with most of those examples, there's a huge sunk infrastructure cost that creates a kind of inertia that's hard to move away from...automobiles for example, with finite funding, do we maintain the highway system or do we let it crumble and build robust public transit?

with fax in Japan, yeah there's the fax machines, but we're really talking about a fairly minimal dollar amount vs. a scanner and email, maybe $130 dollars (in a very rich country). And for the receiving parties there's probably no additional cost since they already can receive email. But I bet they're prevented from handling scanned documents due to established business procedures (read, established social ceremony)...

One thing that's striking to most Westerners if they ever have a chance to visit a working office environment in a modern 1st world Asian nation is the tremendous amount of physical paper that gets pushed around. The amount of clutter in a Japanese office is simply mind boggling to the average Westerner [1]. In this milieu, a fax is just yet another piece of paper among thousands. There's no pressure to eliminate yet another source of office clutter. The concept of Japanese minimalism simply doesn't apply.

It seems contradictory, but hey, that's Asia.

[1] - http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotopakismo/1182625591/