It is interesting to view this as a situation in which some
development has had such wide-spread and continued success
in some environment that that very success delays the adoption
of some later better(?) development in that environment.
wired land-line telephony in the US vs. mobile in Africa
personal checks in the US vs. EFTs in the EU & cell credit in Africa
NAT vs. ipv6
automobiles in the US vs. effective public transit
with most of those examples, there's a huge sunk infrastructure cost that creates a kind of inertia that's hard to move away from...automobiles for example, with finite funding, do we maintain the highway system or do we let it crumble and build robust public transit?
with fax in Japan, yeah there's the fax machines, but we're really talking about a fairly minimal dollar amount vs. a scanner and email, maybe $130 dollars (in a very rich country). And for the receiving parties there's probably no additional cost since they already can receive email. But I bet they're prevented from handling scanned documents due to established business procedures (read, established social ceremony)...
One thing that's striking to most Westerners if they ever have a chance to visit a working office environment in a modern 1st world Asian nation is the tremendous amount of physical paper that gets pushed around. The amount of clutter in a Japanese office is simply mind boggling to the average Westerner [1]. In this milieu, a fax is just yet another piece of paper among thousands. There's no pressure to eliminate yet another source of office clutter. The concept of Japanese minimalism simply doesn't apply.
I'm working at a national Japanese research agency with several thousand researchers. The administrative overhead is probably close to 50% (as in, half the jobs here are in administration). It's only for a 3 month research project that I'm here, yet I had to fill out somewhere between 15 and 20 forms (no exaggeration) - twice actually, once scanned and sent by e-mail and once again by hand when I came here (because the scanned version wasn't 'original' enough). It's mind boggling to the extreme. I could sit down and make a simple DB application with Word / Excel export to generate all that stuff with unified interface in a day or two, which would save them literally hundreds if not thousands of man hours a year - but I don't think they really care so much about efficiency here. They really want to see the stuff all filled in by hand, there is some kind of inherent value there that I don't seem to understand.
Oh and the rules for business trips, allowances, relocation coverage and all that, don't get me started on them.
It's a good experience though, makes me all the more motivated to have my own startup soon, instead of going nuts in big organisations like these.
I'm not sure of the deep anthropological explanation, but ceremony, place, order and formality are all very important in Japanese society. This is a culture that awards black belts not only in martial arts, but also in flower arranging. As the article mentions, paper documents are an important part of ritual -- they can be stamped, folded, stapled, filed, etc.
Couple this with the fact that Japan was rebuilt after WWII in the model of the 1950's US Military, which I have to imagine was centered around forms and paperwork.
One final anecdote -- when doing business in Japan, I have personally known customers who showed up to meetings with a binder containing copies of literally every white paper and presentation I had ever given to them over a 2-3 year period. Even in the pre-Web 2.0 days, this drilled into me the importance of forethought and consistency in business, since you could find yourself confronted at any moment with your own evidence.
Not sure I understand the US landline vs Africa mobile example.
The US is a completely mobile nation, and it also has land lines. There are more smart phones in the US than any other country (China will or has passed that, depending on whose stats you go by), and around 200 million cell phones. The penetration rate of both are radically higher than any country in Africa.
I believe the point is that most US households still have landlines, in addition to their mobiles. That's as opposed to areas in the developing world where the countryside will just never be hard-wired -- they skipped that stage of technological evolution and went straight to wireless.
See The Verge article Japan's digital content struggles: the country of the future remains stuck in the past[0] for more on Japan's love-hate relationship with new technology.
Anecdotes like "A decade ago, Tamagoya tried to shift to online sales of its bento lunches, but business suffered" suggest to me that a digital interface to faxes using tablets (for writing) might be quite popular in Japan among those who do want to move away from faxes. Just because the person you're communicating with needs faxes so they get warm, fuzzy feelings while ordering their lunch doesn't mean your own business efficiency has to suffer as well.
I agree. And companies are trying to digitize the faxes, like NTT, "the giant domestic telephone company... It is offering services that allow older Japanese to use their fax machines to send messages to their children’s and grandchildren’s smartphones, where they appear as attachments to e-mails."
That's found in the last paragraph of the article.
Yeah, I saw that. I think the option of replying with a handwritten message is important though. Otherwise you're stuck with sending typewritten stuff, which might negatively affect your business if you're selling to elderly Japanese people.
The Japanese don't switch to electronic document systems because of their great respect for precedent and established procedure. A whole administrative and legal culture has grown up around the paper document, and the Japanese are too attached to the old ways to give that up.
The Japanese mindset loves technology and innovation, but only if it fits into the established scheme of things. Disruptive innovation -- or, indeed, ANY kind of disruption -- is anathema.
For example, the iPhone could not have been developed in Japan. It was too much of a break from the past. If left to themselves, the Japanese might have got there in the end, but only through a decades long process of incremental steps.
This wasn't because of some sort of advanced thinking on the part of the Japanese. They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters to string together a whole sentence.
