Japan’s love affair with the fax machine (2021)
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
At the very least, the hanko is another example of holding on to old processes for reasons other than efficiency and effectiveness.
Only after covid did the bank start implementing electronic signatures.
I'm reading a book right now on the difficulty that Hanzi brought to the developing china of the early 20th century [1]. The difficulties are all mostly predictable - cultural attachment, the fragmentation of languages and dialects, transliteration of tonal variants, finding a large enough keyboard etc.
But there are some interesting things I didn't know, for example that there were attempts to decompose symbols into radicals that could be combined.
[1] Jing Tsu: Kingdom of Characters.
You can't "stamp" an email with the family seal. You can stamp a piece of paper and then fax it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_(emblem)
Crests, coats of arms, flags... these things kinda-sorta died out in America. (Indeed: people came to America to escape the Nobility's culture from Europe). But Japan has a lot of families with "samurai" lineage, the old Nobles from 500 years ago... as well as a connection to their families crests, emblems, flags, etc. etc.
Culturally, its important to at least enough of them, to keep those traditions alive. Fax works for that. Email doesn't seem to quite do the family seal/mon justice.
After all, if you've got this stamp that's been in the family for the past 300 years, you're gonna want to keep using it for tradition's sake. (Maybe not the actual 300-year-old family relic, but replications of it on modern rubber).
They're also part of some important business practices. One such practice called nemawashi, which is a "peer consensus" required for big decisions in some companies. A document outlining the change or project you want to undertake circulates to all peers or superiors it would reasonably affect, and they must all sign with their hanko in order for the process to be accepted.
Although there are some high-culture elements to them, such as having a bigger hanko if you're in a higher position in the company, some etiquette around hanko placement on the page depending on your rank in the company. There is also a tradition of giving a fancier hanko as a coming of age gift, those used to be of ivory (and still can be, Ivory in Japan is a fairly fascinating topic in itself).
I'm definitely an outsider, but I've seen these stamp before. I didn't know its full cultural significance.
I've looked at hankos on Wikipedia, and they look like that object I've seen before. Thanks for introducing me to the right word to research on!
I'm sure Japan knows about e-signatures. The problem is that of "culture" perhaps? I'm not entirely convinced that this stamp-thing is a bad thing for Japanese culture, or that this is an issue that needs "fixing".
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But "if it does need fixing" (and again, I don't think I agree with that mindset...), e-signatures are readily available and easily done in Adobe-PDF readers, backed up by public/private key infrastructure given out by your company's smartcard system (or whatever).
Hanko culture, however, is harder to kill off. Part of that is things like more senior employees having larger hankos, needing to tilt your hanko signature to "bow" to your managers, etc. Japanese E-signature platforms generally have seals, and offer features to change the size of the seal, and to rotate it, to support the cultural aspects of hanko culture.
Like, these faxes are still typed and printed first, right? People aren't just handwriting everything. About the only advantage of faxes in such a situation is the ability to personally sign/stamp something easier.
Ummm.... China/Japan was making up new symbols constantly. Which is why UTF-16 failed. We Westerners have small alphabets and less of the image/iconography culture than the Eastern world.
I can absolutely see this "iconography" culture in China/Japan being a major reason for fax machines.
To be pedantic, what failed was UCS-2, the enconding formerly known as just 'Unicode'. UTF-16 was introduced with version 2.0 of the standard and can encode all codepoints thanks to the surrogate pair mechanism.
I used to work for a company doing Japanese handwriting recognition, and we would sometimes get request "can you support kanjis not in unicode" and "lost" contracts because we could not. This is especially the case for rare Kanji for family names, etc. I still have no idea how those customers actually handle those kanjis in their systems, must be fun.
It's like the country is trying to move forward, but still do things the old way because of culture.
Note: If I understand correctly, most muslim people wash instead of wipe (happy to be corrected)
It's funny to me. For example doctors, when told they needed to wash their hands before surgery all freaked out, thought it was bullshit, complained, thought people were over thinking etc...
Now we have washing your ass instead of just wiping it. To those used to washing, just wiping seems barbaric, the same as doctors not washing their hands.
Similarly walking down streets and parks with shit and grease and oil and then tracking that shit into your house instead of taking off your shoes at the door. It's like that saying "Were you raised in a barn". I want to say it every time I see someone track outside shit through their house.
Definitely! In 12+ years in Japan I could count the number of times I've used a squat toilet on one hand. Anywhere remotely nice has bidets.
That's not even touching on the cult of the magic signature. A piece of paper is suddenly special because someone scribbled something that looks roughly like their name on it, even though that doesn't prove anything.
In Japan you often see an intentionality in the inspection of the business card, as if to suggest that you appreciate this very important step in our upcoming business relationship, and I am very impressed by your card and it's credentials.
I'm amazed at Americans shaking their heads about using fax machines, while sitting over their monthly cheques for rent, etc.
