In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On (2013)

Handy-signatur.at seems very convenient. You know, something must be wrong, when even Austria is moving faster than you ;-) I guess our most realistic bet to get something like this to work here is to count on the European Integration and wait for other systems to take over.

Living in Japan and this is dead right. I'd say two decades actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCwzaTPARtU&feature=youtu.be...

The macro economist (e.g. see "The Volatility Machine" by Pettis) would argue that there was fabulous amounts of FDI right until 1991, and one side effect of cheap capital is a lot more R&D into "useless" and "risky" things some of which become groundbreaking consumer innovation. As the FDI dried up so did the keiretsus' spare cash for risky ventures, or it went elsewhere (here in Singapore we see a lot of Japanese VCs like Gree).

I do wonder if it has stopped outside consumer electronics (which are the most visible). In my now 5 trips in the last 2 years alone, I've been consistently impressed by the quality of the engineering (particularly civil and systems) all over the country.

Key word being 'adopted'. I guess there was a time when Japanese culture enthusiastically adopted technology and culture from outside of Japan, but I don't see this too much anymore. Remember that Apple had to go to great lengths to even get the iPhone on sale here - up to that point, while mobile phones here might have been great in the 90s or whatever, innovation had basically stagnated in that space. There is the fax thing in the article. I can tell you that in the financial sector here there are a great number of customs and practices that were abandoned by the rest of the world twenty or thirty years ago in the name of efficiency. Remember that MiniDisc remained a big deal here well into the 2000s - even ten years ago few people in Japan knew what an MP3 player was (again, until Apple basically forced the iPod onto the market here).

So new tech can be adopted here, but you really have to go to unreasonably great lengths to prove it out before shops and distributors will work with you - and the price of being wrong is really high. And you can multiply this by a factor of ten if your company is not Japanese. Japanese remind me of the Amish in this respect, actually - of course, it has nothing to do with religion. I think it is a side effect of Japanese exceptionalism and various Nihonjinron bullshit that continues to be a big deal for the Japanese. In fact, I suspect this is getting worse, although it's certainly possible I just notice it more now. Even if a thing is successful everywhere else, even if everyone finds a thing very useful (or, in the case of fax per the article, hopelessly outdated), the Japanese will reject it without consideration, or cling to it beyond the point of reason, with no justification aside from, well, they're Japanese so obviously things that work everywhere else can't work here, and vice versa.

It is an exceptionally stupid meme and it's holding back the entire society. And while I could definitely be wrong (and hope I'm wrong), it seems to be getting worse.

I'm American, but unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with Australian culture to really see what such a "fixation" might be.