. And I lived in China for 9 years where checks don't exist either (because the trust system isn't really in place, so they went straight to QR-based mobile payments). In the USA, a lot of people don't use checks anymore for practical purposes (though there are some hold outs, and you might need to write a check once or twice every 5 years). Checks and cash are just things that you don't need to use anymore. I can't wait until I don't have to carry my credit card in my phone anymore (I already don't have to pull it out more than a couple of times a week).
> Anyhow, the "digital health file" prototypes were hacked again and again and it's been delayed several times to get to tight privacy.
That sounds like Germany, they are conservative like that, and they probably aren't wrong.
Faxes aren't bad though, there are plenty of fax2email gateways that make them as convenient as receiving email.
In my experience (now perhaps ten or more years outdated), fax is still legally preferable because of the time stamping available to both sender and receiver, giving fax a proof of point-to-point transmission and receipt email doesn't provide.
Also, back then (2010 or so) my employer dealt with a lot of remote sites (logging camps and lumber yard offices) that had POTS but no Internet. That has probably changed a lot.
Use of checks is rapidly dying in the US. My credit card gives 1-3% cashback for purchases, I use it for everything possible and pay the bill in full each month, so no interest.
As late as 2015
some common entities would not reliably accept credit cards (government, very small shops), but that’s almost completely gone now and COVID has pushed most of the remaining holdouts to accept digital payments.
Any situation or credit card doesn’t work such as my mortgage, I use a bank transfer or plain old cash.
My experience in Japan is they are very bureaucratic. It's actually amazing they have progressed this much. They are also very patient, people use cash and they will count the coins in their own pace in a long line grocery cashier and you won't see any one complain.
Well yeah, sometimes some technologies take a greater hold in some countries, and persist long after they have disappeared in other countries. Such as the Minitel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel) in France. Or Teletext (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext) in many European countries. But I don't think we should read too much into such technological "relics"...
I think Teletext is underrated. I much prefer the Swedish television's news on teletext over their news web site.
When there can be only 40×25 characters in a page, each article has to be concise and to the point to be able to fit. Indices are easier to survey. No distracting images or videos.
Browsing used to be slow on older TV sets, but more modern sets cache all pages.
On well laid out teletext channels, the most convenient way to browse is using the +/- buttons.
The reason why there is an impression that Japan is more technically advanced is due to the high quality electronics that used to be produced in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. If I bought a Panasonic, Sony or similar people knew it would work well and you wasn't wasting your money.
It isn't some sort of exoticism of the East. They were making high quality products that worked very well. For many people my age, the Japanese seemed to be ahead technologically because all the cool consumer electronics, game consoles etc were coming from their when I was a child.
It's funny. The group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing. It's only the American companies that do. And yet if you ask people on the street, which products have the best reputation for quality, they will tell you the Japanese products.
Now, why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award, or who won the Baldrige Award. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services.
One can spend enormous amounts of money on quality. One can win every quality award there is. And yet if your products don't live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. So, where we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department. We need to get back to the basics and go improve our products and services.
Also because of a tendency for them to release their best products as Japan-only. "Galapagos phones" are a good example. When I visited in 2009, they were still much more capable devices than the then-available iPhone. But by being unavailable outside Japan, they had no hope of winning global market share.
It's hard to describe; there were so many of them and I can't find much if anything left on the English internet that describes them. They were very diverse; some would have large screens that unfold or rotate after flipping open to create a widescreen-on-a-keyboard-stick, for example. They were high enough resolution to support two simultaneous side-by-side channels of streaming video, which people would watch on the train. Sounds normal today but it was bizarre to see back then.
The manufacturers thought the domestic market was big enough for them. In a way that protected foreign markets and allowed less mature smartphones to develop internationally until they were good enough and "cool" enough to take over Japan too. Oops.
I see this happen again and again, too, not only with phones.
Not only was their stuff cool, but it was also more reliable. In that time period, we had to deal with the "capacitor plague" infesting every manufacturer with low-grade components if they didn't keep a close eye on their supply chain or willingly pay extra for the good stuff. Japan is really big on 'Made in Japan' and mostly managed to avoid that.
They also radically transformed the landscape around semiconductors in the 60ies/70ies. E.g. a big section of the famed "high output management" from Andy Grove is about how Intel had to reinvent itself under the pressure of Japanese chip makers and Intel could not compete with them.
I never read a compelling explanation as to why Japanese companies started struggling w/ innovation from mid 90ies until now.
Demographics. The late 20th century rise of Japan tracks with their post-war generation; the institutions built then, centered around MITI, were very strong and propelled the country into a leading exporter, and then an asset bubble economy. With the 90's, the bubble collapsed and globalization took hold, moving the industral exports increasingly towards China. But, as with the other major powers involved in the war, the institutions of the postwar largely stayed in place. The bubble then reappeared elsewhere in Asia, and then in US real estate, and eventually(where we are now) became called the "Everything Bubble", where all of these countries have a zombie company issue and a corresponding lack of creative destruction. Japan was simply the earliest to experience the demographic effects leading into this cycle; they are ahead on aging, population decline, etc.
Japan seems to have ended up like what people in the 80s imagined world would look like in the year 2000. Faxes, robots that look like humans but aren't that capable, etc.
One thing that is great about Japan though is that they design things to last as opposed to planned obsolescence that we so much like here in the West.
That's because it was used mainly to print the Bible (work of devil from their point of view). The west also needed 300 years to disvover algebra (work of muslim barbars )
/s
I think this is a symptom of Japan being more focused on enjoying life and it's aesthetics than incessantly "innovating". I'm American, I love America, but I think America gets this wrong. We're obsessed with speed and progressing with diminishing returns. When was the last time we as a country focused on being happy and enjoying what little life we have - finding joy in the little things like fax machines, rather than the wasteful pursuit of always being on top?
I find it funny that this is the assumption for Japan. But if we were talking about how people in the US still use checks (as do other countries), then it's because Americans are dysfunctional and behind the times.
American society is ossified in many respect while still allowing some innovation, especially if it's on the frontier.
The problem is that we don't want to create new 'frontier' after having already occupied them, preferring that we pull up the ladders on anyone young or disadvantaged at the expense of all of us, leaving if not trillions, billions of dollars on the table.
I was going to post something very similar. Japans relationship with technology feels quite different to me. It seems like if you look at any particular example, you'll see it was advanced until it was simple, reliable, and cheap and then slowed. There isn't a western obsession to relentlessly "upgrade", it's only done when needed.
Faxes are still used for some purposes in the US, probably especially in healthcare (though that's slowly transitioning to electronic transfers).
There can also be physical paperwork involved requiring a particular kind of signature guarantee with financial transfers. After 2 weeks of back and forth involving my brokerage and my local bank, I finally ended up having to go in person to a brokerage office to transfer stock to a different brokerage account.
Lots of rose-colored spectacles in this thread about Japan. Lest we forget that it is a society like any other with its pros and cons and its idiosyncrasies.
I live in Germany, possibly #2 for fax machine usage by ossified civil servants and old businesses (aka anything that's not an "app"), and I hate having to use physical letters or fax machines to consider a document properly "sent".
At the very least, the hanko is another example of holding on to old processes for reasons other than efficiency and effectiveness.