The streets were immaculately clean, but they put their bags of garbage right on the curb where everyone could see them blocking the way.
We saw a demonstration of Asimo, the human-acting robot, which could hop on on leg at this point. And then we would go to get food and they only accept cash.
There were "smoking only" areas on the streets (Shibuya for example), as a way to corral and even shame smokers. And yet most places accommodated indoor smoking.
We could go to restaurants and pre-order from a vending machine and give the ticket to the chefs, but in those same shops, along with most coffee shops (even the western ones), they didn't have easy access wifi.
Habits are difficult to change. Cultures must be even more difficult.
I think my biggest takeaway from the USA was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.
They have dirty streets, but then keep their garbage tidy when throwing it away?!
On the one hand, they don't really have robots, on the other hand you can survive completely without cash by paying for absolutely anything by card.
Even ordinary little restaurants have free wifi, but nowhere did I see a pre-order machine. They hadn't even heard of them, and we've had those since at least the 70's.
With the robots, I think it's more of an issue of deciding what type of robot is "right". Do we want to focus on robots that can walk and act like humans? Or those that can make ordering food easier? Cash wasn't difficult to deal with, but it's tough to argue that cards and magnets aren't the future.
I don't want to come off as someone who says cash is dead in 20 years. It was really easy paying that way, and doesn't have the tracking aspect like the US has, whatever that's worth.
But still seems like Japan is missing things.
It bugged me so much to walk through for instance Liverpool Street Station, or others, and not finding a trash bin to throw away whatever petty trash I'd collected on the way (napkins, chewing gum etc.) When someone pointed out the terrorism aspect of trash bins it was a bit of a revelation to me, and since then I've had much more respect for the people involved in street planning, including the design of public trash bins and such.
Other differences definitively aren't so clear. The trash is a good example, but a more glaring difference is how little crime they have. Crime is almost non-existent and there are no firearms, this can make parts of the US and large parts of the word seem comparatively barbaric.
But still technical anonymity sounds like a weak justification for technical obsolescence. For cash, credit card systems on retail don't even get your name... I think it could be arranged online even with traditional systems. Specially if it was a national demand, this is the kind of thing you can force companies to do with laws (or they would develop themselves).
I think a more obvious explanation would be related to their insularity -- they are probably the least integrated developed country (due to geographical, linguistic and cultural reasons). Some of those technologies by themselves aren't really that significant for personal productivity (I think that can be another factor), but combined they make a big difference I think.
I think that differs between prefectures? I've often been to the south (Kyushu) and there each apartment building has a small building in front where the garbage bags go, and in that tiny building are several "zones" for different kinds of garbage. The garbage men just take the bags out of that building.
I don't know that it's the right way to put it — after all mayhaps things are just as odd the other way around — but some things were definitely jarring, like the ubiquitous vending machines (cheap and with cold and hot drinks) next to houses with no central heating (heated room by room mostly with kerosene heaters) or the weird ubiquity of "busybody" jobs (e.g. any form of road encumbrance having one person on each side directing traffic, and we crossed a lot of roadworks).
I definitely noticed the busybody jobs. Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess? Trash collectors on the streets sweeping leaves into their collections. People guarding semi-obstructed parking exits to make sure no accidents occur, no matter how easy it is for the drivers to see the sidewalk.
Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about.
They act as "pushers" during rush hour. Actually shoving people in so that the train doors can close.
And that you don't make the other way around, was to note that others may see some of the things in our own cultures as way out of date while others are surprisingly futuristic, we wouldn't know because for us that's just the normal "now", we've grown with these things there or developing so them meshing together is normal
Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.
Japan's entry into the PC market was timed in sync with the 80s boom economy, which meant every conglomerate on the islands turned it into a fractured, incompatible mess. Even imported standards, like the IBM PC standard, were turned into incompatible islands of technology like the FM-Towns. MSX was the big hope for a standard, but for various reasons failed to get to market in the U.S. (the biggest market) and died like everybody else did when IBM PCs came to market (notable exception Apple).
This meant there was no real PC market in place for the internet to attach to. While everybody else everywhere in the world was getting PCs specifically to send email and surf the early web. Japan funneled the internet into impossibly limited flip phones, turning it into not much more than an AOL-like information portal that the carriers could have just provided themselves -- but also meant it took longer to become the kind of full-on cultural phenomenon it became elsewhere.
Smart phones are, in many ways, a miniaturization and untethering of both previous technological waves and Japan, stuck using very limited internet on flip phones and the occasional PC didn't catch on to this trend.
Thus the first wave of PCs caused a boom in the U.S., the second wave of the Internet caused a wave everywhere but Japan, and the third wave caused a boom in the U.S. (Apple again) and now caught up South Korea (which coincidentally imported the Internet and PCs as a single phenomenon during their later economic boom so they had the environment where smartphones made sense) and to some extent Taiwan.
Japan missed all of this stuff and the catchup efforts never made it off the islands. Even in Japan, the top smartphones are iPhones and Japanese Internet sites look like late 90s design.
Developing export channels for physical goods is almost hilariously expensive. If you haven't just been doing it, getting a new channel going is very hard -- and having few channels for export of PCs and smartphones and an already well developed and competitive global market meant that the incentive to export Japanese made PCs and Smartphones no longer existed (this combined with a general downswing in the Japanese economy making access to capital investment for export pushes more difficult). Japan also spent the 80s dictating how the rest of the world was supposed to do business with them, while other export driven economies were more pragmatic in their dealings with everybody else and so the kinds of relationship building everybody else does was foreign to aging Japanese businessmen.
This all combines for the both the very inward looking domestic market only focus Japan's tech industry has taken over the last 10-20 years and the lack of general technological and cultural development clearly visible in Japan. It's not that the Japanese are stupid or not creative, just that fortune didn't favor them and their stuck waiting for better conditions to coincide with the next technological wave.
The horrible web design to me can only be partly explained by that though. As a people with an special eye to detail and design this is simply incomprehensible to me...
http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g298184-i861-k6165919-A...
I get what you're trying to say, but that literally means the present day.
I don't think their PCs are particularly backwards either - they have some ultrabooks that never make their way to the US that are pretty sexy. Component pricing is a bit more expensive than the US (about 30% even with Yen devaluation) but you can say the same for just about anywhere in the world (heck, I'm in TW right now and even the best pricing is at parity w US pricing, on average it's 20% more even though half the brands are HQ'd here).
For a time last year due to the Yen devaluation, prices for Apple products was ~15% cheaper than stateside.
High-tech/lo-tech and expensive/cheap are different axes. Everyone in Japan was doing the whole text message thing 15 years ago, back when most of us were just coming to terms with email. The same can be said about GPS navigation.
Thinking about it, how much software do you know that has been written in Japan (I can think of Ruby, games don't count as they fall under game console, think PC software), compared say to Western Europe or US. It would seem they are at the same level as any of those countries and there would an equal distribution of software written but that's not the case.
Quora has an illustration[0] of a keyboard with english and hiragana characters mapped, and conversion to kanji by software. It seems awkward, but not to the degree that it would stifle adoption considerably. Admittedly, this is a naive view on my part.
[0]https://www.quora.com/How-do-computer-users-type-in-Japanese
I'm reasonably confident you can drop it, because it doesn't make any sense and doesn't actually match the country.
http://www.theonion.com/article/earthquake-sets-japan-back-t...