Japan’s love affair with the fax machine (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Japan’s love affair with the fax machine (2021)

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62 pointsecliptik64 comments

By the way, the article isn't so much about the fax machine as about the Japanese belief that they were technologically leading the world (read it).

I don't have a strong opinion about whether they were / continue to lead in tech, but I do have a strong belief that Japan and its general culture does lend itself to a much stronger valuing of conscientiousness in work and doing things well / fully / to the best.

Maybe that's a bit of cultural myth of course, which the Japanese benefit from propagating. (All the movies, mentions of people who take decades to perfect their craft; even small everyday jobs being done well; things on time; everyone polite, considerate, etc)

But there definitely is something about what attentiveness to detail can achieve, when allowed to happen by emphasis of culture or the work at hand.

I don't know if I or anyone I work with every gets to be conscientious about doing something really well and to high competence. It seems that everything I'm involved in is "let's try it and see whether it works" and then give up and move onto the next thing. Or "well, good enough".

Which is good for some purposes and ends, but not good for developing a decades-long expertise, deep expertise and wisdom, about doing things.

This is an interesting comment. I once took an exchange course at Oxford regarding the history of business. One of the professor's lectures was on innovative edge and the issues it brings. He brought up various examples in history, but his most notable one was from Japan. Japanese swords were hardcore the best of the best. When foreigners first came to Japan, Japan laughed at their weaponry. Japan believed it had the pinnacle of weaponry and they were right for the most part, especially when it came to sword combat. But even the projectile weaponry that the foreigners brought also sucked in terms of operational reality. The Japanese sat confidently atop their mountain of sophistication. Then many many years later, foreigners came again, this time with more effective ships, cannons, guns, etc. The Japanese sword meant nothing in that context because the new weapons changed the rules of battle.

It's interesting that Japan may keep experiencing this as a cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, there is beauty in seeking perfection in something, achieving it, and being satisfied with it. On the other hand, there is the risk of getting blindsided by a third party's innovation. Interestingly enough, after many years of 20-20 hindsight, the achievement of and satisfaction with perfection may be a more sustainable attitude than constantly trying to innovate. It's probably better for society and better for the environment. But humanity doesn't move forward if not for the innovation that breaks the rules. You probably want both in the world and constant tension between the two in order for the world because on their own, they probably both have issues.

Japanese hardware is usually up there with Apple in terms of quality.

In my area, miniature modeling, Japanese tools and products are superior and cheaper than western alternatives from companies like Games Workshop

My guess is that it's mostly economics, not culture. Japan has lifetime employment (you generally work at the same firm until you die) so a lot of the incentives for quick, flashy, shoddy work are not there. Second, they have a export economy with a high-value currency. That means that they can only compete on the very high end of the quality scale. Third, they are right next door to China, and the one area where Japan is sort of leading the world (robotics) makes sense when China is your biggest export market.

I feel like japanese culture is pretty willing to take big bets - the whole AI (FGCS)thing in the 80's is an example.

It seems like, at least to an outside observer, Japan and Germany are very good at high precision, high quality stuff.

Not necessarily the style I'd want for most items though. China seems to good at defect tolerant, mass producible, hard to break because it's squishy plastic, everything done in software, kind of work, which is my preferred style.

America seems to be way behind because all our stuff is heavy. We want stuff to have "A nice weight to it", we'll use wood and steel and cast iron, we make stuff big and bulky and simple and leave the tech to everyone else.

We do seem to be pretty good at stuff that needs a ton of paperwork proving it was made a certain way, but half the time "Made in America" seems to mean "Made like it's 1950, with a lot of skill and good materials, but low tech and expensive".

All except a few bits of high tech that we seem to do really well on, like CPUs.

But that's just what I gather from consumer stuff, I'm sure people who work in more specialized fields notice other patterns.

America may be behind on physical consumer goods, but we dominate in virtual goods—software, music, and movies/TV.

It's also very popular in Germany, for three simple reasons:

1. It is a written form, so you can sign things with a pen before faxing it. It functions like a scanned PDF.

2. You don't get spam like with email because the sender has to pay to reach you.

3. You get a confirmation that your document was received. And unlike email read receipts, those confirmations are honest because spam is not an issue.

In the US there always was occasional fax spam. I think I saw one maybe 5 years ago.

The US is known for having free local landline calls, something that as far as I know is not very common globally.

Remember the sheet fed by roller fax machines? Urban legend says that if you fed a piece of black construction paper into the sending machine and then tape the ends together after it had pulled through enough to do so would cause the receiving end to run out of toner and/or paper. Prank fax calls instead of SPAM.

