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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

If I had to bet, probably classic Japanese incompetence with technology.

One of the most recent failures concerning MyNumber cards was government officials entering Person A's info for Person B's card while processing new registrations.

There have also been minor problems integrating the national health insurance and its associated patients' data with MyNumber; previously this data was handled and stored separately mostly in paper form.

To put it simply: There have been many bumps and rough edges that MyNumber has had to get through, many of them so basic in nature that most people unfamiliar with Japan's inner workings probably would find it mindblowing.

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People don't realize how technologically incompetent Japan is. Fax machines are still the norm for day to day business in most places, and online banking is seen as a cutting edge feature.

Hell, until very recently most non-combini ATM machines in Japan have limited business hours (like WTF do ATMs stop working on the weekends???), and buying online concert tickets means you buy it online, then go to the local 7/11 and print it out in paper form. The rest of the world has long since moved to E-sign and the average Japanese person is still expected to use a personal seal for business dealing.

It's like Japan took a very weird turn on their tech-tree in the late 80s and went off a deep end and invested all the points in toilets.

My toilet was smarter than Siri and could sing to me but god forbid if I wanted to pay my rent online lol.

What do you mean until recently? The ATMs where I am still have limited business hours.

My experience too, but I live in the inaka.

I don't think incompetence is quite the right word. A compelling hypothesis is that a lot of the overall technology adoption curve is driven by lopsided age demographic, where Japanese have a high % of people over 40. Gen X and older are not digital natives. Digital UI/UX and internet services are generally behind the times in Japan, but physical appliances and devices are cutting edge.

I find this very convincing. I had the same thought on a trip to Italy.

Everyone’s old, and the local tech is very good at the things those people liked when they were young in the 70’s and 80’s.

Clearly there is lots of good engineering there but not for this new computer thing.

There's probably also a cultural perspective, where people are generally more ready to defer to authority. Say for example the boss of a company is an old man who's been with the company for 50 years... and he doesn't want to change how the receipts are processed... and nobody will challenge him.

And also money/business. These custom seals are a big business and changing that may create unhappy business people. Other things are “traditions”, like you have to pay a mandatory sum of money to NHK or to the “committee that organizes the life of the street”

Speaking of seals and traditions. Not all companies do that, but there's a tradition that on documents multi-sealed, each seal is rotated by some angle that depends on how low/high in the hierarchy people are, with the topmost being vertical and the lower rank you get, the more the seal is at an angle, as if it were bowing.

That has been mimicked in electronic seals, I kid you not.

The government has already massively reduced the dependency on seals with no pushback https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13781455

The licence fee isn't exactly a Japanese tradition, it was literally modeled after the BBC. There's even an anti-NHK political party

A local committee for upkeep of the neighborhood was also a thing in my parents neighborhood in Sweden, and the US has it even more formalized into HOAs

The seal engraver cooperative associations did make noise, unsurprisingly.

Edit: FYI, the NHK party changed its name for the 10th time and doesn't contain NHK in its name anymore.

Nothing so complicated guys, it is because they are Japanese.

Obviously they can get rid of fax machines and Do Tech Better.

Here, go to a 7 floor electronics store and you'll see Walmart style greeters in larger numbers. Wall to wall. If you buy a washing machine you'll spend hours and meet a whole lot of uniformed employees to show you deference. Like the whole staff of that floor. You get to meet a village where everybody "loves" each other.

As if the store employees themselves cooperatively and humbly assembled the washing machine as a team effort. And no one person stands out.

An artisanal washing machine that crafts people diligently slaved away at making bespoke just for you. And sacred reams of paperwork they will equally fill out with the outmost of care and send by well trained hawk if need be. The more effort and "care" spent the better.

Or you can just order it online on the website for that very store. Same price. So what the hell?

I think it is because they don't view BS jobs as a bad thing but rather as necessary for an inclusive and harmonious society.

Theirs Not to Reason Why, Theirs But to Do and Die.

Very weird comment. I bought a washing machine earlier this year. From a 7 floor electronics shop. The only “paperwork” was the receipt and choosing a delivery time. I declined extended warranty. I dealt with exactly one salesperson, one other person trying to get me to change my phone plan in exchange for a discount (I declined) and one cashier.

Thus ruining these peoples day and rather strengthening my point. :P

Receipt and delivery time is all that is necessary, 10 minutes tops, in and out. It absolutely can and should go that way and did in your case.

But sometimes the pomp and circumstance take over and you would think it is 1924 and these are the first machines sold in Japan or something. That's because on slow days that floor full of people have diddly squat to do. Count them, it is x4-5 more than elsewhere.

