That can be useful if you feel Unicode doesn't represent what you want to say - for instance, if you can only communicate in ASCII symbols you can't invent any new symbols, you can "only" build them out of ASCII art.

It's mostly because Japan is bad at web technology and APIs though. They also love gratuitous complexity; you've seen their websites and how every page is covered in stuff, but the URLs themselves are less like "youtube.com" and more like "blahblahblah.bsd.unix.nicovideo.jp/several/tech/buzzwords.jsp".

Now do checkbooks and the US

US banking still stuck in the 70s and encourages rent-seeking third-parties to fill the gaps.

How widespread is checkbook use in the US compared to the fax use in Japan?

Asking because I had a bank account for almost a decade now, and I only had to use the checkbook twice, and it was pretty niche use-cases. I still have the same checkbook that I got back then, and I think I won't be able to go through the entirety of it even in multiple lifetimes.

Cannot comment on how widespread the usage of fax in Japan (since I haven't lived there myself), but, from what I heard from other people, you pretty much need to have access to a fax machine.

I haven't used Fax for a decade as a Japan local resident individual , but maybe some businesses still heavily use Fax.

Thanks for answering this. My original comment wasn't meant as a retort, I legitimately had no idea, so I asked here. Because on reddit, one can easily get an impression that one needs a fax machine access in Japan just as much as one needs a car in the majority of the US. I kind of suspected it was a typical exaggeration, but wasn't sure.