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While I don't think sweeping generalizations are useful, there do seem to be some categories in which Japan has seen slower modernization than others.

This doesn't have to imply anything more than that, just like the prevalence of copper broadband doesn't say much more about the US than the fact that the US has some pretty antiquated broadband technology. You can argue about "coulds" and "shoulds", but it's always more complicated than that.

My personal experience in this space is specifically related to "RPA / Robotic Process Automation". There is significant RPA demand (and growing) in Japan due to the significant number of old systems that have never been modernized, preventing traditional forms of API-centric automation from happening. I learned about this when consulting for an RPA product team, and was surprised that a disproportionately large percentage of their prospective customers were in the Japanese market.

I won't claim that Japan is "stuck in the 90s", but there are certainly some categories in which there seems to be a cultural tendency towards caution / away from modernization for the sake of it. This isn't inherently good or bad, just interesting. It's part of what's fueling the RPA hype cycle, which is arguably just a different path to modernization than the one many other companies followed. Acknowledging this doesn't have to be disparaging.

> For some reason it's culturally acceptable to make these kinds of comments about Japan in English language forums. But I don't really understand why... Japan is no doubt very different from other countries in various respects. But it doesn't seem helpful to say essentially "we are 30 years ahead of Japan".

Examining the rate of progress and current state of things doesn't automatically have to imply there was intent to disparage or conclude anything negative.

I realize that some people will do just that, but I'm just trying to say that not all discussion is coming from this place - I personally find the RPA thing fascinating, and it helped me better understand the nature of the problems some companies are trying to solve, and why those problems are more challenging in the Japanese market than others.

Right, I absolutely agree. It's interesting to compare, in fact I've written about the startup environment comparing the US to Japan before:

https://41j.com/blog/2022/05/startups-and-japan/

But when people make broad statements based on single events it doesn't come off as a thoughtful comparison but something else entirely...

I wonder how much of this is because of early adoption and then a laggy update cycle because of that. There's quite a few European countries that look much more modern than the U.S. in their roads and ports and buildings, and it's always been my pet theory that later modernization has something to do with it. Much of the major U.S. infrastructure was created in the 50's and 60's as we went though a major modernization (the highway system, for example), but that means that all those "modern" works are now half a century old or more. Countries that went through modernization more recently often look much newer to my eyes.

Was Japan early to adopt technology in the 90's? If so, maybe what we're seeing is that modernization effort left them somewhat stuck at that level in some industries, just like it sometimes feels like the U.S. is stuck a decade or two or three behind in some industries based on the last time the majority of it retooled and modernized. If so, maybe we'll see another modernization effort soon.

In some respects this is just like buying a brand new top of the line TV with all the bells and whistles, and then skipping the next 2-3 cycles of innovation trends until the current TV seems like it's just not cutting it anymore. That seems to be a natural cycle for a lot of things.

Also Japan is the world leader in fax technology. Fax. Many fax companies are only viable because of the Japanese market.

Now do checkbooks and the US

US banking still stuck in the 70s and encourages rent-seeking third-parties to fill the gaps.

How widespread is checkbook use in the US compared to the fax use in Japan?

Asking because I had a bank account for almost a decade now, and I only had to use the checkbook twice, and it was pretty niche use-cases. I still have the same checkbook that I got back then, and I think I won't be able to go through the entirety of it even in multiple lifetimes.

Cannot comment on how widespread the usage of fax in Japan (since I haven't lived there myself), but, from what I heard from other people, you pretty much need to have access to a fax machine.

I haven't used Fax for a decade as a Japan local resident individual , but maybe some businesses still heavily use Fax.

Thanks for answering this. My original comment wasn't meant as a retort, I legitimately had no idea, so I asked here. Because on reddit, one can easily get an impression that one needs a fax machine access in Japan just as much as one needs a car in the majority of the US. I kind of suspected it was a typical exaggeration, but wasn't sure.

That can be useful if you feel Unicode doesn't represent what you want to say - for instance, if you can only communicate in ASCII symbols you can't invent any new symbols, you can "only" build them out of ASCII art.

It's mostly because Japan is bad at web technology and APIs though. They also love gratuitous complexity; you've seen their websites and how every page is covered in stuff, but the URLs themselves are less like "youtube.com" and more like "blahblahblah.bsd.unix.nicovideo.jp/several/tech/buzzwords.jsp".

Nintendo, one of Japan's largest/most successful companies, still doesn't know how to run an online service properly. Sony's Playstation is better (but not as good as Microsoft's Xbox), but the Playstation online service is run in California.

And I could name a half-dozen US government -.gov - websites that are downright terrible with respect to usability and security practices. Since when does Nintendo represent all of Japan?

I feel like Nintendo is better than average for a Japanese company tech-wise. But it is notable how they treat the internet; they updated Animal Crossing Switch to add a few new online features, but if you try to use them you have to go through a conversation with a cute animal who basically says "to use this service you MUST agree that EVER GOING ONLINE means HACKERS will LITERALLY KILL YOU and you're only doing this because you're AN IDIOT".

You cannot compare governments to large gaming companies. Nintendo is known for creating amazing quality products… except when they go online.

It's more fair to compare them to other gaming companies.