CNN
–
When you think of Tokyo, you might think of films like “Akira” or “Ghost of the Seashell,” depicting neon-lit skyscrapers and its world-famous bullet train system, or futuristic Japan filled with intelligent robots and holograms.
But there is a more common side to Japan that can’t be found anywhere in these cyberpunk films. This includes fax machines, floppy disks and personalized ink stamps. It includes artefacts that have long disappeared in other developed countries, but in Japan it has stubbornly persistent.
For everyday residents, the delay in digital technology and subsequent bureaucracy is at best inconvenient and, at worst, they want to tear their hair apart.
“Japanese banks are portals to hell,” one Facebook user wrote to a group of foreigners in their local group. The commenter quips ironically: “Maybe sending a fax will help.”
The scale of the issue has become horrifyingly clear as the Japanese government struggled to deal with the national crisis with its clumsy digital tools.
Since then, they have launched dedicated efforts to fill that gap, including newly created digital agencies and many new initiatives. But they have arrived at the technology race 36 years after the arrival of World Wide Web, and decades behind, more than half a century after the first email was sent.
Now, as the countryside competes to change itself, questions remain. What took so long and can they still catch up?
It wasn’t always the case. Japan was the purpose of global acclaim in the 1970s and 1980s, with companies such as Sony, Toyota, Panasonic and Nintendo becoming popular names. Japan has brought world beloved devices like Walkman and games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros.
But it changed by the turn of the century with the rise of computers and the Internet.
The world was transforming into a software-driven economy, but “Japan was slow to adapt to software and services with its hardware strengths,” said Colonel Kawashi, director of the University of Tokyo’s Economic Security and Policy Innovation Program.
A variety of factors have made the problem worse, he said. Japan has not invested sufficiently in information and communication technology, and as its electronics industry shrinks, Japanese engineers flocked to foreign companies.
This left the government with low digital literacy and a shortage of skilled high-tech workers. Over time, various ministries and agencies adopted their own patchwork IT strategies, but no unified government promotion. Stamp Used to validate identity.
There were also cultural factors.
“Japanese companies are known for their risk aversion culture, seniority-based … hierarchical systems and slow, consensus-driven decision-making processes, all of which hinder innovation,” Kawai said.
And thanks to Japan’s plunge birth rate, it’s far older than young people. This distinctive proportion of elderly people means broader distrust of new technologies, vigilance of digital fraud, and preferences for traditional methods such as: Stamp, “There is relatively little demand or pressure on digital services,” Kawai said.
That indifference was widespread, said Jonathan Coopersmith, professor emeritus of history at Texas A&M University. Small and medium-sized businesses and individuals were not forced to switch from fax machines to computers. Why buy a new expensive machine and learn how to use it when the fax works fine and everyone in Japan uses it?
We found that large businesses and institutions, such as banks and hospitals, have switchovers that can be too disruptive for everyday services. “The bigger you get, the harder it becomes, especially to change the software,” Coopersmith said.
It also caused a legal headache. New technologies require new laws, such as how electric scooters have encouraged new road regulations, or how countries around the world are trying to legislate deepfakes and AI copyrights after the AI boom. Japan’s digitalization had to change thousands of regulations, Coopersmith estimates, lawmakers simply had no incentive to do so. After all, that doesn’t mean that digitalization isn’t an important issue driving votes in elections.
He summed it up: “Why do I want to be part of the digital world when I don’t need you?”
Pandemic push
As a result, for decades, Japan remained old technology, if any other advancement, creating the ultimate contradiction.
Japan has world-class robotics and aerospace industry, with features of everyday life that tend to be respectful, with safe and clean public spaces, ubiquitous vending machines, convenience stores, widely accessible public transport, and comprehensive bullet train systems.
The digital obstacles look even more severe in comparison.
In 2018, the then-Cybersecurity Minister of Japan raised anger and distrust when he claimed that he had never used a computer because his secretary had done “that thing” before going back to his remarks a few days later.
