Comment by jackschultz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackschultz | Hacker News Reader

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I was just in Japan and they had ads for this coming line that we weren't quite sure what they meant. Interesting to hear that it opened, and is the last subway line planned.

I don't have comments about the economics of Japan's railways, but I was extremely impressed with the system itself:

- The app to direct you through the system was really handy. Enter a starting and ending location, and it told us how to get there perfectly. Over the entire week we were there, we didn't have any issues taking the wrong train.

- You pay by distance traveled by tapping a card when you enter the subway and again when you exit. Different from the systems in the US I've travelled (specifically Chicago) where you tap once at the beginning. Also impressed with how quickly the system read your card.

- The stations where you can make connections are labeled really well with arrows noting where to go next and how far away they are. However those connections can be really long distances. I think the longest was 700ish meters, a little under a half a mile. Seeing 400m on a sign seemed normal.

- Despite the distances between the connections, I don't think we had to transfer more than once ever. The lines were very well related.

- The stations themselves covered a giant area under the ground and had a ton of numbered exits. Take the wrong exit and you could be a long way from where you were trying to go. But we also used the numbers to specify where we were coming from if we were meeting people, and guides used them in directions.

- The trains themselves were impressively quiet. Granted Japan is in general, but these were notably quiet. Kind of a shock to come back to Chicago and hear the secondhand music or people yelling on the phone.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Really impressed with Japan in general though. Highly recommended for people to visit.

Japan is very impressive in some ways and very...unimpressive in others. It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US. That and their strange insistence on using fax machines and cash for everything. But yes, when it comes to taxi cabs and those amazing toilets that warm your ass-cheeks while playing music, if feels they're easily 75-100 years ahead of us.

http://www.theonion.com/article/earthquake-sets-japan-back-t...

I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.

The streets were immaculately clean, but they put their bags of garbage right on the curb where everyone could see them blocking the way.

We saw a demonstration of Asimo, the human-acting robot, which could hop on on leg at this point. And then we would go to get food and they only accept cash.

There were "smoking only" areas on the streets (Shibuya for example), as a way to corral and even shame smokers. And yet most places accommodated indoor smoking.

We could go to restaurants and pre-order from a vending machine and give the ticket to the chefs, but in those same shops, along with most coffee shops (even the western ones), they didn't have easy access wifi.

Habits are difficult to change. Cultures must be even more difficult.

I completely agree and an interesting way of putting it. Just to think of the counterpoint to this:

I think my biggest takeaway from the USA was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.

They have dirty streets, but then keep their garbage tidy when throwing it away?!

On the one hand, they don't really have robots, on the other hand you can survive completely without cash by paying for absolutely anything by card.

Even ordinary little restaurants have free wifi, but nowhere did I see a pre-order machine. They hadn't even heard of them, and we've had those since at least the 70's.

Oh absolutely! I think the main issue with the garbage is that there aren't alleys where you can have dumpsters and trucks that run through them. Doesn't mean it's odd to see trash bags on the sidewalk. Their culture of trash seems to go beyond cleanliness too actually. There are no public trash cans anywhere, not even in bathrooms (all blow dryers) and they expect people to take their trash with them.

With the robots, I think it's more of an issue of deciding what type of robot is "right". Do we want to focus on robots that can walk and act like humans? Or those that can make ordering food easier? Cash wasn't difficult to deal with, but it's tough to argue that cards and magnets aren't the future.

I don't want to come off as someone who says cash is dead in 20 years. It was really easy paying that way, and doesn't have the tracking aspect like the US has, whatever that's worth.

But still seems like Japan is missing things.

FYI: The trashcans disappeared after the sarin gas attacks. They've never come back

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

London transport was the same, due I believe to the IRA. Clear plastic bin bags now hang everywhere instead of bins, which are unsightly but safer I guess.

