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Comment by asutekku | Hacker News Reader

I’ve lived in japan and believe me, what you see as a tourist does not translate into reality. Japan in general is about 10 years behind the western world and in some places even more. Sure, tourist facing areas and central tokyo are pretty nice, but that’s not the reality in most places.

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Are you currently in the western world? I live in Los Angeles, which is a city that feels like it's trapped in the 1990s. Our highways were never finished and the city is fundamentally crippled as a result. We are building rail faster than any other city but it's still far too little and much too late, and what we do build is littered with compromises and further issues that hobble its utility, such as a failure to develop grade separations, until the project is redone entirely. The local government is corrupt. The FBI is indicting councilmen and city hall officials left and right. We are zoned for a smaller population than we were in the 1920s, with 4x the population living here today compared to the 1920s.

This isn't just LA. Development across the U.S. over the past 20 years has been largely stagnant, and this is reflective in our huge shortage of housing supply that has come to bite us in the rear in recent decades with homes increasingly out of reach for working people, not just in California, but increasingly in flyover places like Idaho and Ohio too.

Of course, maybe it's the U.S. that is 30 years behind the western world.

The part about U.S. development is partially true. Idaho has been developing immensely, with Boise Area 10x'ing since 1930 and averaging 30% YoY population increase the past few decades.[0] If you go there, there's immense construction with frequent road closures and cranes everywhere. So while Idaho may still be dealing with the second-order effects of California's underdevelopment, I would struggle to find anywhere that's been building as much as Idaho is.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise_metropolitan_area#Demogr...

I'm willing to bet Boise is still not building nearly enough housing to put a dent in increasing cost of living.

While that could be true, it wouldn't point to the root cause. There exists a limit to how fast an area can physically develop by modern construction speeds and government permitting procedures, orthogonal to the area's willingness to develop. It's possible that 600k population Boise area is unable to build as fast as California's 700k yearly exodus would like to be accommodated.

What does it mean to be "10 years behind the western world" ? Are they behind in technology, values, policy? Can you give some examples? I'm not disagreeing with you, just curious for more info. (I don't know much about Japan myself.)

A partial answer: Googling 'japan fax' would give you many articles attesting that faxes are still a stable for communication in offices.

e.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-ja...

> Japan’s health ministry has said it will allow health centres to report new coronavirus cases online, instead of by handwritten faxes, after a doctor lambasted the legal requirement.

Another very externally visible example is that the Japanese have taken a long time to transition from SHIFT_JIS to Unicode on the web, and on Windows.

I appreciate this is a partial answer, but by those standards the US is also similarly behind. For example, still commonly use checks and they are nowhere near transitioning to the metric system.

While I don't think Japan should be judged solely on its fax machines (they're ahead in some places and behind in others), there is a difference with fax machine usage in Japan vs the US - they're a trailing indicator of another bottleneck. Fax machines are so widespread in Japan largely because they ease the process of physically stamping documents with a registered stamp (a hanko), which is used instead of a signature. So far they've failed to digitize them, and it's often cited as a huge cause of bureaucratic slowdown, especially in the pandemic. One of the goals of the new prime minister is to finally start phasing them out.

> So far they've failed to digitize them, and it's often cited as a huge cause of bureaucratic slowdown, especially in the pandemic.

Compare this to the US where Bill Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures Act[1] back in 2000.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Signatures_in_Globa...

I've been working in the computer graphics field for 25-years, the last 10 of which (and currently) have been in Japan. Before I got here 10-years ago, I had visions of Japanese studios having cutting-edge tools, all built in-house, created to automate tasks, making production efficient.

I was extremely disappointed.

I understand that Japan has a reputation of being at the forefront of technology and, while the manufacturing sector may have had extreme advances in the 80's and 90's, those advances have fallen, with nothing really of note since. No longer is Sony the leader in electronic hardware. Toyota is no longer the leader of car manufacturing efficiency. When was the last time you've heard or read about anything innovative coming out of Japan? There's nothing "disruptive" coming out of here. They are riding on their long-past reputation of being fore-runners of tech. In my opinion, it's not so much a lack of intellectual availability here, but rather, deep-rooted cultural phenomena that has been holding this place hostage for so long.

