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Comment by lliiffee | Hacker News Reader

Taxis are craaaazily expensive in Japan. (The quality of service is high though, which perhaps you were referring to.)

Quality is fine?!? Cars are clean, polite, don't try and screw you. But they often don't have detailed knowledge of the town in which they operate (no test like the knowledge in London). And rather than falling back on GPS will regularly dig out a dirty old A to Z.

Granted that might be less common in central Tokyo but it's happen to me several times. Taxis often have a really poor idea of where they're going.

I've experienced this too, and these days I almost always ask them to use the GPS as soon as I get in the taxi. I've only been refused once, and that guy physically did not have a navi in the car.

That's somewhat surprising to hear, given the high-tech reputation that Japan has....

It's reputational hangover from I would say maybe the 80s. My experience in Japan was totally the opposite. Most people's emails are something like abc3fa3a11fe.afj.kl@softbank.co.jp because that's the email their phone provider gave them, and they don't know how to check their email if they lose their mobile phone. Internet access is sparse - not even the starbucks at the famous shinjuku intersection had wifi when I was there in 2014. If you want internet, you need to go to an internet cafe - those places that people sometimes just move into as cheap apartments. To do that, you need to register for a card... with a Japanese phone number and a Japanese bank.

You want any paperwork done, it'll involve a fax. No, scanning and emailing will not work, sorry. No, you can't just bring the paper in, it must arrive via the fax machine.

Japanese websites: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...

Etc.

I get unlimited LTE when I'm in Japan:

http://www.bmobile.ne.jp/english/

I just used b-mobile's visitor SIM for a recent trip to Japan. The "unlimited" claim is bullshit. If you go over the 1 GB/3 day limit, they throttle you down to ~0 kbps. I couldn't even pull up directions in Google Maps to figure out how to get to the airport for my flight home.

Japan has been struggling to keep up in a software-first world. Hardware has been pretty close to top-notch, software not so much.

This might be a naive question, but how do non-English-speaking people use programming languages, which are seemingly all in English?

Not at all naive. In fact, the language barrier plays a huge part in why Japan's software abilities have lagged behind.

Programming in itself is relatively easy to abstract from English, as math is a universal language. If you write it enough times, "print" and other commands are just concepts.

Where the language barrier rears its head is in documentation. All those countless hours we save with Stack Overflow is something a Japanese developer frankly can't leverage. Even basic documentation is lacking. Python and many other languages don't have a Japanese version of it's documentation. Ruby is the best supported language there.

Rest of the world: "Please take me to such and such address"

Japan: "Please start driving towards <famous landmark>. You know that convenience store near there? Yeah that's the one, can you take me there for starters. OK, now still continue a bit forward. Now turn right in the next intersection. Yes, right here, next take a left..."

To be fair, while it's common for western (US/Canada) taxis to bring you to somewhere based on address (or intersection), it's not common in much of the rest of the world and they rely on landmarks much more often. Any Latin American country and many Asian countries are the same, in that you tell them a landmark and go from there.

For example, did you know that it wasn't until sometime in the last couple years that South Korea implemented a standardized address system? You can't tell a taxi driver to go to an "address" cuz the address of your hotel didn't exist a couple years ago, even if the hotel did, so you have to tell them the closest landmark.

Most japanese GPS will take landline numbers as that's more reliable (and much, much easier to input) than addresses. The alternative is a proprietary location system (Denso's MAPCODE).

It doesn't help that a lot of streets in Japan don't have names.

I have a friend living in a small town in Japan that can't get mail at his apartment because the building doesn't have an address. He has his mail delivered to the closest building that does have an address, and they give it to him.

> It doesn't help that a lot of streets in Japan don't have names.

That's because Japan doesn't generally use street-based addressing, it's area-based from top to bottom, so street names are replaced by block numbers (I guess small villages could be blockless and jump directly from village to building as well).

All taxis I've gotten into had a GPS and I could just give the address.

No, taxis are not very expensive. They're about what you'd expect in an industrialized country.

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