On the other hand, there was a legal obligation for fax use for signature transactions in Germany until legislation said a scanned pdf is equivalent. And fax is still considered privacy conserving, while email is not, so in medical contexts they wind send you a PDF (could be eavesdropped), but they will send you a fax with e g. your lab report.
Mailed checks -- rent, utilities, etc -- have held on longer, but it's probably been 10 years since I even OWNED checks. My wife has some, because until recently it was the most convenient way to pay her student loans, so if for some reason we needed a check we'd just have her deal with it.
I'm almost 52, and our approach here is pretty normal. All our utilities are paid online. I guess taxes are the only thing we still need a check for.
So, yeah, we shake our heads a fax machines, and the people doing so are also shaking their heads at checks, too.
The notion that fax is somehow safer or more secure than email is utterly laughable, and has been for 20 years. A huge chunk of corporate fax numbers are just gateways to a system that routes a PDF to email. It's literally the same thing. And if it's not, fax is WORSE since it relies on the physical security of the fax machine.
Regarding security, the logic/claim is that the long distance transport between the organizations is "safe" via phone. The in-house processing on the recipients last mile is their security problem. And the pdf to fax in-house infrastructure "is safe, IT said".
That public internet, dark and sinister, in between the two, is not to be trusted, though. That's the legislatures position over here.
Many Americans no longer pay for their rent by check. Heck, I had to go to the bank last year when somebody wanted me to pay by check...because I hadn't used one for a few years. Many of us don't use cash either...its fun just carrying a phone around these days.
> And fax is still considered privacy conserving, while email is not, so in medical contexts they wind send you a PDF (could be eavesdropped), but they will send you a fax with e g. your lab report.
You just don't login to something like Mychart and see the result?
I get your MyChart hint. Anyhow, the "digital health file" prototypes were hacked again and again and it's been delayed several times to get to tight privacy.
> Anyhow, the "digital health file" prototypes were hacked again and again and it's been delayed several times to get to tight privacy.
That sounds like Germany, they are conservative like that, and they probably aren't wrong.
Faxes aren't bad though, there are plenty of fax2email gateways that make them as convenient as receiving email.
Yes, yes and yes.
Also, back then (2010 or so) my employer dealt with a lot of remote sites (logging camps and lumber yard offices) that had POTS but no Internet. That has probably changed a lot.
As late as 2015 some common entities would not reliably accept credit cards (government, very small shops), but that’s almost completely gone now and COVID has pushed most of the remaining holdouts to accept digital payments.
Any situation or credit card doesn’t work such as my mortgage, I use a bank transfer or plain old cash.
When there can be only 40×25 characters in a page, each article has to be concise and to the point to be able to fit. Indices are easier to survey. No distracting images or videos.
Browsing used to be slow on older TV sets, but more modern sets cache all pages. On well laid out teletext channels, the most convenient way to browse is using the +/- buttons.
#!/bin/sh wget --quiet -O - http://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttx1.exe?request=$1 |html2text -utf8
It isn't some sort of exoticism of the East. They were making high quality products that worked very well. For many people my age, the Japanese seemed to be ahead technologically because all the cool consumer electronics, game consoles etc were coming from their when I was a child.
The manufacturers thought the domestic market was big enough for them. In a way that protected foreign markets and allowed less mature smartphones to develop internationally until they were good enough and "cool" enough to take over Japan too. Oops.
I see this happen again and again, too, not only with phones.
One thing that is great about Japan though is that they design things to last as opposed to planned obsolescence that we so much like here in the West.
Now, why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award, or who won the Baldrige Award. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services.
One can spend enormous amounts of money on quality. One can win every quality award there is. And yet if your products don't live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. So, where we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department. We need to get back to the basics and go improve our products and services.
- Steve Jobs
I never read a compelling explanation as to why Japanese companies started struggling w/ innovation from mid 90ies until now.
Tl;dr: It's the writing system.
[edit] Even better: https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-did-the-o...
Japanese corporate culture is abominable. Korean corporate culture is almost as bad. I can’t speak for the rest of East Asia.
American society is ossified in many respect while still allowing some innovation, especially if it's on the frontier.
The problem is that we don't want to create new 'frontier' after having already occupied them, preferring that we pull up the ladders on anyone young or disadvantaged at the expense of all of us, leaving if not trillions, billions of dollars on the table.
There can also be physical paperwork involved requiring a particular kind of signature guarantee with financial transfers. After 2 weeks of back and forth involving my brokerage and my local bank, I finally ended up having to go in person to a brokerage office to transfer stock to a different brokerage account.
I live in Germany, possibly #2 for fax machine usage by ossified civil servants and old businesses (aka anything that's not an "app"), and I hate having to use physical letters or fax machines to consider a document properly "sent".
Every year or so there is something that is just easiest or fastest to submit via fax, the alternative being mail.