Japanese bureaucracy has a bad rap, but it isn't that bad. There's still paperwork (not much has moved online) but the public servant staff are super helpful and guide you through things and are helpful when there is some blocker. Especially in the past 3-5 years there have big improvements with a lot of paperwork and stuff that required your personal seal has been removed, and the MyNumber card makes doing anything online very easy. I've never ever had to fax anything as people joke about (and a friend in Germany actually had to do)
You know, I would try and defend (South) Africa at least, but I really can't. I won't call it impossible though, again at least for ZA.
In my experience, ZA bureaucracy is simpler than e.g. Germany or Greece, but general operational incompetence and corruption makes it just as slow. It's a tradeoff of more easily understanding what you have to do, but you'll have to sit in a queue for 6 hours and hope they don't tell you "the system is offline".
The closest thing to legal bribery is to go through specialist firms that deal with the bureaucracy for you, for a fee. This is also much faster as they know who's who within each department to get things done faster.
I've had friends request old documents only to learn 8 months later that the archival facility burnt down a few years ago so they don't know what documents they do or don't have. Ask a firm to do it, pay a couple thousand Rand, and they'll get it done within 3 weeks.
I'm not the parent commenter, but no you can't bribe people in Taiwan or Japan.
If I told you the only way to deal with the Canadian government is bribes, would you believe me? Then why do you believe it when talking about equally advanced countries?
My apologies, looks like I need to level up my reading comprehension. I think I am still confused with smabie's authorative sounding comment, then. Why would he say that you can just pay a bribe?
Maybe your information is not up to date.
10-15 years ago you were probably right.
Since then Germany is trending down and Eastern Europe is trending up - and bureaucracy along with it. Digitization, customer friendliness, you name.
Even some random office in Serbia seems more pleasant than dealing with Germany.
Germany is trending towards becoming a has-been, like the UK (with the difference that in the current geopolitical context it's even proving to be an obstacle).
Japanese bureaucracy has a bad rap, but it isn't that bad. There's still paperwork (not much has moved online) but the public servant staff are super helpful and guide you through things and are helpful when there is some blocker. Especially in the past 3-5 years there have big improvements with a lot of paperwork and stuff that required your personal seal has been removed, and the MyNumber card makes doing anything online very easy. I've never ever had to fax anything as people joke about (and a friend in Germany actually had to do)