Fax spam used to be a problem many years back (and some famous "DoS" attacks of faxing someone a completely black piece of paper on a loop to use up all their ink). Is that no longer the case? My guess in the US it's no longer a problem just because so few people use faxes anymore, but don't know about the rest of the world.

Fax spam can be a thing. An old fax number at my office would get 1-2 spam faxes a week for a while. Often related to some kind of vacation membership scam.

You’re pitching email as the only viable alternative to a fax. It’s not, you can use something like Docusign instead.

Fax spam is absolutely a thing. 10 to 20 years ago or so, we had to use the software that comes with a brother MFC printer to digitally save the faxes because 99% was spam and it was wasting paper and toner.

One of my first jobs in the 90s was making fax software so my boss could send a newsletter to all of our customers who all had fax and virtually none had email or even internet access. One of the first things I worked on was getting our own virtual ISP by white labeling our ISP’s services.

These are all nice features but not the reason why faxes are still so popular in Germany. Its because Germany is years (some say decades) behind on digitizing the country and they need those fax machines to get anything done at all...

I would agree with you if I knew a technology that solved the same pain points as fax. Email is not the solution because you need to drop large amounts of incoming emails just because of spam. That means you can never rely on an email with an important document arriving. Snail mail is ... well ... slow. But it does arrive reliably and it does offer honest delivery tracking.

As the example use case, let's go with me asking a potential supplier if they can provide a specific component.

Which technology would an ideally digitized country use?

Email? Or check the supplier catalogue online.

Are you really sending a fax for that?

Re : signatures. All my recent contracts have been sign with DocuSign. That’s fine

DocuSign and alternatives.

Well, any other country (except Japan) has found a way. I don't recall when I had seen a fax machine in real life, there was one in the office 10 years ago, but it was one machine for about 1 thousand people.

Sample solution is a website on which you send "email" (not real one, but the side shows it as such) - this way you can communicate with goverment (local and country level) in Poland.

I wonder, how do people in Germany do taxes? They fax them?

> I wonder, how do people in Germany do taxes? They fax them?

Many (most?) private households don't have a fax machine.

There are several ways of submitting your taxes (e.g. mailing them in), but there's also the Elster app which makes this process fully digital: https://www.elster.de/eportal/start

Plus various (mostly paid) third-party tools.

It's also worth noting that filling out a tax report is optional for most(?) people that aren't self-employed, because taxes are automatically deducted from your salary. You're advised to fill them out, though, as usually you can get some money back (e.g. by deducting money for your commute and other things).

> I wonder, how do people in Germany do taxes? They fax them?

They use software (or websites) that utilizes a so called ERiC-API (Elster) (available since ~1999) to communicate with the tax office. Since 2005 companies must send their tax stuff digital.

I run a smallish business in Germany (20+ employees) and we actually do have a fax machine. However, I wouldn’t say it is used very often. The only thing I remember it was as used in the last year was for government grant which expected the signed quarterly time sheets to be faxed. So I think we used the fax machine 4 times last year. This probably still infinitely more than a lot of other countries, but I would say still very much an exception and not the norm. I think doctors still use them fairly frequently but I don’t have much insides into that.

> You don't get spam

I recall 4chan faxing black pages taped together in an infinite loop to the church of Scientology.

Exactly. And is why I like Fax, an extreme minority on HN. I only wish Fax could be of much higher resolution and much faster. But for now, it gets the job done.

Of course the 2nd Point, SPAM cost may not be the same in every country.

There are also Unicode or Character / Information representation problems. We can write it, but as may not be able to input it within the computer system, due to CJK / Unicode / System implementation mismatch etc...

And Fax is still used in many industries outside of silicon valley. Especially those in Global Logistics and Supple Chains.

Can't blame them, given how mediocre computer representation continues to be.

Just hop onto any Wikipedia page about Chinese characters, and be perplexed at the non-displayability of many characters, eg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chinese_radical/%E4%...

Unicode just isn't a good solution for pictographic languages where new characters can be invented the same way new words can be coined in alphabetic languages. In practice this doesn't happen that often, but there's no reason they can't be; there's an annual creative kanji contest in Japan: https://sousaku-kanji.com/archive.html

That's super interesting: so even the 'well meaning' Unicode committee got a basic part of writing culturally very wrong: the assumption was that these are Alphabets, rather than living things. Alphabets change as well over time, but much more slowly than the words. Thanks for pointing this out.

I think emojis were a mistake to include in Unicode.