In fact, the use of email on phones has resulted in people continuing to use their carrier's email service instead of migrating towards Gmail and other device-agnostic services that also have a lot more features.
> They just couldn't use SMS because it can't handle enough 8 bit characters to string together a whole sentence.
Not sure how to interpret this ....
SMS works fine on all Japanese cellphones, between carriers, and even to other countries (I've texted to someone in Korea, though only ascii was really reliable... CJK characters sometimes worked, but sometimes got trashed).
Because of the encoding used (some variant of ISO-2022-JP with custom code points for emoji), and probably some additional metadata, the maximum length of messages is reduced; for instance, on my phone, it's 100 ascii chars, or 50 CJK characters or emoji.
However, Japanese can be very dense, much denser than English on a character-count level, depending on which words you use, so the smaller character limit isn't always a horrible limitation.
The main issue is that things like verb conjugations and polite forms can realllly bloat things up, increasing word lengths dramatically. So there's constant pressure when using SMS in Japanese to (1) use very informal language, (2) be grammatically incorrect, and (3) use emoji for everything...
But hey, texting is generally between friends anyway, so the above aren't such a problem, and indeed, probably add to the sense of informality, which can be a good thing.
Inter carrier SMS messages in Japan were not possible until recently (July 2011, or about ten years behind other countries). This had to do with some of the Japanese carriers adopting PDC as a 2G standard instead of something that was used more internationally (eg. CDMA).
To allow customers to communicate via text with friends with other carriers, Japanese carriers adopted email on their phones and the Japanese customers became more familiar with email instead of SMS for text.
These days more and more Japanese are using applications like Line to exchange short messages with each other. This is increasing in part because smartphone numbers are increasing rapidly and the "gala-kei" phones are dying out.
In my experience the provider-based email addresses seem to be used mostly as a way to confirm other service's accounts, and that sort of thing.
Phones do come with email addresses, and that's primarily used instead of text messages, but there is SMS/MMS (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what Softbank's S!Mail is, though, I get the impression it's mostly just used in-network, by people on family plans). Also, Naver's 'Line' is particularly popular for messaging right now.
"One of the hottest sellers is a model that is powered by batteries so it will keep working during power failures caused by natural disasters."
I find it interesting that the Japanese feel there is a need to fax during a natural disaster. However, after reading the article and seeing how useful the they still find the fax machine, maybe it is important to be able to fax during a natural disaster.
Fax works with the simplest land line in the noisiest environments (when your DSL or U-Verse is down), is cheap, and almost universally available. Signed faxed contracts are in most instances legally binding.
Up until the mid 2000s, we still had a fax machine in our office. By that time, because our fax number was listed, we received about 10 spam messages a day – some of them were complete product catalogs that took 30-40 pages. It cost us hundreds of dollars a month in toner and paper.
In 2008, we switched to fax software, which cut costs dramatically, but we still had to pay for the dedicated fax line. We shut it down in 2011, because no relevant faxes had come in for over a year.
not just Japan, the German-speaking countries in EU are the same. A signature on a fax is legally binding, a sig on a scanned and emailed doc is not. Tax authorities 'prefer' paper trails as well, going fully electronic is not allowed - and you need to keep stuff for at least 7 years.
e-mail to fax gateways still are very popular in b2b solutions.
This is in part driven by the nature of their street markings. Addresses have 4 numbers, rather than number and street. As such it's awful to find places. It is customary to fax maps. Eventually Google will render this obsolete.
I've been shocked since I moved to Japan about this. The most in-your-face example for me, was visiting Japanese real estate agents, looking for apartments. They'll often literally hand you a book of fax papers compiled together, four inches thick.
We've managed to survive mostly fax free at our startup and at home — but we own faxes in both places.
But my sense is, until there's something "ten times better" for the aging demographic who loves to fax, it ain't gonna change for the population at large (and it is, uh, large). Tablets (and the ability to write by hand) are one piece of the equation, but the paper-trail piece is harder.
All employees at the company I work for are automatically assigned an email addr, a phone number and a fax number. I know of one case of the fax number being used...it was a prank and got routed to email anyway.
I suspect the Japanese situation has more to do with their alphabet than anything else.
I think it very unlikely that the NY Times has a physical fax machine spitting out paper. Just because a US enterprise accepts faxes, these days they probably have a fax server in the cloud and get email attachments, etc. I find it hard to believe that at the NY Times fax volume, humans are poring over glossy, fading fax paper, or that the entire fax reception system comes to a halt when something runs out of paper.
Alas, the impression left by that article of the Bento lunch company is that they are printing 30,000 faxes a day to paper. It is hard to see that as being economic, but if it is true, then an electronic fax server system should be a great startup in Japan.
what is stopping them from moving to a scanner and e-fax based system? you can still use the phone lines and print physical copies if you want. seems like you could save a lot of paper and space.
Nothing stops anybody who wants to use those systems. I love how fax-centric Japan is, because it means living here I can do so many things by email using a fax<->email service. (I use JFax, or whoever bought whoever bought JFax... Been using the same fax by email number for 15+ years.)