Next time you're in BIC stay a while and observe. Especially older couples, they love the attention. That's the other subtle aspect at play I think. Loneliness resents efficiency.

The Western solution seems to be to give people basic income and have them stay home. I offer no opinion on what is "better" and maybe I'm wrong but I really think that's what is going on.

Don't stay home, stay in uniform, we'll find you something <- not an entirely terrible way to be.

I think a large part is that everything has a documented procedure. Just look how people work at banks or government offices. Or the documentation for just about anything. You'll find 2 pages documentation about how to fill a rather simple web form.

Changing the procedure is also a procedure, and is rarely done in disruptive ways.

Luckily these things are improving rapidly. Stuff that just a few years ago needed filling out a form and stamping it are now done either online or by the staff at city hall just scanning your My Number card

> Gen X and older are not digital natives.

You do realize that Gen X literally grew up playing video games and with `Apple ][`s & `Apple //e` in every classroom right? You know Gen X led Web 1.0, right?

Not my experience. I think you are either just parroting what you read online, live in the countryside, or have not been to Japan for 10+ years. I live in Tokyo and none of what you say is true here. I pay all my rent online, and have for 5 years in all places I've ever lived. I never printed out concert tickets. Seals have become less and less common and are almost never necessary anymore except in very traditional B2B settings. I have one and I have never used it despite have various Japanese bank accounts. They are officially being phased out. I don't know about the ATMs because I never have to use those since 99% of restaurants accept digital payments. Yes, there are still a few that need cash, but it's really just 1%.

Japan is definitely technologically behind. I am not arguing against that. But let's not exaggerate here.

It could also be that if you live for 10 years in Japan you may have not seen how good are some of the banks abroad in some countries. That transfers are free and instant, that you do not need to justify anything or fill any form, that you can get virtual numbers, one-time numbers, that you also have additional security (3D secure), that you get cashback, that you do not need to give a paper proving where you live, etc.

Many of the benefits you talk about apply to my Japanese bank account too.

Bank transfers are instant and I don't need to fill in any forms (other than the receiving bank account info) or justify anything, and I get cashbacks both in form of cash and points that I can use at the konbini, etc.

I also don't need to give out any papers showing where I live, instead they send a kind of sealed postcard to my stated address to verify it.

I don't know much about 3-D secure, is that like MFA? If so I guess I have that too, but you're probably taking about something else.

Bank transfers are not free though and I don't get one-time use credit card numbers, mainly because my bank doesn't include a credit card to begin with, but services like Revolut are available here too (just maybe not very popular).

I do agree financial services are generally behind the times here, just maybe not in all the ways some may think.

How much time does it take you to send or receive an international wire transfer?

Do you need to bring a passport or other documents to exchange currencies?

Oh, I was talking about domestic transfers. I've never done an international wire transfer so I wouldn't know, sorry.

3DS (Three Domains Secure) means that when you try to buy something online, the merchant sends you to your bank, who then authenticates you in some way. It's usually an SMS code, which means it's technically "MFA for credit cards".

Though keep in mind that 3DS was also rolled out with a liability shift; banks sold it to merchants as "if you 3DS validate a transaction it's never fraudulent and the customer can't chargeback". Which is obviously untrue if you're using SMS 2FA, which can be defeated. Good thing most American merchants forget to turn on 3D Secure...

Japan has all of the things you listed.

That most if not all the big banks don't is the problem. They make progress, but that's frustratingly slow.

My experience as an American:

- Free or instant, pick one. FedNow was supposed to fix that but AFAIK it hasn't rolled out.

- Opening a bank account involves shittons of KYC paperwork. I've never had to prove residency though. In fact in Utah it's the opposite: you can prove residency (for a state ID card / drivers license) by, among other things, having a bank statement with your new address on it. No clue how that works with paperless.

- Virtual/one-time numbers are a thing but not widespread. Credit card companies sell services intended specifically to ensure getting a new number doesn't cancel recurring charges.

- 3DS (Three Domains Secure, not Nintendo 3DS) is technically supported but rarely enforced by merchants.

- Cashback is a gimmick used to justify payment fees.

I agree with you. The person you're replying to is too negative about Japan. Like every country, there's parts of technology that are ahead and behind the curve. Japan is indeed lagging in some areas, but in others it's clearly one of the most advanced countries in the world.

I just realized I haven't used an ATM once this year! Even our sleepy southern Kyushu city now has standard credit card readers on the city trams.

> live in the countryside, or have not been to Japan for 10+ years.

