
Why is hi-tech Japan using cassette tapes and faxes? (2015) - alexanderdmitri
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34667380
======
dmit
I have a friend in Japan who used to own a small seafood restaurant. At the
end of the day, before closing up shop, she would send a fax to her supplier
at the local fish market with a list of things she needed for tomorrow. Take a
printed form, circle the necessary ingredients, fax it. Got any additional
notes? Just write it at the bottom. Only took a minute.

A modern solution for this use case would be a custom website or a mobile app.
Now, even if you disregard for a moment the cost of
developing/running/maintaining those things, the UX and reliability of paper
and pencil for this use case is far superior to mucking around on your phone
or PC.

~~~
bobthepanda
If it’s just a shopping list, what does fax offer that SMS wouldn’t?

~~~
bassman9000
Circle items VS awkwardly typing on a tiny screen where you can't see the
whole form Ask a 50+ person to choose between large "screen" and manual big
circling motion vs phone typing

~~~
oska
The equivalent to circling things on paper is selecting check boxes next to
items on a touch screen. Which is just as easy, if not even easier (easy to
cancel a selection which is not so easy once something is already circled on
paper).

~~~
lenkite
My Dad who has Parkinson's despises small mobile phone touchscreens that
require him to awkwardly press tiny areas. A4 Paper rules the day.

~~~
oska
So he would presumably struggle with a piece of paper the size of a small
mobile phone too.

Why contrast a small phonescreen with a piece of A4 paper when touchscreens
also come in A4 size?

------
keiferski
Has the typical software application actually gotten better with time? I feel
like websites in particular and software in general have gone downhill since
the early 2000s. Everything is more complicated, less clear, loads more
slowly, and is wrapped in the UI-flavor of the week. Boring ugly websites,
like boring ugly technologies, just get the job done.

~~~
otterlicious
A line-of-business application where I work was recently upgraded to be
responsive with a number of useful client-side JavaScript features added.
Nobody in their right mind would use it on a mobile device but it's nice to be
able to resize the browser window instead of dedicating one monitor to it. And
the JS library they're using for the dozens of large data tables in the system
is so much more pleasant to use than the ad-hoc server side filtering and
sorting they had before. I can't think of a thing they did that seems
frivolous, except maybe dropping the Internet Explorer requirement, and I'm
not complaining about that either. ;-)

~~~
lenkite
The problem is that this is a rarity. Most "modern" web-apps are worse than
their traditional desktop app replacements. It is not as if developers are
worse today. It is because traditional desktop applications can build upon
better frameworks, leverage better tested accessibility, compose and extend
native and rich UI controls offered by the OS and all of which leads to better
developer productivity and comfortable user experience.

Yes, you can do all that with JSS and CSS also. However you have to fight
extreme CSS and JS bloat in order to achieve the same thing.

I really want the browser vendors to offer a large suite of standardised,
modern web controls. UX Designers who love to do their own snarky, edgy stuff
can keep doing so, but for us developers it would be a god-send for our
sanity.

------
quelltext
As if this were any different in other countries.[1]

In some European countries fax is still the only official way to transfer
documents digitally.

I heard similar rules exist in old companies in the US, in particular
financial & health care ones.

Yet, when I lived in Japan I don't think I ever sent a fax or encountered a
situation where faxing was necessary myself. Yes our company sometimes needed
to send faxes to a bank and we needed to use workarounds (online fax sending
service), so I know it's still a thing. However, it's a thing like legacy
software and COBOL is a thing. It's just there waiting to be replaced when
possible. Most businesses/companies are not setting up processes that require
incoming faxes.

I guess there is a niche for it in small businesses that are too old (dying)
and don't care to modernize. And why not? I don't think it's so weird to use
faxes where it makes sense. They are just one communication tool among many.

These articles and their fascination with Japan. Just like the suicides and
the sexless, herbivore men crap that is constantly making the rounds.

No, Japan is not like every other place, but it's also not that unique. At
least I wished these journalists would properly identify how phenomenon x in
Japan is different from the same one happening in let's say ...Finland. But
that wouldn't be exotic enough to interest readers. Somehow with Japan it
always has to be explained with some exceptional quality/pattern (Japanese
people do this and that, culture, shame, homogeneous society...).

[1] [http://theconversation.com/why-do-people-still-use-fax-
machi...](http://theconversation.com/why-do-people-still-use-fax-
machines-109064)

~~~
oska
> These articles and their fascination with Japan. Just like the suicides and
> the sexless, herbivore men crap that is constantly making the rounds.