Safer only in the sense that there's less shrapnel from the bins themselves, which is part of the reason why trash bins make such terrifying bombs in the first place. However, drop a bunch of nails and other shrapnel with your bomb, and the effect is now potentially greater because there's no shell to take most of the blast. I think the more modern bins that have very narrow openings are probably better from a safety point-of-view, since most trash is rather small anyway and terrorist bombs seem to mostly be rather clunky affairs. The split bins that have specific openings for things like papers, cups, and petty trash, are even better since they add an environmental aspect.

It bugged me so much to walk through for instance Liverpool Street Station, or others, and not finding a trash bin to throw away whatever petty trash I'd collected on the way (napkins, chewing gum etc.) When someone pointed out the terrorism aspect of trash bins it was a bit of a revelation to me, and since then I've had much more respect for the people involved in street planning, including the design of public trash bins and such.

The cash and reservation machines were definitively good examples because those things are simply obsolete. Paying through your phone or with a credit card (apart from tracking you mentioned) is easier and less expensive for the economy (more efficient) no matter how you put it, it's just changing a few bits on some accounts. The same goes for reservations: when you have your smartphone everywhere with you and could do it from anywhere, a whole machine dedicated to it is completely obsolete.

Other differences definitively aren't so clear. The trash is a good example, but a more glaring difference is how little crime they have. Crime is almost non-existent and there are no firearms, this can make parts of the US and large parts of the word seem comparatively barbaric.

Japan values privacy more than other cultures. Cash is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Even ordering online you can buy things by (1) place the order and get code (2) go to convenience store, tell code, pay cash. Merchant knows what you ordered but payment processor does not know who you are, only that cash was paid for order #XYZ. Similarly adult videos in hotels are paid by cash. You put cash in card dispensing machine and get code. Type code into TV.

That explanation only makes sense superficially... why wouldn't they just legislate privacy, or invest in online systems that are inherently private? (client side crypto and whatnot) -- it's by no means infeasible.

Neither client-side encryption nor legislation help if - for example - the company you've bought porn from is hacked and their customer database leaked.

Anonymous cryptocurrencies then? I see that would be more complicated...

But still technical anonymity sounds like a weak justification for technical obsolescence. For cash, credit card systems on retail don't even get your name... I think it could be arranged online even with traditional systems. Specially if it was a national demand, this is the kind of thing you can force companies to do with laws (or they would develop themselves).

I think a more obvious explanation would be related to their insularity -- they are probably the least integrated developed country (due to geographical, linguistic and cultural reasons). Some of those technologies by themselves aren't really that significant for personal productivity (I think that can be another factor), but combined they make a big difference I think.

>I think the main issue with the garbage is that there aren't alleys where you can have dumpsters and trucks that run through them. Doesn't mean it's odd to see trash bags on the sidewalk.

I think that differs between prefectures? I've often been to the south (Kyushu) and there each apartment building has a small building in front where the garbage bags go, and in that tiny building are several "zones" for different kinds of garbage. The garbage men just take the bags out of that building.

> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.

I don't know that it's the right way to put it — after all mayhaps things are just as odd the other way around — but some things were definitely jarring, like the ubiquitous vending machines (cheap and with cold and hot drinks) next to houses with no central heating (heated room by room mostly with kerosene heaters) or the weird ubiquity of "busybody" jobs (e.g. any form of road encumbrance having one person on each side directing traffic, and we crossed a lot of roadworks).

The busybody jobs are actually a social policy. At some point the government decided it was better to have full employment than idle hands, which is why Japan has such a low crime rate.

How much does that cost? Could the US afford to do that? Why aren't we talking about "the successful example of Japan's public stimulus in job creation" as an alternative to e.g. basic income?

I guess it's only successful if you're one of the types that think that government debt doesn't matter.

Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around.

I definitely noticed the busybody jobs. Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess? Trash collectors on the streets sweeping leaves into their collections. People guarding semi-obstructed parking exits to make sure no accidents occur, no matter how easy it is for the drivers to see the sidewalk.

Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about.

Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess?

They act as "pushers" during rush hour. Actually shoving people in so that the train doors can close.

> Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around. […] Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about.

And that you don't make the other way around, was to note that others may see some of the things in our own cultures as way out of date while others are surprisingly futuristic, we wouldn't know because for us that's just the normal "now", we've grown with these things there or developing so them meshing together is normal

> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.

Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.

It's probably easiest to think of current Japan as being the highest culmination of mid-80s technology and thinking. The rest of the world moved to the next three major technological revolutions: personal computers, the internet and smart phones.

Japan's entry into the PC market was timed in sync with the 80s boom economy, which meant every conglomerate on the islands turned it into a fractured, incompatible mess. Even imported standards, like the IBM PC standard, were turned into incompatible islands of technology like the FM-Towns. MSX was the big hope for a standard, but for various reasons failed to get to market in the U.S. (the biggest market) and died like everybody else did when IBM PCs came to market (notable exception Apple).

This meant there was no real PC market in place for the internet to attach to. While everybody else everywhere in the world was getting PCs specifically to send email and surf the early web. Japan funneled the internet into impossibly limited flip phones, turning it into not much more than an AOL-like information portal that the carriers could have just provided themselves -- but also meant it took longer to become the kind of full-on cultural phenomenon it became elsewhere.

Smart phones are, in many ways, a miniaturization and untethering of both previous technological waves and Japan, stuck using very limited internet on flip phones and the occasional PC didn't catch on to this trend.

Thus the first wave of PCs caused a boom in the U.S., the second wave of the Internet caused a wave everywhere but Japan, and the third wave caused a boom in the U.S. (Apple again) and now caught up South Korea (which coincidentally imported the Internet and PCs as a single phenomenon during their later economic boom so they had the environment where smartphones made sense) and to some extent Taiwan.

Japan missed all of this stuff and the catchup efforts never made it off the islands. Even in Japan, the top smartphones are iPhones and Japanese Internet sites look like late 90s design.

Developing export channels for physical goods is almost hilariously expensive. If you haven't just been doing it, getting a new channel going is very hard -- and having few channels for export of PCs and smartphones and an already well developed and competitive global market meant that the incentive to export Japanese made PCs and Smartphones no longer existed (this combined with a general downswing in the Japanese economy making access to capital investment for export pushes more difficult). Japan also spent the 80s dictating how the rest of the world was supposed to do business with them, while other export driven economies were more pragmatic in their dealings with everybody else and so the kinds of relationship building everybody else does was foreign to aging Japanese businessmen.

This all combines for the both the very inward looking domestic market only focus Japan's tech industry has taken over the last 10-20 years and the lack of general technological and cultural development clearly visible in Japan. It's not that the Japanese are stupid or not creative, just that fortune didn't favor them and their stuck waiting for better conditions to coincide with the next technological wave.

I think a big big part of this is that English is hard and Japan is just large enough that they get away with doing everything in Japanese (compared to something like.. Estonia). They have their own Physics and Engineering journals, their own textbooks on everything, their own programming world. In the tech sphere they basically don't really have to learn English at all to be successful and so they end up being incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. They put in a lot of resources in getting people to learn English and yet it doesn't seem to pay off (I don't know what the solution is)

The horrible web design to me can only be partly explained by that though. As a people with an special eye to detail and design this is simply incomprehensible to me...

I worked over there for a year. Dropped right into a RoR and Android shop and coded with them just like an American style one so at least anecdotally, they don't really have a different programming world.

Ruby was built in Japan. But shops like yours are rarity: in patio11's words, "Metropolitan Nagoya has literally thousands of people who can write assembly code that you’d literally trust your life to (you have before and will again, unless your sole method of transportation is bicycles), and probably only a few dozen who you’d want working on a web application."

