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

https://theconversation.com/japans-love-affair-with-the-fax-machine-a-strange-relic-of-technological-fantasies-168674

by drdee • 4 years ago

64 86 4 years ago

uniqueuid• 4 years ago

A big reason is of course the possibility of using arbitrarily complex letters or symbols, thus allowing Kanji (and Hanzi) to be used.

I'm reading a book right now on the difficulty that Hanzi brought to the developing china of the early 20th century [1]. The difficulties are all mostly predictable - cultural attachment, the fragmentation of languages and dialects, transliteration of tonal variants, finding a large enough keyboard etc.

But there are some interesting things I didn't know, for example that there were attempts to decompose symbols into radicals that could be combined.

[1] Jing Tsu: Kingdom of Characters.

dragontamer5• 4 years ago

IIRC, its still "high culture" in Japan to have custom seals / stamps made to represent your family.

You can't "stamp" an email with the family seal. You can stamp a piece of paper and then fax it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_(emblem)

Crests, coats of arms, flags... these things kinda-sorta died out in America. (Indeed: people came to America to escape the Nobility's culture from Europe). But Japan has a lot of families with "samurai" lineage, the old Nobles from 500 years ago... as well as a connection to their families crests, emblems, flags, etc. etc.

Culturally, its important to at least enough of them, to keep those traditions alive. Fax works for that. Email doesn't seem to quite do the family seal/mon justice.

After all, if you've got this stamp that's been in the family for the past 300 years, you're gonna want to keep using it for tradition's sake. (Maybe not the actual 300-year-old family relic, but replications of it on modern rubber).

ehnto3• 4 years ago

You might actually be thinking of hankos, which are widely used in every-day paperwork, and they are usually a personal seal rather than a family seal. I don't think they're high culture, as almost everyone has one and they're used for day-to-day document signing of many types of documents, like opening a bank account or filing taxes and so on.

They're also part of some important business practices. One such practice called nemawashi, which is a "peer consensus" required for big decisions in some companies. A document outlining the change or project you want to undertake circulates to all peers or superiors it would reasonably affect, and they must all sign with their hanko in order for the process to be accepted.

Although there are some high-culture elements to them, such as having a bigger hanko if you're in a higher position in the company, some etiquette around hanko placement on the page depending on your rank in the company. There is also a tradition of giving a fancier hanko as a coming of age gift, those used to be of ivory (and still can be, Ivory in Japan is a fairly fascinating topic in itself).

xwdv2• 4 years ago

What if we turn these stamp into some kind of NFTs that you can then stamp a hash into your messages and documents?

mminer237• 4 years ago

Surely everyone can type Kanji now though? I could see that being an issue adopting to typewriters from handwriting, but now I assume those issues have been fixed. There's not many symbols you can't represent in Unicode and people aren't making up new symbols commonly.

Like, these faxes are still typed and printed first, right? People aren't just handwriting everything. About the only advantage of faxes in such a situation is the ability to personally sign/stamp something easier.

dragontamer5• 4 years ago

people aren't making up new symbols commonly.

Ummm.... China/Japan was making up new symbols constantly. Which is why UTF-16 failed. We Westerners have small alphabets and less of the image/iconography culture than the Eastern world.

I can absolutely see this "iconography" culture in China/Japan being a major reason for fax machines.

cdavid2• 4 years ago

Depends on the Kanjis.

I used to work for a company doing Japanese handwriting recognition, and we would sometimes get request "can you support kanjis not in unicode" and "lost" contracts because we could not. This is especially the case for rare Kanji for family names, etc. I still have no idea how those customers actually handle those kanjis in their systems, must be fun.

dhosek• 4 years ago

In my younger days I started a project to create Han characters from radicals in Metafont. It was an ambitious project which, sadly, was beyond my skills. A smaller-scale idea, assembling Hangul from individual letters was more feasible, but the realities of school and work were enough to keep any of this from getting beyond initial demonstration coding. In a parallel universe, this was my senior project in undergrad and was finished in 1990. Some of my parallel universes are really amazing places.

