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.
