[skinpop]

The lack of digital government services has been a real pain for me. I've often ended up in situations where I had to drive around to a bunch of different places to get official documents printed out and stamped for me. In general there's also a lot of situations where you have to fill out a bunch of forms with information they already should have.

In Sweden those sort of things can be handled online. And I don't even remember the last time I had to fill out a form with my information there because it just happens automatically with the personal number system.

I definitely hate this part about Japan. Then there's other crap like how services often won't accept bank account names registered with roman characters. But banks here won't allow you to open an account unless the account name matches your immigration card exactly, so if your name is written in roman characters then you are stuck with that, which basically creates a catch 22 type of situation.

Finally, digital services here, especially the public ones are typically abysmal.

In a nutshell, dealing with Japanese authorities and their apps and forms and stamps and whatnot feels like you are interfacing with a manual, paper based system from the 60's but with the added unpleasantness of user hostile apps and webservices that seem to have been built using a 90's tech stack even though they just came out in the last few years.