One of the common impressions of Japan is that it is a high tech society. It is, and it isn’t. It is common for the most senior of senior citizens to carry around a mobile phone, and for everyone else mobile phones are an essential part of life here. Computer and electronics stores are similar to those in the USA – full of lots of gadgets and toys for electronics geeks, and there are plenty of young to middle aged men walking the aisles gazing at them.
But outside of the big cities electronics and high tech play a much smaller part in daily life, and in many ways has a long way to catch up with America. While mobile phones are everywhere, personal computers are comparatively rare. Japan’s society is old and getting older – with a falling birthrate and older people living longer and longer there are a lot of people out there who can’t or don’t want to use computers. One kind of store that is becoming popular is a computer learning shop. I’ve seen them popping up everywhere, and they charge a monthly fee to teach weekly classes to an older clientelle about how to use Microsoft Office, make postcards or use email and the internet.
This trend extends to the company offices – where records are still predominantly paper-based. Huge rooms full of filed papers are common, and a lot of Japanese business culture is focused on stamping approval on pieces of paper and shifting them around. With all this paper flying around, the FAX machine is a very important tool for business and many people I know even have a dedicated FAX machine at home.
So for me this all seems a little old fashioned. Often I am frustrated with businesses and government offices that have not yet moved to the web or email and insist on calling during business hours or sending postcards. Luckily the company I work for, OTC, recently started moving to electronic documents for paperwork and it has made my life (and I’m guessing theirs) much easier.
In our apartment I’ve set up a wireless network connecting two computers, the Wii, a networked hard drive, our stereo system, and our laser printer. Everything works very smoothly until we turn on our microwave oven – it operates on the same frequency as the network and if you are listening to music on the stereo being streamed from the hard drive over the network it can sometimes interrupt the music. Kind of a bummer, but the microwave was here first and we don’t use it enough for this to be a problem.
However, now we’re shopping around for a cordless phone for the new house as our old one is near death (again). Almost all the cordless phones being sold now operate on the same frequency as the network and the microwave, making them a poor choice for my situation. While it is easy to find phones that avoid the interference in other countries, apparently there is no market for them in Japan. I talked to a person at Panasonic the other day about it, and she acknowledged that although their international models support other frequencies, their Japanese models do not, and they have no plans to change that.
Call it future culture shock, but it seems lately that things are way behind around here…