But they actually prove that we could continue adding characters, if the design allowed enough foresight in space designated to these evolving sets.

To an extent, the fact that they made so much software care about non-BMP characters that otherwise wouldn't and the fact that they made English speaking users care about characters outside Latin-1 makes it worthwhile. Even from an English speaking country, running into software that wouldn't accept the € sign was a problem until the early 10s, and I think displaying emojis drives American companies more than displaying the euro sign or kanji.

So I'll give emojis in Unicode a wide pass on criticism for their effect in making everyone actually support all of unicode, and making people give up things like MySQL's utf8mb3.

AFAIK the construction of new kanji is a novelty, not something of any real importance in communication.

Japan has embraced UTF-8, and before that they embraced Shift-JIS - a homegrown encoding that also didn't support constructing new characters. Is there any encoding that works well for this particular case? AFAIK there aren't any of any prominence, which suggests that it's a non-issue - surely if constructing new characters was important to them, Japanese or Chinese or Taiwanese computer scientists and standards organizations would push for some kind of encoding that enabled it.

You're correct. Parent comment says something true (some / many characters don't have a representation in most fonts), but the inference it makes is wrong (this is a bottleneck for communication)

And specifically these characters that are not present in mainstream fonts are getting so far down the long tail that most natives wouldn't know how to write them, so would result in e.g. hiragana in Japanese if they knew the word at all. To some extent computers have even increased the variety of kanji usage as you'll get textbooks that describe a word as "usually written in kana" because it's infrequent enough that an average Japanese person wouldn't be confident to handwrite it from scratch, and so twenty years ago that meant they had to use Hiragana.

But in these days of computer IMEs when they type it in phonetically and get a list of options presented to them, they're confident enough to pick one, and so the kanji gets used a lot more.

so far down the long tail that most natives wouldn't know how to write them

True, but if we can't even display them then chunks of language are going to effectively disappear because people will have less and less opportunity to encounter them.

AFAIK the construction of new kanji is a novelty

Yes, that's why I referred to it as a 'creative competition.'

I think you're missing the main point that more than half of the characters on a relevant Wikipedia page don't display properly.

Does this come from actual experience trying to communicate in chinese or japanese? At least for chinese (but I'm pretty sure it applies to japanese too), what you're saying doesn't ring as relevant (i.e. it is true that some characters don't have a graphic representation in many fonts, but it doesn't cause problems for communication / creation of new words)

Plenty of fonts can represent a vast amount of characters (search around, but even free fonts can have >50k), much more than even highly literate people could ever use (a very educated person might know 8k characters, but would use much less actively).

Every new release of Unicode releases new characters that are slowly incorporated into fonts...but for many years these are on the truly long tail of characters, nothing that any common person would use. There might be a few exceptions with new characters (the new japanese emperor characters comes to mind), but the thing to bear in mind is that new words don't necessarily involve new characters. A big chunk of nouns in chinese are composed of multiple characters, so making a new combination can generate a new word (电视 is television...electric + vision). This is probably even easier in japanese were they can use katakana to spell an English word and create a new japanese word.

Yes. Han Unification is something people read about online and decide is bad or whatever, but it actually isn’t relevant to using Japanese with computers. People use Shift-JIS and fax machines because legacy technology takes a long time to die everywhere and longer in Japan. It’s not more complicated than that.

This is correct: as much as it's wrong, Han Unification isn't a problem so long you stick to one language to support and remove all conflicting fonts for the other two locales, which are rarely needed anyway in Asia, it just comes back when you try to support multiple CJK languages at the same time. Unicode coverage of each languages are totally fine for 99% of use cases, the Unification problem is just it's reusing the same address space for all CJK languages.

Well, we all know Unicode Han Unification is fine for not just 99 but 99.99% of use cases. It is those 0.01% that we care about.

Indeed, the only problem is you’re not going to be mainstream in Japan, but that honestly hardly matter…

The problem is probably less prevalent in Japanese. There's like 10x less kanji than hanzi, and only 2-3k are normally used. Also faxes in Japan are generally sent using printed documents, so handwriting a very rare character doesn't explain the usage of faxes.