And until 2019, the last company in Japan still operating Pocket ended up halting services. It’s decades after personal messaging devices have become obsolete by mobile phones.
The prevalence of old technology also produced endless bureaucracy. You may need to open a bank account or register a home. Stamp The stickers should be requested directly by visiting the local council, along with documents of personal information, Kawai said.
Ultimately, there was a global pandemic to ultimately force change. Japan’s technological gap has become clear as the national and local governments would be overwhelmed without the digital tools to streamline the processes.
In May 2020, months after the virus began ramping globally, the Japanese Ministry of Health launched an online portal for hospitals rather than relying on handwritten faxes, phone calls and emails.
And even so, the hiccups persisted. The contact tracing app had a month-long system error that failed to notify people of possible exposure, public broadcaster NHK reported. Adapting to remote work and school was challenging, as many people never used file sharing services or video tools like Zoom.
In one heart-warming case of 2022, the Japanese town mistakenly routed the entire Covid Relief Fund of about 46.3 million yen ($322,000) to a single man’s bank account. According to NHK, this stems from the fact that the bank is given both a floppy disk of information and a paper request form, but by the time the authorities realized their mistakes, the man had already staked most of the money.
For people under the age of 35, a floppy disk is a magnetic memory strip wrapped in plastic physically inserted into a computer. Usually, each store up to 1.44MB of data. This is less than the average resolution photo on your iPhone.
The situation has become so bad that at one point, Takuya Hirai, appointed to the newly created role of Minister of Digital Transformation in 2021, described handling of the pandemic as a “digital defeat.”
Thus, digital agencies were born. This is a division tasked with speeding up Japan, born of a “combination of fear and opportunity,” Coopersmith said.
Created in 2021, it launched a series of initiatives, including deploying a smart version of Japan’s Social Security Cards and seeking more cloud-based infrastructure.
Last July, the digital agency ultimately declared victory in “war on floppy disks,” eliminating disks from all government systems.
However, the pain was also increasing. At one point, the government sought the public for ideas about metaverse through a complex system that required them to download Excel spreadsheets, fill out details, and send emails to the ministry.
After the move gained light corn and distrust on social media, Digital Minister Tarocono wrote on Twitter:
Kawai said the government has made solid progress and companies have rushed to follow, hiring many external contractors and consultants to help overhaul the system.
Masahiro goto is one such consultant. As part of the Nomura Research Institute (NRI) Digital Transformation Team, he has helped large Japanese companies across all industries adapt to the digital world. From designing new business models to adopting new internal systems.
These clients often “want to move forward, but I’m not sure how I’ll go about it,” he told CNN. “Many people still use older systems that require a system that is approaching a lot of maintenance, or end-of-service life. Often, it’s time for them to reach out to us for help.”
NRI consultants are in high demand. The number of companies reaching out to services, especially over the past five years, “are definitely increasing year by year,” Goto said. And justification: For many years, Japanese companies have outsourced their IT needs. This means there is a lack of internal skills to completely digitize.
“Essentially, they want their business to be more efficient and I want them to actively adopt digital technology as a means of survival,” he said. “In the end, improving productivity is essential as Japan’s population continues to decline.”
According to local media, certain pockets are reluctant.
Something like Stamp A person who is rooted in tradition and customs and who gives to children when some parents are older may be difficult to phase out given their cultural importance.
The pace of progress is an ambitious digital agency to drive regulatory reforms, and it also depends on lawmakers’ prioritizing digitalization when creating future budgets, Kawai said. It is also the fact that Japan is catching up to the moving goal post as new technologies advance in other parts of the world.
“This will be a continuing challenge as digital technology in 2025 is different from digital technology in 2030 and 2035,” Coopersmith said.
However, experts are optimistic. At this rate, Kawai estimates that Japan can catch up with Westerners in five to ten years.
And finally, there is a public hunger as more and more companies accept cashless payments and deploy new online services.
“People generally want to be digitalized for sure,” Kawai said. “I’m sure young people, or the public, prefer to get digital as soon as possible.”
