
In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On  - msh
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-is-anything-but-a-relic.html?pagewanted=1&ref=global-home
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dmckeon
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

~~~
bane
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.

It seems contradictory, but hey, that's Asia.

[1] - <http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotopakismo/1182625591/>

~~~
unimpressive
>[1] - <http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotopakismo/1182625591/>

Why? I mean, what cultural precedent causes this?

~~~
bane
pre-digital, yet modern white collar office practices...it's not that much
different than your typical office in the 1970s

[http://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/dec-11-20...](http://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/dec-11-2011-twenty-
four-images-from-integrated-environmental-design-brochure-electricity-
council-1970s/central-accounting-office-at-southwestern-electricity-board-
plymouth/)

hell, if you can organize and run a major international military offensive and
an empire in a paper-based office, why would you ever need to move on?

~~~
msh
Because someone more efficient could run you over...

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w1ntermute
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.

0: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-
con...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-content-
ecosystem-hulu-country-future)

~~~
kevin_rubyhouse
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.

~~~
w1ntermute
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.

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Pitarou
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.

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fosap
On the other hand, at least I think so, the Japanese are using emails instead
of text messages on their mobile phones.

Text Messages: One of the worst, and still the most popular IM systems.

~~~
w1ntermute
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.

~~~
snogglethorpe
> _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.

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noneTheHacker
"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.

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giardini
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.

Fax is older than the telephone: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
I disagree that operating a fax line is cheap.

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.

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pinaceae
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.

not all technology moves on in parallel.

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mathattack
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.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Eventually Google will render this obsolete.

If you have a smartphone, it already has. You can get around with no problem
if you have Google Maps.

~~~
mathattack
I wrote imprecisely. The technology is there - it's adoption is what will
render this problem obsolete.

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robertlaing
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.

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rurabe
Another one: even though businesses have POS systems, they all calculate the
total bill on a handheld solar calculator. Why???

~~~
jacquesm
Possibly because there is no paper trail of the final amount like that?

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gwern
See also [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-japan-
fa...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-japan-fax-machines-
find-a-final-place-to-thrive/2012/06/07/gJQAshFPMV_story.html) "In Japan, fax
machines remain important because of language and culture"

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Havoc
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.

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someperson
Another good article people may be interested in..

[http://edinburghnapiernews.com/2011/01/26/%E2%80%98japan-
hig...](http://edinburghnapiernews.com/2011/01/26/%E2%80%98japan-high-tech-
image-low-tech-reality%E2%80%99/)

(There was a third I had, but can't seem to find it at the moment)

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dear
New York Times fax number: 212-556-3622

In NYTimes, the fax machines roll on too.

In fact a great majority of companies in the developed world have fax. Not
every company is a SV startup.

~~~
lesterbuck
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.

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aeturnum
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.

~~~
veidr
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.)