YEwSdObPQT• 4 years ago

The reason why there is an impression that Japan is more technically advanced is due to the high quality electronics that used to be produced in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. If I bought a Panasonic, Sony or similar people knew it would work well and you wasn't wasting your money.

It isn't some sort of exoticism of the East. They were making high quality products that worked very well. For many people my age, the Japanese seemed to be ahead technologically because all the cool consumer electronics, game consoles etc were coming from their when I was a child.

jbay8082• 4 years ago

Also because of a tendency for them to release their best products as Japan-only. "Galapagos phones" are a good example. When I visited in 2009, they were still much more capable devices than the then-available iPhone. But by being unavailable outside Japan, they had no hope of winning global market share.

emteycz• 4 years ago

In what ways was it better than a Sony Ericsson?

mc32• 4 years ago

Also due to their tendency for miniaturization whereas euro and more so North American products were bulkier —for electronics at least.

karmakurtisaani• 4 years ago

Japan seems to have ended up like what people in the 80s imagined world would look like in the year 2000. Faxes, robots that look like humans but aren't that capable, etc.

One thing that is great about Japan though is that they design things to last as opposed to planned obsolescence that we so much like here in the West.

ezconnect2• 4 years ago

You should see their houses, it is designed for obsolescence.

jabroni_salad• 4 years ago

Not only was their stuff cool, but it was also more reliable. In that time period, we had to deal with the "capacitor plague" infesting every manufacturer with low-grade components if they didn't keep a close eye on their supply chain or willingly pay extra for the good stuff. Japan is really big on 'Made in Japan' and mostly managed to avoid that.

ksec• 4 years ago

It's funny. The group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing. It's only the American companies that do. And yet if you ask people on the street, which products have the best reputation for quality, they will tell you the Japanese products.

Now, why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award, or who won the Baldrige Award. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services.

One can spend enormous amounts of money on quality. One can win every quality award there is. And yet if your products don't live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. So, where we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department. We need to get back to the basics and go improve our products and services.

- Steve Jobs

cdavid2• 4 years ago

They also radically transformed the landscape around semiconductors in the 60ies/70ies. E.g. a big section of the famed "high output management" from Andy Grove is about how Intel had to reinvent itself under the pressure of Japanese chip makers and Intel could not compete with them.

I never read a compelling explanation as to why Japanese companies started struggling w/ innovation from mid 90ies until now.

syntheweave• 4 years ago

Demographics. The late 20th century rise of Japan tracks with their post-war generation; the institutions built then, centered around MITI, were very strong and propelled the country into a leading exporter, and then an asset bubble economy. With the 90's, the bubble collapsed and globalization took hold, moving the industral exports increasingly towards China. But, as with the other major powers involved in the war, the institutions of the postwar largely stayed in place. The bubble then reappeared elsewhere in Asia, and then in US real estate, and eventually(where we are now) became called the "Everything Bubble", where all of these countries have a zombie company issue and a corresponding lack of creative destruction. Japan was simply the earliest to experience the demographic effects leading into this cycle; they are ahead on aging, population decline, etc.

glandium• 4 years ago

Back then "made in Japan" was a stamp of quality, and "made in Taiwan" denoted crap.

brink2• 4 years ago

I think this is a symptom of Japan being more focused on enjoying life and it's aesthetics than incessantly "innovating". I'm American, I love America, but I think America gets this wrong. We're obsessed with speed and progressing with diminishing returns. When was the last time we as a country focused on being happy and enjoying what little life we have - finding joy in the little things like fax machines, rather than the wasteful pursuit of always being on top?

swimfar• 4 years ago

I find it funny that this is the assumption for Japan. But if we were talking about how people in the US still use checks (as do other countries), then it's because Americans are dysfunctional and behind the times.

brink2• 4 years ago

Just keep in mind that behind the times != dysfunctional

necrotic_comp• 4 years ago

I think the salarymen would probably disagree with you on "enjoying life".

decafninja• 4 years ago

This.

