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Why is hi-tech Japan using cassette tapes and faxes? (2015)

37 pointsby alexanderdmitriover 5 years ago

12 comments

dmitover 5 years ago
I have a friend in Japan who used to own a small seafood restaurant. At the end of the day, before closing up shop, she would send a fax to her supplier at the local fish market with a list of things she needed for tomorrow. Take a printed form, circle the necessary ingredients, fax it. Got any additional notes? Just write it at the bottom. Only took a minute.<p>A modern solution for this use case would be a custom website or a mobile app. Now, even if you disregard for a moment the cost of developing&#x2F;running&#x2F;maintaining those things, the UX and reliability of paper and pencil for this use case is far superior to mucking around on your phone or PC.
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keiferskiover 5 years ago
Has the typical software application actually gotten better with time? I feel like websites in particular and software in general have gone downhill since the early 2000s. Everything is more complicated, less clear, loads more slowly, and is wrapped in the UI-flavor of the week. Boring ugly websites, like boring ugly technologies, just get the job done.
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quelltextover 5 years ago
As if this were any different in other countries.[1]<p>In some European countries fax is still the only official way to transfer documents digitally.<p>I heard similar rules exist in old companies in the US, in particular financial &amp; health care ones.<p>Yet, when I lived in Japan I don&#x27;t think I ever sent a fax or encountered a situation where faxing was necessary myself. Yes our company sometimes needed to send faxes to a bank and we needed to use workarounds (online fax sending service), so I know it&#x27;s still a thing. However, it&#x27;s a thing like legacy software and COBOL is a thing. It&#x27;s just there waiting to be replaced when possible. Most businesses&#x2F;companies are not setting up processes that require incoming faxes.<p>I guess there is a niche for it in small businesses that are too old (dying) and don&#x27;t care to modernize. And why not? I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s so weird to use faxes where it makes sense. They are just one communication tool among many.<p>These articles and their fascination with Japan. Just like the suicides and the sexless, herbivore men crap that is constantly making the rounds.<p>No, Japan is not like every other place, but it&#x27;s also not that unique. At least I wished these journalists would properly identify how phenomenon x in Japan is different from the same one happening in let&#x27;s say ...Finland. But that wouldn&#x27;t be exotic enough to interest readers. Somehow with Japan it always has to be explained with some exceptional quality&#x2F;pattern (Japanese people do this and that, culture, shame, homogeneous society...).<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;why-do-people-still-use-fax-machines-109064" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;why-do-people-still-use-fax-machi...</a>
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thunderbongover 5 years ago
This is a rant, most of it self-directed, so add salt to taste.<p>We live in a bubble. A bubble out of which we force ourselves not to look out of. A bubble filled with screens and frequent dopamine hits. We smile, we snicker, we chuckle, and whenever something doesn&#x27;t agree with us, we instantly reply with our disagreement.<p>We don&#x27;t want to look up, outside the window, feel the breeze and see life as it is going on around us. People walking, talking, communicate using many things beside a keyboard and emojis. Mostly using tones of voice, facial expressions, body language. Even more so with things they can touch, feel, read on things which are tangible, not worrying about going out of charge, or talking about formats, or apps.<p>This is life. Not the bits and bytes. Not the communication protocols, not the APIs, coding methodologies, frameworks, editors, tabs, spaces. Those are for machines to talk to other machines, not to people.<p>Like @dmit mentioned, analog still rules our world, if only we were to open our eyes. I don&#x27;t mean analog in the electronic sense, but in the physical sense. There are myriad of colours, not just black and white, let alone greys.<p>We are still mechanical in our heads, and physical in our hands.<p>We are not the machines we use. I don&#x27;t want to write on a screen. I want to write on paper. I want to give it to a machine. Let it do what it&#x27;s for. Let the person the paper is given to, scribble on it, change it, send it back. I talk to the person and the deal is done. No version control required. If machines are there for both of us to fulfill the tasks we need to do, let them do it properly. That&#x27;s what they are there for.<p>Okay, end of rant. I don&#x27;t know where this is going anyway. But good for Japan to stick to what works. Making machines of people should not be considered development. Making machines for people should be.
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Theodoresover 5 years ago
Aside from Japan, the thing about cassette tapes that will keep a few of them around for a while is the automobile.<p>If you have a classic car then the period correct in-car-entertainment could be a cassette player with slots in the dashboard for a selection of cassettes. You would need period correct tapes for your 1980&#x27;s hot hatch - e.g. &#x27;Born in the USA&#x27; or &#x27;Brothers in Arms&#x27; that were de-facto during that time for anyone owning a VW Golf Peugeot 205 GTI.<p>These little accessories are what makes a classic car that bit more interesting. Needless to say the market for refurbished cassettes is a bit thin but I would like to think it exists.
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mhdover 5 years ago
Meanwhile in Germany doctors are still using fax machines and dot matrix printers heavily, as there&#x27;s no good solution for digital signatures and some paperwork still needs physical carbon copies.<p>Also, in the few years since this was written I got the feeling that some genres are actually bringing cassette tapes back. Mostly out of nostalgia, of course (so <i>totally</i> different from the vinyl craze).
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dkarpover 5 years ago
Meanwhile the UK national health service is apparently the largest purchaser of fax machines in the world.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.co.uk&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;11&#x2F;nhs-worlds-biggest-fax-machine-buyer-due-stubborn-resistance&#x2F;amp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.co.uk&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018...</a>
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tmm84over 5 years ago
Japan is still using these technologies because most Japanese aren&#x27;t computer literate. Many are smartphone literate. Most of what I have experienced in my time in Japan so far are clients trying to move from pen&#x2F;paper to smartphone&#x2F;cloud.
boomboomsubbanover 5 years ago
Faxes make somw sense, but audio cassette tapes remaining seems bizarre. The best explanation I can find is a combination of Sony&#x27;s negotiation of a free license keeping prices low and older fans who find then easier to sing along to than a skipping CD.
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jimpickover 5 years ago
Japanese elementary and high school students spend years learning how to memorize and hand-write 2,136 official Kanji. That’s an expensive skill to learn, and has some advantages ... fax fits well.
smitty1eover 5 years ago
There is a conscious &quot;capitalist Socialism&quot; afoot in Japan.<p>Rather than have a large, explicit, government-run social safety net, the society instead embraces inefficiency in the name of keeping unemployment low.<p>When I was stationed there in the military in the &#x27;90s we marveled at seeing people in company livery out directing traffic in the parking lot at the grocery store.<p>There were inefficient layers of distribution for prodcuts, and cute little trucks running around making deliveries, so that everyone has a job.<p>Their &quot;bridge to nowhere&quot; infrastructure projects are legendary.<p>They also have a gazillion little bars where you buy your own bottle and return to the same place to chill out every night with the colleagues.<p>Cassette tapes and faxes? Sounds par for their sort of quirky, introverted course. I kinda miss it.
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turnkeyreverseover 5 years ago
Because why fix it if its not broken?