> In practice this doesn't happen that often

The primary reason that this doesn't happen that often is that neither Chinese nor Japanese use Chinese characters in a primarily pictographic manner anymore. Only a small subset of the characters are pictographic (and even they are only vaguely so), and unlike in the distant past, most words are actually compositions of several characters, so new words can be represented via either combinations of existing characters if applicable, or via borrowing existing characters for their pronunciation (or in the case of Japanese, using the syllabic characters).

most words are actually compositions of several characters

For that matter most characters are combinations of other ones. Briefly, there are 27 different stroke shapes and 214 different 'radicals' in kanji that are recombined in various ways to form new characters. Japanese kanji overlap heavily with Chinese Kangxi, but they're gone in somewhat different directions over the last few centuries. (I'm interested in both languages but less familiar with Chinese than Japanese because I can't speak the former at all.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stro...

I'm not a linguist, but I don't think you can understand languages that use Chinese characters if you're not willing to look at the components those characters are built out of. I mean, you could just learn them by sight and remember the ~2000 most common ones, but that seems like both a more shallow and difficult approach.

Anyway, a lot of the more obscure characters are not displayed properly on most web pages like the Wikipedia example above because they're in one of the CJK extension tables, and this seems like a problem, because few people are going to want to dig through the unicode charts to find them. This isn't a problem with unicode as such, but with the way browsers and operating systems implement it.

https://unicode.org/charts/

You couldn't simply do an encoding that generates kanji procedurally from the list of component radicals because of the differing placements, and sometimes significant modifications of the radicals to fit in the kanji.

Take the kanji 勉 which is made up of the radicals 免 and 力. You could maybe have a "right half" slot for the 力 radical which would figure out the stretching but the fact that the leg of 免 extends underneath it is something that only exists for that kanji and then you'll need to special case it.

I probably couldn't do it, and while I might have the skills in future it would probably be a fool's errand to build a system for that just to demonstrate that it could. But I don't see any fundamental barrier to the idea; it's a comprehensible system, after all. Maybe I'll sic an LLM on it when I'm feeling less conscious of heat loads.

Actually Unicode has something for character creation: 'IDS', or Ideographic Description Sequence. For example, the Chinese character for the word Biang[1] can be describe with:

⿺辶⿳穴⿲月⿱⿲幺言幺⿲長馬長刂心

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha...

Oh, am reminder of this 2020 story about the last pager user in Japan

https://restofworld.org/2020/japan-last-pager/

I've heard some genuine horror stories regarding fax machines being used in software development in japan.

A prime example was in the early 2000, circa 2003-04, when it was somewhat common for Japanese studios to outsource Game Boy Advance ports from arcade machines to smaller studios residing in Eastern and Southern Europe.

A friend of mine was working in a studio tasked with porting several Irem (or Konami, can't remember) shooters.

Despite communicating by normal means with the EU publisher and distributor, the contractual side was handled by fax, which they had specifically bought for this reason.

Once the contract had been signed... nothing happened. That is, for all practical purposes they were expected to rebuild the game from scratch.

They had zero support of communication from the original publisher and developer, Once they pointed out to the firm that it was an absolutely insane idea, and if at least they could ftpd them a snapshot of the original sources/assets, again all they got was radio silence.

Then, after a week or two they started receiving... something, by fax.

And by "something" I mean "printed and rescanned at 72DPI Black and White pages of partial Motorola 68K source code and artwork on grid paper fully in japanese".

It was an obscene amount of useless, nearly unreadable data. Eventually they decided to ignore the original dev and got paid support from some MAME guys that basically helped them rev-eng the original roms.

No idea how they were expected to send the finished game, I can only hope they didn't have to fax it back.

Fax is widely used in small to medium medical offices still in the US. Lab reports, radiology, referrals, prescriptions (for things like PT). End up in the ER on vacation? Unless your primary doc is in the same "health system" it's quite likely that the paperwork will be faxed from the ER to your doc.

This says much less about fax than about the dysfunctional "healthcare system" in the US.

That's not it. Other countries with universal healthcare also use faxes. It's a conservative industry and you have less legal risk to send a fax and get another signed fax back than to rely on email, docusign, documentsignr.com or whatever. They won't be replaced until it's both very clear and also required to move to some standard digital signature system. This is resisted by the public everywhere because this pretty much means requiring an e-id system.

That is similar to many other countries as well. 99% of HN has a world view of Tech where the definition "tech" means Software Industry.

For what it's worth, I worked in Canada from 2005 to 2012 as a mechanical engineer and had to use faxes at least once a month for ordering from some old school suppliers in Canada and USA (for things like steel bars and rods). This was at multiple companies. I lived in Japan from 2012-2022, and had to send a fax precisely once, for my first apartment contract. I did it from a 7-11.

I know medical and legal places still use them, but that's true in North America too. I did a quick check of some suppliers of mechanical parts in USA (McMaster-Carr) Canada (Grainger) and Japan (Misumi) since that is my background and they all still accept orders by fax.