Japanese corporate culture is abominable. Korean corporate culture is almost as bad. I can’t speak for the rest of East Asia.

kiba• 4 years ago

I find this to be an incorrect assumption.

American society is ossified in many respect while still allowing some innovation, especially if it's on the frontier.

The problem is that we don't want to create new 'frontier' after having already occupied them, preferring that we pull up the ladders on anyone young or disadvantaged at the expense of all of us, leaving if not trillions, billions of dollars on the table.

dymk2• 4 years ago

What joy is there to be had in a fax machine? I think you’re confusing that for nostalgia.

PinkMilkshake• 4 years ago

I was going to post something very similar. Japans relationship with technology feels quite different to me. It seems like if you look at any particular example, you'll see it was advanced until it was simple, reliable, and cheap and then slowed. There isn't a western obsession to relentlessly "upgrade", it's only done when needed.

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

I think the use of faxes is related to the Japanese obsession with personal business relationships. You can't open a bank account without an introduction to the bank manager. You can't rent a cellphone without having a man in a suit hand-deliver it to you, show you how it works, and remind you that it needs to be returned promptly. Faxes are more personal than e-mail; you know that the fax you receive is the result of somebody hand-feeding a piece of paper that they physically signed into a machine, and it went over physical wires connected to a telephone. There's also the Japanese spiritual tradition that every object has a spirit; it's hard to feel spiritually connected to software.

ehnto3• 4 years ago

Related is the importance of the exchange of business cards. In Australia if you gave me a business card, it's entirely pragmatic, it's for me to call you later. I pocket it and never think about it again.

In Japan you often see an intentionality in the inspection of the business card, as if to suggest that you appreciate this very important step in our upcoming business relationship, and I am very impressed by your card and it's credentials.

ehnto3• 4 years ago

I wonder if the Hanko has something to do with it as well. A hanko is a small personal seal that you use to sign documents, you can't hanko an email and although you could print the email up, it's not quite the same experience and that physicality is not implicit like it is in the fax process. E-signatures and the like haven't taken off there, and having to go to various institutions to hanko the paperwork in the flesh is still part of a lot of processes.

At the very least, the hanko is another example of holding on to old processes for reasons other than efficiency and effectiveness.

gfxgirl2• 4 years ago

FWIW the government announced they are trying to ween Japan off the hanko. It became abundantly clear during lockdown, that requiring people to go to various government agencies to get official stamped documents to do work, sign contracts, etc, and to have to pass documents around that require hanko is something that has to be changed if Japan wants to head into the future.

ne0flex• 4 years ago

I work for one of the big Japanese banks in the US. Up until covid, whenever we had to get documents approved by Tokyo, we had to get it stamped, then overnight the physical paper to Japan for management to review and stamp it. Depending on the situation/document, they'd overnight the paper back to the US.

Only after covid did the bank start implementing electronic signatures.

presentation2• 4 years ago

DocuSign actually has a Hanko option with a Hanko design widget to customize it nowadays :)

jakecopp• 4 years ago

A great explanation of Hanko is this podcast episode by 99% Invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/

1_player• 4 years ago

What is interesting is that I've never heard of hanko until today. It seems like it's usage is widespread, everybody carries one in case they need to sign something official. It's surprising how I never heard of or seen these seals ever.

llampx3• 4 years ago

Lots of rose-colored spectacles in this thread about Japan. Lest we forget that it is a society like any other with its pros and cons and its idiosyncrasies.

I live in Germany, possibly #2 for fax machine usage by ossified civil servants and old businesses (aka anything that's not an "app"), and I hate having to use physical letters or fax machines to consider a document properly "sent".

gsich• 4 years ago

The common Fritzbox lets you send a fax as easy as an email.

ghaff• 4 years ago

Faxes are still used for some purposes in the US, probably especially in healthcare (though that's slowly transitioning to electronic transfers).

