Japan's Paper Culture

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111954448...

I am finding that life without a smart phone in my pocket is palpably more pleasant — and without a smart phone, the utility of a notepad and pen increases quite a bit.

I don't like the look of a second monitor in my home office, so (yeah, Japanese) stationery are a more palatable alternative for me.

Wonder what recent tax law changes they’re referring to?

Then I moved back to metropolitan France and all the teacher and kids where looking at me like an alien when I was picking all my stuff up before coming to the board ...

It goes back to when someone in the MIT student center asked to borrow a pen to fill out an ATM deposit slip, I had only a Cross pen engraved with my name and the first project team I was on, and I reluctantly handed it over while emphasizing that I needed it back...

An interesting tidbit is that some of the picking processes described in the video I linked to above were implemented only recently as COVID-19 simultaneously applied upward pressure on order volume (people shopping online more) and downward pressure on fulfillment capacity (warehouse worker density restrictions). We literally had to stop taking orders for a short while to keep the backlog of orders reasonable.

It was gratifying to apply things we learned from computer science and industrial engineering together to help us keep up with demand.

I also highly recommend kakimori, which builds custom notebooks that you can select all the parts for (binding, paper, cover, etc.). Really memorable experience, and it's in a quieter residential part of the city (but still fairly convenient/central) that feels very different from the usual tourist spots.

I'm hoping they can bring them back, though, there's nothing to compare to. In the meantime, online shipping works fine for what they happen to offer on the website, and that stock has increased recently, which is encouraging.

I can recommend their luggage in particular, there's just nothing quite like it.

0: https://usa.kinokuniya.com/

First redo your grip, it probably sucks.

Then relearn the alphabet using that grip to the standard of your eye.

Then relearn to see the flaws in your handwriting in increasingly subtle ways and keep training to eliminate those flaws up to the standard of your eye.

In physical/tactile terms, it's a really impressive writing experience, but I've found the utility of that so constrained by the absence of indexing and navigation features that I don't use it for much besides occasional drawings. It turns out that navigating a physical notebook works in ways that flipping through electronic pages can't keep up with without a lot of work on the interface.

As an e-reader, recent updates to the rendering have made it usable, though there are still sometimes hassles with display and getting documents onto the device. It's theoretically great to be able to annotate PDFs, but in practice not being able to easily navigate the annotations later makes it substantially worse than writing notes in the margins of a paper book.

I'm sure a lot of this can be improved with 3rd-party hacks, but it isn't designed as a platform and it feels only grudgingly open to modification, which seems like a huge missed opportunity. (Not to mention being yet another product built on open code that doesn't return the favor.) Being able to SSH to the device and poke around the filesystem is cool, but it mostly feels like a glimpse into how much more utility the whole thing could offer.

I'll use mine as long as it works, but I'm unlikely to buy another one and I can't in good faith recommend it for most users. I do know several folks who are happy with the narrow range of things it's good at, which is why I bought it in the first place. Personally, I'm placing my hopes for a more useful-to-me e-ink future on devices like the PineNote.

I certainly do not mean that Japan is "just a place" in the sense that the nasty, slightly unkempt area behind my garage is "just a place." Japan is the sum of thousands of years of culture and achievement. I truly marvel at many things about Japan.

I did my best (in my admittedly hurried and casual post) to be clear that fetishization is what was to be avoided, and not appreciation.

Often, particularly in the 90s/2000s, one would see Japan fetishized as some sort of magical place of technical advancements, weirdo tentacle porn, cute and submissive women, etc. That sucked for a number of reasons too obvious to type out. That's the sort of thing of which I'm dismissive, not the sort of informed and genuine appreciation you expressed.

Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are closer to China in terms of both geography and culture without having problems with corruption. It's almost as if 400 years of history has very little to do with it.

That's a bit suspect considering a lot of pre-WW2 Japanese governments were based off Chinese models (not to mention, as another commenter mentioned, there are other examples of Asian governments with low corruption, maybe even less than Japan's). In China's case, if we're going back hundreds of years, I suspect the explanation is a bit more complex, you know, having to deal with all that sheer area in the age of horses, no natural sea barrier against foreigners, not to mention a population size that easily dwarfed Japan's (and most countries in the world).

Btw, there's a reasonable argument to be made that constraints are what drives creativity. From my own experience, East Germany had much better political jokes than West Germany. Mostly because you didn't need a carefully worded joke in the West, you could just open a newspaper.

Compare also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo and http://d7.drunkenboat.com/db8/oulipo/feature-oulipo/para/oux...

(Just to be clear: I vastly prefer to live in a free society.)

I also hoped that the second paragraph would really drive that home, sans subtlety.

("Maybe they'll even think it's funny," I dreamed)

I therefore chose not to insult the reader by further clarifying that she was a pretty regular-ass person, not some kind of magical exotic creature. We were friends for quite a few years and folks tend not to be friends with weirdos that fetishize them.

I even heard her fart once (which would have really confirmed her non-ethereal nature) but she swore it was her seat making some kind of noise so let's give her the benefit of the doubt.

The author obviously has an appreciation for crafting advanced stylistic prose in English.

I imagine you'd send them the text and a sample of your handwriting, and they'd produce a neatened up version that's close enough to your handwriting that someone could believe you'd produced it with enough care.

(Cheaper versions would just give you a generic neat hand, without customising it to your own handwriting.)

It does show a certain kind of dedication I suppose.

I would certainly hope that there is fairly large and self-evident gulf between appreciating and fetishizing.