[hnfong]

There's probably also a cultural perspective, where people are generally more ready to defer to authority. Say for example the boss of a company is an old man who's been with the company for 50 years... and he doesn't want to change how the receipts are processed... and nobody will challenge him.

[rvnx]

And also money/business. These custom seals are a big business and changing that may create unhappy business people. Other things are “traditions”, like you have to pay a mandatory sum of money to NHK or to the “committee that organizes the life of the street”

[glandium]

Speaking of seals and traditions. Not all companies do that, but there's a tradition that on documents multi-sealed, each seal is rotated by some angle that depends on how low/high in the hierarchy people are, with the topmost being vertical and the lower rank you get, the more the seal is at an angle, as if it were bowing.

That has been mimicked in electronic seals, I kid you not.

[kalleboo]

The government has already massively reduced the dependency on seals with no pushback https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13781455

The licence fee isn't exactly a Japanese tradition, it was literally modeled after the BBC. There's even an anti-NHK political party

A local committee for upkeep of the neighborhood was also a thing in my parents neighborhood in Sweden, and the US has it even more formalized into HOAs

[glandium]

The seal engraver cooperative associations did make noise, unsurprisingly.

Edit: FYI, the NHK party changed its name for the 10th time and doesn't contain NHK in its name anymore.