INSIDE JAPAN
Moving with the Times
Irwin Wong
by Erika Woodward Although his wife and former classmates still do, 75-year-old Shizuo Daigoh doesn’t communicate by fax anymore, if he can help it. “Because I’m working for a foreign company, I am not the norm,” he says, tapping the screen of his iPad as he checks his e-mail in the Winter Garden one November afternoon. Having left university in 1960, the tech-savvy Club Member says that of the 20 students in his graduating class, “only 10 people know how to use a push-button telephone” and “only four people can use e-mail.” For many in Daigoh’s generation, sending and receiving paper messages, with an option to handwrite them, is simpler than the electronic alternatives. Since early word processers did not support the Japanese language, many people never became acquainted with a keyboard. “Japanese people basically cannot type,” Daigoh says. “Handwriting is easier.” Fellow Member Kazuakira Nakajima, 69, attended typing school after work as a young man, and he attributes his preference for e-mail to his early mastery of the keyboard. “I had no sense of resistance when e-mail came. Also, I’m much faster than my secretary—I can type 60 characters a minute,” says the financial consultant, who has removed his fax number from his business card. “That’s progressive!” chimes in Member Donald Soo. The 54-year-old American says that many of the small businesses he works with prefer corresponding by fax. “The administrative system in Japan is very much about filing, filing and filing,” he says. “The usage of any technology very much hinges upon people’s mindset and how ingrained the existing administrative system is.” Believing a technology’s lifespan depends largely on the age of its users, Daigoh makes a prediction: “When people my age pass away, then the fax will disappear.” o
Shizuo Daigoh and Kazuakira Nakajima
population, these figures are perhaps not too surprising. It’s also a question of culture and etiquette. E-mails and other electronic messages are sometimes perceived as insincere or cold. They’re too easy to dash off. What else could explain the continued popularity of handwritten nengajo (New Year’s greeting cards) in an era when easy-to-use software can create customized versions in a fraction of the time? “Each year, I attend an awards ceremony that includes members of the Japanese royal family,” says Thomas Shockley, a longtime Tokyo resident and facilitator with Japan Intercultural Consulting. “Until two years ago, an announcement with a revert postcard RSVP would be included. Last year, they switched to fax revert. I asked why recently. ‘Much easier and lower cost’ was their basic answer. I asked why not request to respond by some online solution, having in mind the US Embassy approach. ‘Impolite’ was the response.” Faxes are also hanging on in part because of the Japanese language itself. Due to the complexity of its many Chinese characters and hiragana and katakana alphabets, typing Japanese was a complex task until the late 1980s. Toshiba introduced the first Japanese word processor in 1978.
It cost ¥6.3 million and weighed 180 kilograms. The price and footprint of these machines dropped significantly, but by the time the Internet was booming overseas, ordinary Japanese were only just becoming familiar with typing their language. PCs and then mobile phones followed, and now the auto-complete function on Japanese phones makes typing far less laborious. So how much longer does the fax have? In an informal poll of six small, medium and large companies, Shockley found that fax use has basically ended at the larger firms but continues among smaller ones; he estimates faxes could remain for another 10 years. In contrast, the likes of telecoms giant SoftBank are going paperless, eliminating dedicated fax machines altogether. “It’s become possible to do anything with a PC, and it seems like just a matter of time until faxes disappear,” says Katsue Iwasawa, head of LEX, a small communications and translation firm in Akasaka that still uses its fax machine every day. The reliability of faxes and their personal touch isn’t lost on her: “Why are they still around? To put it simply, consider why phones themselves are still around.” o Hornyak is a Montreal-based freelance journalist.
A look at culture and society 35