But, a difference is outside of conservative industries[1], you still see fax machines a lot more in Japan because it's more recent than in North America that they were ubiquitous. You will occasionally see a dusty one in a home or office, and many mom-and-pop restaurants have an unused one in a corner because the online reservation services used to send faxes to restaurants. I think you had the option of receiving a fax or email back in day, but now you get (and probably require) a dedicated tablet or interface to your POS. I didn't see a received fax in a tray anywhere since about 2015.

Another difference is internal processes in companies and government in Japan have historically required stamps for each approving person, and it was natural to extend the processes to fax, at least as a temporary measure until the physical document made its rounds.

It's also worth noting that pretty much every company in Japan switched to docusign or similar during covid, and government agencies are also required to switch soon.

Overall I think faxes persist a bit longer in Japan, but at this point only in the same industries that use them in other countries too. It's a thing that exists but I would hardly call it a "love affair". As a normal person going about your life there's more reminders that fax machines exist, but the actual usage is low and rapidly decreasing.

[1] There's a reason conservative industries still use faxes. Physical documents and signatures are the benchmarks for legal documents and faxes are still physical documents with signatures that can be produced from a filing cabinet, and whatever your legal predicament is you can be sure there is case law to blame the other party based on documents and signatures. And there's no universal/international, non-proprietary, widely-adopted standard to replace documents and signatures. If you're a doctor sending a prescription from one hospital to another (and both hospitals have strict requirements for record keeping), sending a fax still makes sense.

How did the Japanese government justify standardizing on a privately controlled system, Docusign?

I apologize for the long comment, this is a topic I have been thanking about.

Docusign wasn't required and there is no one standard. required or adopted. Requirements for storing digital documents were added, requirements to have physical documents were relaxed in many but not all areas, and government agencies were told to allow digital signing by a certain date but how well this was achieved varies.

Meanwhile an e-id called "my number"[1] was introduced in 2015 but it's probably not going to solve the problem of making a standardized system anytime soon.

I personally think that in a democratic country it is in everyone's best interest to adopt an e-id with good privacy rules, separated from immigration status etc. I live in Europe now in a country that has a very convenient and well-accepted e-id system. I can do any government process online. But it's privatized and essentially depends on you having a bank account in good standing. On balance I'd rather just have this be an accountable public service.

[1] Everyone is required to have it and everyone is assigned a "my number" which is similar to an SSN. It offers a lot of benefits like doing tax stuff online or ordering documents from a convenience store instead of waiting in line at city hall. But it's so far not required and a very unpopular idea to require everyone to get a physical my number card which in theory could be a good way to prove identity when digitally signing documents, and extended to some standard system for recording contracts.

Thanks for the info, though I'm surprised, doesn't every household already have a household register along with an assigned number in Japan?

Is assigning additional ID numbers to each individual in a household really that controversial?

Everyone has a my number, it's needed to do your taxes for example. But the government wants everyone to get a plastic my number ID card and use it for multiple services including replacing your health insurance card. But using one card for various services is seen as a privacy risk.

I don't remember the details but it doesn't seem legal to force people to get one and use it, so they've been offering incentives like coupons for stores. Meanwhile, from what I passively understand from news, there's been issues like information sent to the wrong person so it's difficult politically to push for it more.

I personally didn't get the card because for foreign residents it expires when your permission to stay expires and I didn't want the hassle of getting a new one each time. Now I live in Europe and I have a similar digital ID and it's quite nice to be able to do virtually any procedure online, although once you apply, stuff that took 30 minutes or 1 week in Japan takes 3 months here.

Faxes, like modems, require an absolute timesync between the ends of the link. Packet networks are not designed to provide this, and a horrible hack (ITU T.38) is implemented in VoIP systems to fake it.Having had to debug an implementation of T.38 once, I expect that after a while no-one will bother to maintain it and these devices will stop working.Or they will just work only over email or some other mailbox system.

Certain industries in the US, such as construction, are still very dependent on fax machines.

A lot of prescriptions are still sent to pharmacies by fax.

A decentralized p2p communication sytem. It even can voice chat ;-)

Still remember when over night Ingram Micro would fax you the latest price list changes or deals. Pages and pages over night would be incoming.

I just received a letter from the IRS asking for a document, which they said could be sent by post or by ... fax

Fax is plenty popular with small businesses in the US. A lot of it is efax but still plenty of fax in the US

Well, here in Germany they still use them. Not the most used communication's device, but still used.

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