I lived in a suburb city near Nagoya from end of 2022 to beginning of 2024. It's not Tokyo, but definitely not an "inaka" either. We got our Aeon Malls and even a Porsche dealer lol.

Okazaki?

Edit: damn, there are many more Porsche center in Aichi than I thought there were. I'll keep this guess, though.

Bits About Money [1] mentions most of these things in his blogposts covering Japan's financial systems, but he does it in a more positive light. He suggests there are benefits to some of these things, or they are just idiosyncratic.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/

While behind parts of Europe, Japan has been far ahead of the US. For many years we've had instant, 24/7 wire transfers (no mailing around paper checks), the My Number card as a secure digital second-factor ID useful for interfacing with government services (without using some private intermediary that asks weird credit reporting questions), free online tax filing, etc.

I wouldn't call the wire transfers exactly instant (perhaps it depends on the bank?), but they should be at least same-day in most cases if you're doing an online wire transfer.

The main problem is that most services that accept a wire transfer might take a while to verify your bank transfer and will often not verify bank transfers outside business hours, so they're not quite as perfect as I would want them to be. If the bank systems could only have been upgraded to support including a reference number, or better yet provide a system for automatic verification by the submitter (such as a request link + verification link, tokens, QR code)... But I'm dreaming about change to some very old systems.

I've sent wire transfers between about, 5 or so different banks? Including like "from Akita bank to Kagoshima bank" not exactly big banks. And it's always done within like 15 seconds, since the Zengin upgrade a bunch of years back.

That said automaticly registered wire transfers aren't really used much lately in my experience. Mostly for stuff like salary, rent and big purchases like a car. Anything else that's automatic people just use cards for now. Precisely due to that lack of messaging/attribution.

For small daily person-to-person transfers, everyone I know uses PayPay since you just exchange phone numbers instead of more personal details. This is similar to back in Sweden where everyone uses Swish instead of regular wire transfers.

Zengin (the interchange network) actually supports 24x7 real-time transfers and EDI data (ZEDI based on ISO 20022, which is built so that you can include invoice number, reference number, etc.) since the end of 2018 or so with the introduction of More Time System and 7th Gen Zengin System. Sadly, it's the bank and bureaucracy that's holding back here (e.g., some smaller banks still refuse to connect to More Time outside their business hours).

ATMs closing must be mostly because of the scams

I think it's just a security thing. Japanese ATMs are all indoors rather than outdoors, and at night they want to lock the doors.

Where I lived in France before moving to Japan, there were 24/7 indoors ATMs, locked, that you could unlock with your card.

Don't forget stamps used to "sign" documents.

It's very easy to ascribe all these problems to a "general" Japanese incompetence with technology, but I don't think that this simplified explanation stands up to scrutiny.

Japan was a world leader in many fields during the 80s and 90s, and even up until the late 00s, Japan was considered to be a leader in areas like Mobile Internet (this mobile internet was quite crummy in practice, but it was better than what was available on western feature phones at that time). Even today, there are many pieces of Japanese technology are quite impressive.

It's not just toilets, and in fact they are not unique to Japan anymore: you can easily get your hand on equivalent washlets in China and Korea as well, even if they are not as ubiquitous in public spaces. Public transit payment still beats any other large country I've been to: FeliCa-based IC cards are standardized and accepted almost everywhere, they are faster than MiFare-like cards[1] and you can easily recharge them on your phone (the situation on Android is less than ideal, with almost no support on international models and the somewhat typical corporate low-quality botch job that is Osaifu Keitai[2] - but it still works). Vending machines are still world-leading and many of them (though not all) support digital payment through IC cards, iD or QUICPay. Digital payment on highways with ETC is fast and reliable, even if it's not the best system out there.

I feel like Japan has an industry-wide problem with software (especially in terms of development speed, quality and UX), but newer services are coming out with better quality software nowadays. Older internet services which predate the smartphone era, and pre-internet services that are trying to modernize are the ones who are usually having a hard time to adapt.

The government is also very poorly on the digitalization front and this is a well-known issue. In my opinion it's mostly for two reasons: strong consensus-based organizational culture and system fragmentation.

The consensus-based culture is the easy one, and one that most western commentators will rant about. This culture is also the main reason older companies found it hard to update their software offering. It essentially centers around nemawashi[3] - negotiating with all relevant stakeholders that are affected by the change (this could be hundreds of people), gathering feedback, allaying fears and preparing the ground for the actual approval, which becomes a formality.