Disclaimer: my experience is in computer graphics, so is limited to that industry. Please take my opinions with a grain of salt. But when I was jumping around different studios back home, before moving to Japan, there was always a dedicated technology team present, from small 10-person outfits, to huge 400-people studios. CG companies know that using software just out-of-the-box was not enough to produce animation profitably, so they invested in tech teams to create tools and production pipelines that would make the production process faster, reduce human error, and ultimately, make the company more money. I was blown away that this mindset was not present in most of the studios here. Most of the studios do not want to invest money into a tech team, as the benefits of technology are not exactly tangible or visible right away to the executives. There is also a deeper issue with taking pride in "doing it by hand". There are more issues, but both of the ones described above point to a pretty "old school" way of thinking.

Of course, not every person I have worked with agrees with any of the above, but the mindset is present enough to stifle innovation in my field. Where there IS innovation, it is created by non-Japanese folks. Much of this technology is quickly forgotten after being used briefly.

I live here, so I guess it can't be that bad. But I have to say that there is a particular naievety present. Even when proposed with new ideas that make sense, there is almost always push-back.

Holy cow, I could write a lot more, but I'll just leave it at this: Japan is absolutely not the technology utopia one may think it is.

you should turn this into a blog post. this is a very interesting take.

I find it strange to say Sony isn't a leader in electronic hardware, at least using it as a blanket statement. Some divisions are clearly innovative. For example, they make the best camera sensors bar none and camera sensors are cutting edge and hard to design and manufacture. Nobody comes close to Sony from my understanding from some camera experts that I work with. They are also working on sensor like this https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/14/21258403/sony-image-senso..., which if it works could be huge for the AV industry. There could be a lack of innovation in japan as a whole, but could that be because you just aren't aware of it? Both Honda and Toyota manufacture fuel cell cars, something that always seemed 10 years out, then all of a sudden it popped up for sale. So it seems strange to say that Toyota isn't innovative, simply because they aren't a leader in one specific area that they were previously. It could be that they aren't experts in CG, but I highly doubt a country can be a world leader in every single field in technology.

I’ve stayed there for extended periods (months) and while I may not live like a poorer or even average income Japanese, I can say day to day life quality is pretty ahead in Tokyo/Osaka/ surrounding areas at least (but then most people live in and around Tokyo or big cities).

> Japan in general is about 10 years behind the western world

In which areas is Japan behind? What are some of your observations?

When was the last time you used a fax machine? We maintain one specifically for communicating with Japanese companies.

It's possible this is for legislative reasons rather than anything else.

If that's the case, then a fax isn't too bad (compared to some of the bureaucratic contortionism in the west).

At least until a few years back only fax was considered 'in writing', so if like a lawyer wanted to submit an appeal to a court it either had to be a letter or a fax, no email. Now the government invented a new authenticated email system which supposedly is like 'in writing'

Japanese has the most complicated writing system of any language. For a long time handwriting was the easiest means of written communication, and faxes can transmit handwriting. There are good Japanese IMEs now, but if faxes already work why change them?

Really, what's makes Kanji so complex compared to Mandarin that it originated from?

Chinese is second most complicated. Japanese has all the Chinese characters, and hiragana and katakana in addition.

Japanese also having commonly used phonetic writing systems makes it easier than Chinese in my book.

But Japanese has fewer phonemes than Chinese, and no real tones, which results in a large number of homophones, which makes phonetic writing harder to read. It's not appropriate for business communications.

This is not true at all. Japanese Kanji comprise only a few thousand characters (~2000 being considered sufficient for functional literacy). Chinese has well over 50000 characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

All Traditional Chinese characters are valid in Japanese even if they're only used for names. Japanese also has kanji invented in Japan which are not valid in Chinese. There are currently 2136 jōyō (general use) kanji, which are the bare minimum you need to known to be considered literate, but if that's all you know you're going to spend a lot of time with a dictionary. In practice you need at least 3000 characters, which is about the same as you need in Chinese.

Based on this answer and your other answers, I have to think that you know neither Chinese nor Japanese at particularly high level of proficiency. Furthermore, your answers look like they are Wikipedia stock.

1. “all traditional Chinese characters...” — The vast majority of these are only used in classical literature or historical documents. Furthermore, multiple times throughout Japanese history, certain Chinese characters (usually similar) have been merged into one character. This is one reason Japanese characters often have multiple ways to pronounce them, while Chinese characters typically only have one.

2. Joyo kanji 1 — This is hardly the “bare minimum” for basic literacy for daily life (which is maybe half that). Japanese kids learn about 1000 kanji (kyouiku) in elementary school and about 1000 more (the remaining joyo) in junior high school. JHS is the end of compulsory education in Japan. Daily life kanji are more in the kyouiku kanji. The JHS has some practical kanji, but it gets bookish and sometimes a bit obscure very quickly.

