[usui]

I read this piece when it came out in 2022. Maybe it should be marked with "(2022)". Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146

I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine, but at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work. The floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors. If tech-savvy users can't even make it work, I feel really bad for the struggling elders forced to use those sites.

[Multicomp]

I forget if it was Samsung or Sony, but somewhere along the way on my internet journey, someone claimed, without evidence, and thus I have none either, that the incentive structure for having prestige jobs at large technology companies was always in hardware design and software was seen as easier and more low class.

So since nobody will get any promotions for running good software, they are not incentivized to run good software, and therefore they do just enough to get by?

[shiroiuma]

This is historically the reason software engineering in Japan has lagged and there's such a talent shortage (leading companies like mine to hire mostly foreign software engineers). I've heard it's changing, but it'll take a long time to catch up.

[seanmcdirmid]

When I was working for Microsoft China, many of our foreign engineers were Korean and Japanese, who were in China for the higher paychecks.

[usui]

Yes this is true and it might possibly be true for the rest of East Asia though I'm not sure. Software is considered intangible and thus low value that anyone can do, whereas hardware is a real "thing" that you can hold in your hands, and is therefore more prestigious. Well, this way of thinking has made things into the current state.

[ghosty141]

This was and partly is the attitude you can find in german non-software businesses where software is gaining more and more influenxe. For example car manufacturing.

[Jn2G3Np8]

I found this out when buying a Japan Rail Pass for a trip a few years ago, blew my mind.

https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ only works 4:00–23:30 Japan time.

[fsh]

This is especially funny since the JR Pass cannot be purchased by residents of Japan.

[usui]

Yeah this is probably downstream of the fact that if you visit any of the individual JR sites from the expandable map at the bottom, you'll discover they're all down at this time as well. Let's scrap the website and make a staffed phone line or fax machine with operating hours.

[fsh]

Considering the state of japanese IT, there is probably a person typing each reservation from the website into a 1980s mainframe.

[z2]

After receiving the orders that were actually printed from an Internet Explorer 6 only website, and faxed over from another office before being re-scanned in along with a barcode that usually failed to make it over the fax, hence the need to hand-type things. True story (not for JR specifically, but circa 2013)

[cedws]

I've also had issues topping up my (virtual) Suica card late at night before.

[windows2020]

Maybe that's when they run all those crazy legacy jobs, but they politely shut the site down for it.

[WD-42]

Anyone who has attempted to play Final Fantasy XIV beyond the free trial has experienced this. Their subscription management web app is so incredibly bad it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to purchase a subscription. I wonder how much revenue they lose simply from people giving up.

[BariumBlue]

I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.

The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.

At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.

[WD-42]

So you didn’t even get to the final boss, purchasing a sub.

While I played it I always had this dirty feeling imagining what the backend code must look like. Sends chills down my spine.

[abustamam]

I played on my Playstation when I played a few years back, fortunately it was a seamless process! As parent comment said though, subscription process was almost user hostile for some reason.

[abustamam]

I was wondering why the process was so convoluted. I thought it was because I was doing it from my phone and they just had a poor mobile site. Well, apparently they have a poor desktop site that has poor mobile support!

[bigstrat2003]

Let me tell you, as bad as the FF14 subscription process is, it's nothing compared to what they had for FF11 back in the day. We have it good!

[vimda]

A lot of Japanese websites also have to be tremendously over provisioned because of how regimented the country is. A friend of mine worked infrastructure for a local newspaper, and every day at 6PM they'd send a push notification to all their subscribers and had to provision for that peak. When he asked if they could smooth out traffic, send the notification to some folks a minute before, or a minute after he was almost thrown out of the room. "Japan runs on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. On time".

[multjoy]

The UK driving licence authority (DVLA) also has a period in which you can’t conduct a range of transactions overnight, but that’s because it interfaces with systems that still run batch jobs overnight and the cost of making it all 24/7 simply wasn’t worth it considering the demand.

[pixl97]

Really having common maintenance windows makes things way easier. If you already have a service with a limited geographical range its not bad.

[abustamam]

A pet peeve of mine — undated blogs :(

[bandrami]

The US Social Security Administration website is available from 6am to 8pm, Monday to Friday (or at least it was that way a few years ago)

[shakna]

The service hours seem a bit wider nowadays [0], but not 24/7.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/myssa-static/rel_1.0/offHoursPopup.html

[mananaysiempre]

I’ve heard such things in the US were because of accessibility law that required the website (for the general population) to work no better than the associated call center (for the people who can’t interact with the website for whatever reason).

On one hand, that seems obviously stupid. On the other, I don’t see how you could phrase a legal requirement of this nature.

[bandrami]

That's better than my assumption, which was that it was running off the Visual Foxpro instance on somebody's desktop and that guy had to be logged in for it to work.

[bryanrasmussen]

this is also relatively common in Denmark, at least for government sites. One common thing you see (saw, haven't noticed in the last couple years) in Danish .gov sites is queuing where you need to wait some time before you are allowed in to use a site.

[corranh]

Getting ready for a trip to Japan, I spent an embarrassing amount of time troubleshooting failures to load a Suica (train/transit) NFC card on a phone before realizing it just doesn’t work a few hours a night Tokyo time.

[art0rz]

The Suica app doesn't even work on my Pixel 10 Pro, since it requires an Android phone with some sort of Japan-specific hardware (FeliCa/Osaifu-Keitai technology, whatever that is, I'm assuming some special NFC or secure enclave sort of thing).

[socalgal2]

One of the worst sites in existence is the Japanese Visa site they direct people to to make QR codes for when you land in Japan as a tourist. It's atrocious.

https://services.digital.go.jp/en/visit-japan-web/

I hate it so much I kind of wish I could volunteer to fix it. I suspect the process though would be torture

Note: experience on mobile is bad. I don't remember if desktop is better.

[pezezin]

I live in Japan and every time I go through the airport I refuse to use the QR code customs forms, the old paper based form is so much easier...

[ezoe]

Probably the old habit of batch processing.

[nekooooo]

if you're talking about the train booking site going down -- struggling elders are still using the face to face or phone support. they probably have never made an online reservation.