HOTROOMVID.COM - When you think of Tokyo, you might think of neon-lit skyscrapers and its world-famous bullet train system, or films like “Akira” and “Ghost in the Shell” that depict a futuristic Japan filled with intelligent robots and holograms.


But there’s a more mundane side of Japan that you won’t find anywhere in these cyberpunk films. It involves fax machines, floppy disks and personalized ink stamps – relics that have long died out in other advanced nations but have stubbornly persisted in Japan.


For everyday residents, the lag in digital technology and the ensuing bureaucracy is at best inconvenient, and at worst makes you want to tear your hair out.


“Japanese banks are portals to hell,” one Facebook user wrote in a local expat group. A commenter joked sarcastically: “Maybe sending a fax would help.”


The scale of the problem became terrifyingly clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the Japanese government struggled to respond to a nationwide crisis with clumsy digital tools.


In the years since, they’ve launched a dedicated effort to close that gap, including a newly created Digital Agency and a host of new initiatives. But they’re arriving to the tech race decades late – 36 years after the arrival of the World Wide Web, and more than half a century after the first ever email was sent.


Now as the country races to transform itself, the question remains: What took them so long, and can they still catch up?


How did they get here?

It wasn’t always this way. Japan was the object of global admiration in the 1970s and ‘80s, when companies like Sony, Toyota, Panasonic and Nintendo became household names. Japan brought the world beloved devices like the Walkman, and games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros.


But that changed by the turn of the century with the rise of computers and the internet.


While the world was shifting to software-driven economies, “Japan, with its strengths in hardware, was slow to adapt to software and services,” said Daisuke Kawai, director of the University of Tokyo’s Economic Security and Policy Innovation Program.


A range of factors exacerbated the problem, he said. Japan didn’t invest enough in information and communications technology, and as its electronics industry shrank, Japanese engineers flocked to foreign companies.


That left a government with low digital literacy and a lack of skilled tech workers. Over time, different ministries and agencies adopted their own patchwork IT strategies, but there was never a unified government push – meaning public services never properly modernized and remained reliant on paper documents and hand-carved, personalized seals called hanko that are used for identity verification.


There were cultural factors, too.


“Japanese companies are known for their risk-averse culture, seniority-based … hierarchical system, and a slow, consensus-driven decision-making process – all of which hampered innovation,” Kawai said.


And thanks to Japan’s plummeting birthrate, it has far more old people than young people. This outsized elderly proportion meant a wider distrust of new technologies, wariness of digital fraud, a preference for traditional methods like the hanko, and “relatively little demand or pressure for digital services,” Kawai said.


That apathy was widespread, said Jonathan Coopersmith, professor emeritus of history at Texas A&M University. Small businesses and individuals didn’t feel compelled to switch from fax machines to computers: Why buy expensive new machinery and learn how to use it, when fax worked fine and everybody in Japan used it anyway?


Larger corporations and institutions like banks or hospitals found a potential switch too disruptive to daily services. “The bigger you are, the harder it is to change, especially software,” said Coopersmith, who wrote about Japan’s relationship with the fax machine in a 2015 book about the device.


It also posed a legal headache. Any new technology requires new laws – for instance, how electric scooters prompted new road regulations, or how countries worldwide are now trying to legislate against deepfakes and AI copyright after the AI boom. Digitizing Japan would have required changing thousands of regulations, Coopersmith estimates – and lawmakers simply had no incentive to do so. After all, it’s not like digitization is a key issue driving votes in elections.


He summed it up: “Why do I want to become part of the digital world if I don’t need to?”


The pandemic push

The result was that for decades, Japan remained stuck with old tech even as it progressed in other ways – creating the ultimate contradiction.


Japan has world-class robotics and aerospace industries, and features of day-to-day life that tend to awe foreign tourists, like safe and clean public spaces, ubiquitous vending machines and convenience stores, widely accessible public transit and a comprehensive bullet train system.


Its digital failings look even more stark by comparison.


In 2018, Japan’s then cybersecurity minister sparked outrage and disbelief when he claimed he’d never used a computer since his secretaries did “that kind of thing” – before walking back his remarks a few days later.


And it wasn’t until 2019 that the last company in Japan still operating pagers finally halted services – decades after the personal messaging device was rendered obsolete by cell phones.


The prevalence of old technology also created endless bureaucracy. Opening a bank account or registering for housing might require a hanko seal, along with documents of personal information you have to visit a local council to request in person, said Kawai.


Source: CNN