The requirement for nemawashi is not absolute. When working in Japanese companies, I've often set things going without doing almost any nemawashi, but I am not Japanese, and it wasn't easy. Most Japanese, even those who are strongly enthusiastic about effecting change, would probably find the approach of "better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission" very socially awkward to implement. In the end of the day, if you want to change the way that a certain procedure is done in government offices right now, even if the new way is a clear and obvious improvement, you'll have to get very wide buy-in for that. And if you don't prepare that buy-in, a lot of people will instinctively object and try to block or delay it - not because they think your idea is bad, but because they haven't been consulted. If you've been raised in a culture where nemawashi is the norm, not consulting you can be perceived being disrespectful.

In addition to that, why would a mayor of a small city or a department head at a government office want to take responsibility for issues that could happen with your plan, considering you gave no personal assurances to them in advance? The current system might suck, but it works. There may be many issues, but these are longstanding issues that we've been facing last year and the year before that and probably even for the last three or four decades. Nobody would suddenly start complaining about them.

This is exactly what you get with all these "minor integration bumps". These issues are expected to happen in most cases of digitalization. Governments tend to outsource software development and ensuring the quality of outsourced software is not easy when almost nobody in the government has the necessary technical skills to assess the quality of said software. But look the difference between Japan and other countries is the tolerance for these roadbumps. Look at HealthCare.gov. Its launch was an absolute disaster, but the US federal government kept working on it until it became usable. Granted, this disaster should not have happened, and the government should have been better in understanding digital service, but I as far as I know (maybe I'm wrong), there was no pushback for delaying other digital services due to risk.

Besides the consensus-based culture, fragmentation is a big issue in Japan when it comes to government services. A great bulk of the government procedures in Japan fall on municipalities. This includes registration of marriages, births or address change, setting up national health insurance, registering your official seal[4], receiving various welfare benefits, arranging and distributing COVID-19 vaccinations and - yes - handling applications for My Number Cards (which often take quite a while to issue).

During the COVID-19 vaccination effort, this discrepancy was in plain sight, with some municipalities being 2-3 months behind others (and even the fastest municipalities being behind the original schedule). The government organized a centralized system for recording vaccinations, but as far as I understand the municipalities had to handle: collecting the data on the various necessary age brackets (and thus required vaccine allocation to each municipality at each stage), distributing vaccination vouchers, coordinating with local clinics and hospitals to set up vaccination venues, setting up a system that allows residents to book a vaccination time-slot at a venue and finally tracking administered vaccinations. Municipalities vary in size from large cities like Yokohama and Osaka, highly concentrated special wards in Tokyo and small villages with less than 5000 people. Each of these municipalities, regardless of size or situation, had to handle an emergency situation by itself with little time to prepare. As a result, most (if not all) of them choose to arrange everything manually for the first round. Data gathering in preparation was slow and in many cases you could only book a COVID vaccine by a phone call (and of course, the phone lines were constantly busy).

The second round of vaccination (the first booster shot) was a lot more organized. The boosters themselves were delayed, and municipalities vehemently opposed the central government calls to speed up the delivery (citing, again, lack of time), but when the shot was finally ready, it was the difference between night and day: In my ward I could already book a slot at nearby clinic (20 meters from my home) online with little hassle. I could also issue a digital vaccine certificate in Japanese or English from a special app by scanning the My Number card with my phone.

In short, the central government had enough time to improve the centralized vaccine certificate service and the local municipalities had time to set up a vaccine booking and distribution platform (possibly developed by an third party vendor which sold the same platform to multiple municipalities). The main problem is that it took Japan almost a year to reach this stable state. Japanese organization can adapt transformation, but they cannot do it fast and cannot react quickly to change (like the new consensus that the booster should be given after 6 months).

I don't want to be too critical of Japan here. While I think the fragmentation of government service carries very little benefits, it's the product of a decentralized bureaucratic system that functioned quite well in the analog age and now it would be quite a gargantuan effort to centralize everything and train all local government employees throughout the country on the new digital systems. The consensus-based culture is also not always bad. It is bad at adapting to change, but it's usually quite good at organizing complex cross industry initiatives (e.g. IC card interoperability) and dealing with fragmented organizations. It also means that everyone (including citizens, customers and business partners) have less surprises. Even if that includes less good surprises.

If we go back to Tim Cook's offer to have a digital version of My Number Card back in 2022, this seems quite in line with the schedule for similar efforts in Japan. The security concerns may or may not have been valid, but it doesn't really matter. Integrating the My Number Card into Apple Wallet is a pretty big change, and as such it requires the normal gathering of consensus and preparation efforts.

[1] https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-evolution-wh...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.felicanetw...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi

[4] https://hanko-seal.com/archives/5970

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