There can also be physical paperwork involved requiring a particular kind of signature guarantee with financial transfers. After 2 weeks of back and forth involving my brokerage and my local bank, I finally ended up having to go in person to a brokerage office to transfer stock to a different brokerage account.

rob74• 4 years ago

Well yeah, sometimes some technologies take a greater hold in some countries, and persist long after they have disappeared in other countries. Such as the Minitel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel) in France. Or Teletext (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext) in many European countries. But I don't think we should read too much into such technological "relics"...

Findecanor• 4 years ago

I think Teletext is underrated. I much prefer the Swedish television's news on teletext over their news web site.

When there can be only 40×25 characters in a page, each article has to be concise and to the point to be able to fit. Indices are easier to survey. No distracting images or videos.

Browsing used to be slow on older TV sets, but more modern sets cache all pages. On well laid out teletext channels, the most convenient way to browse is using the +/- buttons.

nelgaard• 4 years ago

Yes, and no need for a browser, I have small script that outputs Danish teletext to the terminal

#!/bin/sh wget --quiet -O - http://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttx1.exe?request=$1 |html2text -utf8

furgooswft13• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/Km6bFBSVty4?t=76

tagoregrtst2• 4 years ago

If landlines in the US still supported fax, I’d get a landline (my printer has a fax). I want a landline anyway, but fax is the killer feature.

Every year or so there is something that is just easiest or fastest to submit via fax, the alternative being mail.

BenjiWiebe• 4 years ago

They don't? The CenturyLink landlines around here sure do. (KS)

tagoregrtst2• 4 years ago

Last time I looked a lot of landlines had switched to digital. Then some telcos use lossy compression algorithms that kill fax.

GameOfKnowing• 4 years ago

The author takes a very narrow claim— that fax machines are popular in Japan— and expands it into a weak orientalist takedown of Japan’s objectively advanced society. They even go so far as to acknowledge infrastructure masterworks like Bullet trains only to discount them because of a (still globally used!) piece of office hardware that has fallen out of favor in the US tech sector. Whatever, dude…

redwall_hp• 4 years ago

And...fax machines are heavily used in the medical and legal professions in the US. I have a doctor's card on my desk right now that has a fax number on it, because medical records and forms often need to be faxed. Anyone who's ever had to file a worker's comp or long term disability sort of deal knows the fun of playing fax tag between the company their employer contracts that to and the doctor's office.

That's not even touching on the cult of the magic signature. A piece of paper is suddenly special because someone scribbled something that looks roughly like their name on it, even though that doesn't prove anything.

ezconnect2• 4 years ago

My experience in Japan is they are very bureaucratic. It's actually amazing they have progressed this much. They are also very patient, people use cash and they will count the coins in their own pace in a long line grocery cashier and you won't see any one complain.

froh4• 4 years ago

In reading through the comments, I wonder which generalizations can be drawn about the US habit of paying by cheque. This paper slip that is covering just .1% of all cashless transactions in Germany these days.

I'm amazed at Americans shaking their heads about using fax machines, while sitting over their monthly cheques for rent, etc.

On the other hand, there was a legal obligation for fax use for signature transactions in Germany until legislation said a scanned pdf is equivalent. And fax is still considered privacy conserving, while email is not, so in medical contexts they wind send you a PDF (could be eavesdropped), but they will send you a fax with e g. your lab report.

ubermonkey2• 4 years ago

American check use has been dwindling for decades. It was the elephant in the room when I worked for a transaction risk management firm based on checks in the mid-90s, even. Back then, even as an employee of TeleCheck, the ONLY time I used a paper check at point of sale was my dry cleaner (because she didn't take credit cards and I rarely had much cash only).

Mailed checks -- rent, utilities, etc -- have held on longer, but it's probably been 10 years since I even OWNED checks. My wife has some, because until recently it was the most convenient way to pay her student loans, so if for some reason we needed a check we'd just have her deal with it.

I'm almost 52, and our approach here is pretty normal. All our utilities are paid online. I guess taxes are the only thing we still need a check for.