The other story that is constantly told is about Japan's ageing society, while
very few stories are published about South Korea's situation (ageing more
rapidly even if Japan has the lead) or the demographic situation in various
eastern & southern European countries.

And the BBC is particularly guilty here. It produces generally very lazy
foreign reporting.

~~~
Smithalicious
Exactly, Japan's fertility rate is higher than Italy, Spain and Greece, at a
comparable level to Germany. It is on the low end of things, but it's not
really an outlier when compared to many other first world nations.

------
thunderbong
This is a rant, most of it self-directed, so add salt to taste.

We live in a bubble. A bubble out of which we force ourselves not to look out
of. A bubble filled with screens and frequent dopamine hits. We smile, we
snicker, we chuckle, and whenever something doesn't agree with us, we
instantly reply with our disagreement.

We don't want to look up, outside the window, feel the breeze and see life as
it is going on around us. People walking, talking, communicate using many
things beside a keyboard and emojis. Mostly using tones of voice, facial
expressions, body language. Even more so with things they can touch, feel,
read on things which are tangible, not worrying about going out of charge, or
talking about formats, or apps.

This is life. Not the bits and bytes. Not the communication protocols, not the
APIs, coding methodologies, frameworks, editors, tabs, spaces. Those are for
machines to talk to other machines, not to people.

Like @dmit mentioned, analog still rules our world, if only we were to open
our eyes. I don't mean analog in the electronic sense, but in the physical
sense. There are myriad of colours, not just black and white, let alone greys.

We are still mechanical in our heads, and physical in our hands.

We are not the machines we use. I don't want to write on a screen. I want to
write on paper. I want to give it to a machine. Let it do what it's for. Let
the person the paper is given to, scribble on it, change it, send it back. I
talk to the person and the deal is done. No version control required. If
machines are there for both of us to fulfill the tasks we need to do, let them
do it properly. That's what they are there for.

Okay, end of rant. I don't know where this is going anyway. But good for Japan
to stick to what works. Making machines of people should not be considered
development. Making machines for people should be.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger
> of humans becoming like computers.

\-- Konrad Zuse

Another man very much worth reading:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum)

> His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his
> ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while
> Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to
> make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities
> such as compassion and wisdom. Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction
> between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity,
> something that can ultimately be programmed. Choice, however, is the product
> of judgment, not calculation. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately
> makes us human. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-
> mathematical factors, such as emotions. Judgment can compare apples and
> oranges, and can do so without quantifying each fruit type and then
> reductively quantifying each to factors necessary for comparison.

------
Theodores
Aside from Japan, the thing about cassette tapes that will keep a few of them
around for a while is the automobile.

If you have a classic car then the period correct in-car-entertainment could
be a cassette player with slots in the dashboard for a selection of cassettes.
You would need period correct tapes for your 1980's hot hatch - e.g. 'Born in
the USA' or 'Brothers in Arms' that were de-facto during that time for anyone
owning a VW Golf Peugeot 205 GTI.

These little accessories are what makes a classic car that bit more
interesting. Needless to say the market for refurbished cassettes is a bit
thin but I would like to think it exists.

~~~
jaclaz
Hmmm.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape_adapter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape_adapter)

------
mhd
Meanwhile in Germany doctors are still using fax machines and dot matrix
printers heavily, as there's no good solution for digital signatures and some
paperwork still needs physical carbon copies.

