In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On

It appears that the transition to keyboard remains seriously difficult.  I am not sure where this will end up.  Actually switching to a keyboard friendly system is surely the best option and has already been developed.  One will still master the usual system but also master the alternative.  This is particularly practical for keyboard teaching while traditional ideograms are best done as a hand craft.


It will also facilitate study in other languages as well.


Yet the mere idea that thermal roll fax still sells 1700,000 is amazing..

In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On


By MARTIN FACKLERFEB. 13, 2013


Yuichiro Sugahara, whose company delivers bento lunchboxes, mostly through fax orders. Credit Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-is-anything-but-a-relic.html


TOKYO — Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But it also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology — the fax machine — that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks and cassette tapes in the dustbin of outmoded technologies.


Last year alone, Japanese households bought 1.7 million of the old-style fax machines, which print documents on slick, glossy paper spooled in the back. In the United States, the device has become such an artifact that the Smithsonian is adding two machines to its collection, technology historians said.


“The fax was such a success here that it has proven hard to replace,” said Kenichi Shibata, a manager at NTT Communications, which led development of the technology in the 1970s. “It has grown unusually deep roots into Japanese society.”


The Japanese government’s Cabinet Office said that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011.
 

Yuichiro Sugahara learned the hard way about his country’s deep attachment to the fax machine, which the nation popularized in the 1980s. A decade ago, he tried to modernize his family-run company, which delivers traditional bento lunchboxes, by taking orders online. Sales quickly plummeted.


Today, his company, Tamagoya, is thriving with the hiss and beep of thousands of orders pouring in every morning, most by fax, many with minutely detailed handwritten requests like “go light on the batter in the fried chicken” or “add an extra hard-boiled egg.”


“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” said Mr. Sugahara, 43.


Japan’s reluctance to give up its fax machines offers a revealing glimpse into an aging nation that can often seem quietly determined to stick to its tried-and-true ways, even if the rest of the world seems to be passing it rapidly by. The fax addiction helps explain why Japan, which once revolutionized consumer electronics with its hand-held calculators, Walkmans and, yes, fax machines, has become a latecomer in the digital age, and has allowed itself to fall behind nimbler competitors like South Korea and China.


“Japan has this Galápagos effect of holding on to some things they’re comfortable with,” said Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian who is writing a book on the machine’s rise and fall. “Elsewhere, the fax has gone the way of the dodo.”


In Japan, with the exception of the savviest Internet start-ups or internationally minded manufacturers, the fax remains an essential tool for doing business. Experts say government offices prefer faxes because they generate paperwork onto which bureaucrats can affix their stamps of approval, called hanko. Many companies say they still rely on faxes to create a paper trail of orders and shipments not left by ephemeral e-mail. Banks rely on faxes because, they say, customers are worried about the safety of their personal information on the Internet.


Even Japan’s largest yakuza crime syndicate, the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, has used faxes to send notifications of expulsion to members, the police say.

Photo



 
A decade ago, Tamagoya tried to shift to online sales of its bento lunches, but business suffered. Credit Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times




After the deadly earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011, there was a small boom in fax sales to replace machines that had been washed away. One of the hottest sellers is a model that is powered by batteries so it will keep working during power failures caused by natural disasters.


At Tamagoya, Mr. Sugahara has turned his company’s reliance on the fax and standard telephones into an art form. Every morning, orders for about 62,000 lunches pour in, about half by fax. Most of those lunches are cooked and put onto trucks even before the last order is taken. A small army of 100 fax and telephone operators carefully coordinate deliveries, and fewer than 60 lunches — or 0.1 percent — are wasted.


Every day, Mr. Sugahara hangs up some of the handwritten messages that arrive by fax to remind his staff to keep pleasing customers. These faxed exhortations are on a wall near the sole employee who operates the computer that monitors the company’s Web site, which accounts for a mere 5 percent of orders. “Seeing the handwriting is a reminder that the bento’s 1,000-year history was built on personal ties to the customers,” Mr. Sugahara said.


Handwritten messages have long been a necessity in Japan, where the written language is so complex, with two sets of symbols and 2,000 characters borrowed from Chinese, that keyboards remained impractical until the advent of word processors in the 1980s. Faxes continue to appeal to older Japanese, who often feel uncomfortable with keyboards, experts say.


At the same time, clinging to old ways also forces Japan to accept higher levels of inefficiency. At 114 Bank, a midsize company with an office in the center of Nihonbashi, Tokyo’s answer to Wall Street, most small-business customers still prefer to do their banking by fax.


To ease their concerns about theft of personal information, the bank introduced a high-security system that occupies an entire table in the center of its busy office. The setup includes a two-foot pole with a red light on top to warn of a transmission error. Every time a fax is sent to a new number, two employees must be on hand, one to type the number, the other to ensure that the number was correctly dialed.


“The long history of the fax just makes it seem safer in a world of hackers and viruses,” said Kiichiro Yoshii, the bank’s deputy branch manager.


Japan’s love affair with the fax began during the nation’s economic heyday in the 1980s, when the machines became a household appliance more common than automatic dishwashers. Japan quickly dominated global fax production, making 90 percent of the tens of millions of machines built, according to the Communications and Information Network Association of Japan, an industry group that includes fax makers.


But its very success has made the fax a hard habit to kick. The demographics of aging have also played a role, because the generations that lived through the nation’s glory years have clung to their faxes. In fact, until 2009, the number of fax machines in private dwellings was still rising, a reflection of the dwindling numbers of young people embracing new technologies, experts say.


“Demographics have left Japan dominated by older generations who are still more likely to have a fax number than an e-mail address,” said Shigeyuki Miya, a vice president at the communications group.


Mr. Miya said that 2009 was a turning point because of the introduction of two devices, the smartphone and the tablet computer. The devices proved popular among younger Japanese in a way that PCs and keyboards never did, experts say.


But Japan now faces new fears of a growing divide between the fax and postfax generations. NTT, the giant domestic telephone company that originally helped develop affordable fax machines, has tried to bridge that gap. It is offering services that allow older Japanese to use their fax machines to send messages to their children’s and grandchildren’s smartphones, where they appear as attachments to e-mails.


“We have been with the fax from the beginning,” said Mr. Shibata, the NTT official. “We want to keep the fax evolving so it won’t disappear.”