3. Joyo kanji 2 - Note that government documents can only use joyo kanji. Maybe they can use furigana if necessary for non-joyo. As a default, most of the press only uses joyo, and they definitely use furigana liberally.

4. Joyo kanji 3 - Given that I have used joyo kanji at one time or another that most of my Japanese friends and acquaintances did not know, I think that calling this a “bare minimum” needed to be considered literate is a bit harsh. That said, I don’t recall ever having stumped academics, K-12 teachers, doctors, or lawyers on any joyo kanji. So if you want to call it a bare minimum to be considered highly educated, then I would agree.

5. Joyo kanji 4 - No Japanese person I know who pretty much caps out at joyo kanji uses a dictionary very often — perhaps as much as an American would looking up relatively uncommon Latin or Greek words/terms.

6. From my experience, you need about 5k characters to read a newspaper in Chinese (that was around what I learned), while the 2k joyo were complete fine for Japanese. While I did/do look up words in both languages, they are either domain-specific words (where I often don’t know much about the domain in English, Chinese, or Japanese), or it is a scholarly flavor word. Note that I still look up words in English as well (thank you every George Will article ever).

I don’t have any links or sources readily available (I’m on my phone), but I am fairly certain that research on word and kanji frequency lists in these languages will support my numbers much more than they support yours.

Clarification — One needs to know about 5k Chinese characters to have similar text coverage in Chinese newspapers as joyo kanji would give one in Japanese newspapers.

The actual percentages can vary small bit based on how one treats characters for names, but these numbers are directionally correct.

JIS X 0213 has 11,233 characters across multiple alphabets that gets mixed together in the same sentence, plus the issue of horizontal and vertical typesetting, ruby text, and having to use Unicode Ideographic Variation Sequences to handle things like writing people's names correctly.

I just realize something. Upon encountering kanji one doesn't know, how does one find out the meaning?

How would you "look it up?"

I just realized something. I have no idea how one deals with the rest of the kanji one doesn't know.

Upon encountering kanji one doesn't know, how does one find out the meaning?

How would you "look it up?"

Do Chinese people even have dictionaries???

Of course they do. In fact, there are two main types of Chinese dictionaries: phonetic dictionaries organized by pronunciation and character dictionaries organized by radical.

Thanks for the reply, my question was intented to be rhetorical but my writing style wasn't the best. I was just trying to get JohnBooty to do a quick google search for Kanji/Hanzi dictionaries, after all how else could the east have developed such a sophisicated literary tradition without dictionaries.

I apologize - my question does look a bit like a lazy "please Google it for me" type of query.

I did very honestly attempt to look up the answer on Google, but found the results quite confusing. It's probably my fault.

However, I'm very grateful to the concise and comprehensible replies here on HN. I hope that perhaps they helped others as well.

Characters have a defined way of writing the strokes, so you look them up by number of strokes and radical. ("Radical" being, usually, the bit on the left or the top)

You can see a web-based example at [2]. Click on the "Radicals" button in the upper right. You'll see a list of radicals (sorted by stroke order), and clicking/unclicking on them will cause the list of kanji below to change.

[0] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_by_stroke_count [2] https://tangorin.com/kanji

I truly appreciate this answer. Thank you very much.

Kanji are composed from a much smaller set of radicals, so you look it up by the radicals that compose it. Some dictionaries also divide characters up by stroke count. For the past 15+ years, electronic dictionaries with handwriting recognition have been popular, and now you can just use your phone keyboard.

In practice, sometimes you can also kind of guess at the pronunciation (since characters with the same main radical often have a similar pronunciation) and see what autocomplete lists; maybe that's less true outside of the joyo kanji, though.

Thank you so much for this answer.

Faxes don't work. What are you supposed to do with them? Stick them a filing cabinet and then go look them up there when needed? Faxes were better than snail mail but they suck compared to anything modern. Even the Japanese know this.

Recently I have began to wish we still used them, and I say that as a consumer and a UI designer, as I think about all the designs I have made and discarded that could have easily been solved with pen and paper. It may not scale for an Amazon-sized business, but it totally works for small restaurant.

What do you mean? You can still print at the other end if you really needed certain designs to be somewhere on paper, no?

I mean, the design never needed to be designed in the first place. We should have created some manual process until it it becomes so cumbersome to process the requests that it needs to be someone’s full time job.

Last month when I had to fax my social security number to HR. Still in full force if you work in any sort of bureaucratic organization in the U.S...

> Japan in general is about 10 years behind the western world and in some places even more

Sounds good to me

Edit: because the West is such a utopia in 2020? Please...

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