Also, in the few years since this was written I got the feeling that some
genres are actually bringing cassette tapes back. Mostly out of nostalgia, of
course (so _totally_ different from the vinyl craze).

~~~
nosianu
I think it was just last week that I saw a headline here in Germany that after
a ransomware attack on computers the only thing that still worked was fax [0].
As an administrator I would leave that old technology in place if it doesn't
cost much, just in case, in addition to any of the other arguments about
politics or issues around laws. Just as a backup if - or when -
computers/Internet are down or unusable.

Of course, this does not explain why it is being used _regularly_. From my
subjective point of view, having worked in the IT industry and as freelancer
in various big customer projects for two decades, IT solutions don't look
nearly as great as they appear to be in theory. Riddled with bugs and often
brittle, _completely_ different interfaces depending on what software you use
(much of it custom-made), bad interoperability, expensive, long-term questions
about what will happen 10 years later (usually needs to be solved with even
more money for new software and data migration and lots of new issues). I'm a
lot more wary of shiny software solutions _in practice_ , because I think the
process of creating big and especially custom niche software for special use
cases seems way too political to me now and not enough interested in actually
finding a good technical solution. I laugh a lot less now about people and
businesses using "ancient" tech like paper.

[0] It might have been this court in Berlin:
[https://www.berlin.de/gerichte/kammergericht/kontakt/artikel...](https://www.berlin.de/gerichte/kammergericht/kontakt/artikel.851552.php)
(TL;DR "we are offline, only phone and fax work") -- but it could also have
been something else, that's not the only case when something like this
happened.

------
dkarp
Meanwhile the UK national health service is apparently the largest purchaser
of fax machines in the world.

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/11/nhs-
worlds-biggest-fax-machine-buyer-due-stubborn-resistance/amp/)

~~~
evadne
Yet a few months later [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/25/leeds-nhs-
tr...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/25/leeds-nhs-
trust-345-fax-machines-want-rid)

[2] [https://twitter.com/AxeTheFax](https://twitter.com/AxeTheFax)

------
tmm84
Japan is still using these technologies because most Japanese aren't computer
literate. Many are smartphone literate. Most of what I have experienced in my
time in Japan so far are clients trying to move from pen/paper to
smartphone/cloud.

------
boomboomsubban
Faxes make somw sense, but audio cassette tapes remaining seems bizarre. The
best explanation I can find is a combination of Sony's negotiation of a free
license keeping prices low and older fans who find then easier to sing along
to than a skipping CD.

~~~
frosted-flakes
They were great for audiobooks though[1], because they have a physical place
marker that doesn't reset when it's removed from the player (unlike CDs), they
have fairly high capacity, it's easy to rewind or fast forward, they're easy
to jam into the car radio without looking while driving (unlike CDs), and they
can kick around a car without getting scratched (unlike CDs).

Audio quality isn't super, but it's fine for spoken word.

Oh, and unrelated to audiobooks, making self-recordings is dead easy. I have a
copy of a cassette from the late 1960s of my 10-year old uncle singing a hymn
before he died the following year, and I have the same of my brother from the
early 2000s before he died this year. I treasure these recordings, which
_probably wouldn 't exist_ if recording wasn't as simple as popping a blank
cassette in and hitting the record button—unlike, say, burning a CD. So while
I don't use cassettes anymore (they've all been digitized), I still think it's
a great format.

\--

1 - Which might be why they continued to be used for audiobooks until the
early- or mid-2000s.

------
jimpick
Japanese elementary and high school students spend years learning how to
memorize and hand-write 2,136 official Kanji. That’s an expensive skill to
learn, and has some advantages ... fax fits well.

------
smitty1e
There is a conscious "capitalist Socialism" afoot in Japan.

Rather than have a large, explicit, government-run social safety net, the
society instead embraces inefficiency in the name of keeping unemployment low.

When I was stationed there in the military in the '90s we marveled at seeing
people in company livery out directing traffic in the parking lot at the
grocery store.

There were inefficient layers of distribution for prodcuts, and cute little
trucks running around making deliveries, so that everyone has a job.

Their "bridge to nowhere" infrastructure projects are legendary.

They also have a gazillion little bars where you buy your own bottle and
return to the same place to chill out every night with the colleagues.

Cassette tapes and faxes? Sounds par for their sort of quirky, introverted
course. I kinda miss it.

~~~
weiming
Even these days, daily and business life in Japan is something that will make
an eco- or time-conscious Westerner cry. Routine documents are printed out
with many copies instead of being consumed electronically, many forms and
documents are handwritten, cash is still used for most purchase transactions,
despite NFC readers/phones/cards being ubiquitous, and regular people take a
morning trip to the ATM to get daily cash.

~~~
quicklime
Eco-conscious westerners would do well if they took some lessons from Japanese
daily life - the per capita carbon footprint in Japan is about half that of
the US, despite all the extra documents they print at work.

------
turnkeyreverse
Because why fix it if its not broken?

