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by XorNot 717 days ago
I think this is sort of how Japan is often thought of as "land of the future" because where was a brief period around the 2000s where new tech adoption sort of got a little ahead of the US, but what people really missed was that they weren't ahead so much as just...kind of different?

And the reality today is that it'll seem practically backwards to a Westerner - i.e. tons of paper forms and bureaucracy for things like banking and rental applications.
2 comments
sbarre 717 days ago
I was in Japan in 2008 and the cellphones there were from the future! I remember being awed seeing people watching TV on the subway on their phones..

There was a bunch of infrastructure and services provided by the actual phone company NTT DoCoMo (as opposed to generally over the Internet) that let people watch shows, play games, shop, etc.. all on their mobile devices. Stuff that we do now every day, but this was almost 20 years ago.

They also had phones built for this purpose, like ones that had rotating screens that went into landscape mode (imagine holding a "T"-shaped device) for watching TV..

So it certainly felt like they were ahead, but you're right, it was a very different approach with everything coming from the phone company itself, and one that wasn't set up to stay competitive or stay ahead..

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Sakos 717 days ago
Other examples of this are the Satellaview for the SNES and the 64DD for the Nintendo 64, both of which were only launched in Japan. The Satellaview let you download games and the 64DD let you browse the internet. Apparently they'd also planned to have multiplayer online gaming for the 64DD, but that was never released.
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krageon 717 days ago
On an infrastructure level Japan is literally not even in the same reality as the US. The infrastructure works, everything is clean and works, the toilets are usable and good. The mobile internet infrastructure is honestly fine and most likely better than what you'd be able to get in the US (especially as a foreigner).

It will not seem backwards to a "Westerner" today. The only place where you'd really encounter forms as a human being is in government interactions (and possibly banking), which is not unusual or even particularly backwards.

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