So, yeah, we shake our heads a fax machines, and the people doing so are also shaking their heads at checks, too.

The notion that fax is somehow safer or more secure than email is utterly laughable, and has been for 20 years. A huge chunk of corporate fax numbers are just gateways to a system that routes a PDF to email. It's literally the same thing. And if it's not, fax is WORSE since it relies on the physical security of the fax machine.

froh4• 4 years ago

Good I'm glad to hear that cheques are used less now.

Regarding security, the logic/claim is that the long distance transport between the organizations is "safe" via phone. The in-house processing on the recipients last mile is their security problem. And the pdf to fax in-house infrastructure "is safe, IT said".

That public internet, dark and sinister, in between the two, is not to be trusted, though. That's the legislatures position over here.

seanmcdirmid2• 4 years ago

I'm amazed at Americans shaking their heads about using fax machines, while sitting over their monthly cheques for rent, etc.

Many Americans no longer pay for their rent by check. Heck, I had to go to the bank last year when somebody wanted me to pay by check...because I hadn't used one for a few years. Many of us don't use cash either...its fun just carrying a phone around these days.

And fax is still considered privacy conserving, while email is not, so in medical contexts they wind send you a PDF (could be eavesdropped), but they will send you a fax with e g. your lab report.

You just don't login to something like Mychart and see the result?

froh4• 4 years ago

Point being: no Germans are sitting over cheques, for anything. They virtually don't exist any more for private persons. The last cheque I've got was from an insurance, a few years back, and it could only be cashed into a checkings account, not cashed out.

I get your MyChart hint. Anyhow, the "digital health file" prototypes were hacked again and again and it's been delayed several times to get to tight privacy.

themadturk2• 4 years ago

In my experience (now perhaps ten or more years outdated), fax is still legally preferable because of the time stamping available to both sender and receiver, giving fax a proof of point-to-point transmission and receipt email doesn't provide.

Also, back then (2010 or so) my employer dealt with a lot of remote sites (logging camps and lumber yard offices) that had POTS but no Internet. That has probably changed a lot.

xnyan• 4 years ago

Use of checks is rapidly dying in the US. My credit card gives 1-3% cashback for purchases, I use it for everything possible and pay the bill in full each month, so no interest.

As late as 2015 some common entities would not reliably accept credit cards (government, very small shops), but that’s almost completely gone now and COVID has pushed most of the remaining holdouts to accept digital payments.

Any situation or credit card doesn’t work such as my mortgage, I use a bank transfer or plain old cash.

post_break• 4 years ago

Japan is both the most advanced and the most backwards when it comes to technology it seems. You've got incredible rail systems and smart payments. Then you have ATMs and banks that turn off at night or around new year. Documents that must be stamped. Did you see how during the pandemic that was a nightmare where the stamp was only in the office in a lock box? Fax machines, paper, single use plastic on everything, etc.

It's like the country is trying to move forward, but still do things the old way because of culture.

ramchip2• 4 years ago

It goes both ways. Going to the US, the toilets make me feel like I went back a hundred years, while other stuff feels like the future...

javajosh• 4 years ago

What's wrong with the toilets?! The Germans put a useless poop shelf in theirs, but are otherwise identical, and the Japanese make you squat over a porcelain trough. Or are you referring to fancy electronic Japanese bidets? Have those taken over "the trough" so thoroughly?

ogogmad2• 4 years ago

This article about the topic is a classic (2008): https://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-t...

Tl;dr: It's the writing system.

ogogmad2• 4 years ago

Relevant. The Ottoman empire got its first Muslim-owned printing press in 1729; nearly 300 years after its invention and widespread adoption in Europe: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/53544/did-the-ot....

[edit] Even better: https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-did-the-o...

hulitu• 4 years ago

That's because it was used mainly to print the Bible (work of devil from their point of view). The west also needed 300 years to disvover algebra (work of muslim barbars ) /s

op00to• 4 years ago

Did I miss something, or did they not talk about fax machines at all?

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

Related Stories