Part of the problem with the Japanese computer industry was that Commodore seriously undercut the Japanese manufacturers on price. The Japanese companies were used to trouncing American companies in electronics on the price and bang-for-buck fronts; with the release of the VIC-20 in Japan (called the VIC-1001 or something), Japanese electronics firms were put on the defensive and not able to mount an effective counterstrategy. So they catered to a Japanese market rather than competing for the world market. When it looked like the PC was to be the clear winner of the platform wars, some firms (like Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Sony) managed to gain a toehold in the portable market, but the damage was done.

Very true. In fact there's a rare interview with Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore) that covers this. https://youtu.be/AMD2nF7meDI?t=738

The smoking area thing isn't a shaming technique. Japan is (or at one point was) the only first world nation where smoking is not on the decline. Tokyo is pretty dense, so the smoking areas is a way to keep people from getting burned on the street. If you think about it, an adult holding a cigarette down low is eye-height for a toddler. Smoking in Japan is a very sedentary activity, too. You'll see it, but it's not very common for people to walk and smoke at the same time.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g298184-i861-k6165919-A...

Smoking is very much on the decline in Japan. It's still much more common than in the West (eg. smoking rooms in hotels are still a thing), but it has vastly improved since 2000 or so.

Smoking outdoors is bad because it's crowded and smokers end up scaring kids in the face etc.. In other words they're not looking at from the same perspective as westerners. It's not about smoke in the air.

> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.

I get what you're trying to say, but that literally means the present day.

The predilection for cash is more cultural than technological I think - they've had NFC payments w Suica cards for decades.

I don't think their PCs are particularly backwards either - they have some ultrabooks that never make their way to the US that are pretty sexy. Component pricing is a bit more expensive than the US (about 30% even with Yen devaluation) but you can say the same for just about anywhere in the world (heck, I'm in TW right now and even the best pricing is at parity w US pricing, on average it's 20% more even though half the brands are HQ'd here).

For a time last year due to the Yen devaluation, prices for Apple products was ~15% cheaper than stateside.

I'm unaware of computers being high priced in Japan. Prices on Apple.com or Dell.com are +/- 2% difference. Haven't used a fax machine in Japan since about 2002. Cash ok, but cash = privacy which Japan values more than just about any other culture.

> It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US.

High-tech/lo-tech and expensive/cheap are different axes. Everyone in Japan was doing the whole text message thing 15 years ago, back when most of us were just coming to terms with email. The same can be said about GPS navigation.

On the other hand, 12 years ago MP3 players were commonplace just about everywhere, but in Japan Minidisc was still the big thing.

Good point, but then again ATRAC encoding >> MP3 encoding at typical bitrates back then.

But convenience is so much more imprortant than codec quality for mass market.

They are infatuated with hardware and appliances. That could be blueray players, toilets, robots, game consoles. Maybe it is a cultural thing, but that's how I see it.

Thinking about it, how much software do you know that has been written in Japan (I can think of Ruby, games don't count as they fall under game console, think PC software), compared say to Western Europe or US. It would seem they are at the same level as any of those countries and there would an equal distribution of software written but that's not the case.

This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage. And to that same point, fax machines seem to make sense.

Aside from kanji, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. Their language is complex, but it also seems to have a lot of redundancy built in, even if romaji doesn't count as an unofficial extra Japanese alphabet by now.

Quora has an illustration[0] of a keyboard with english and hiragana characters mapped, and conversion to kanji by software. It seems awkward, but not to the degree that it would stifle adoption considerably. Admittedly, this is a naive view on my part.

[0]https://www.quora.com/How-do-computer-users-type-in-Japanese

> This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage.

I'm reasonably confident you can drop it, because it doesn't make any sense and doesn't actually match the country.

Please elaborate.

Well, for one: QWERTY is not the only mode of input. I have a 23-Key chorded keyboard[1] that can produce all 101-keys of a standard U.S. keyboard.

[1] http://twiddler.tekgear.com/

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