The Old School Otaku Lounge

davemerrill wrote:I agree that an aging population is going to present a giant whack of serious problems, and that Japan is going to have to take a hard look at its immigration policies and see if they can't make some changes. On the other hand, if any country can handle tough challenges, it's Japan.

Challenges, yes. Changes? Hmmm.... [cue teeth sucking]...

I dunno if this has any bearing on the discussion, but one thing I did notice in Tokyo was OVER-employment. Shops had two and three clerks when one was necessary, that kind of thing.

Indeed. How many construction workers "guiding traffic" at each construction site? It's a joke, but keeps employment up. However, it also keeps the cost up. There's an old saying (which I coined) which states "you can't produce anything cheaply in Japan". Nobody has proven me wrong yet. Part of the reason why is their refusal to let machines do peoples jobs. There is upside to it (attention to detail is excellent) however, I think the downside outweighs it. High cost... businesses don't adapt to a new world, etc.

Give Japan time, in 15 years we'll be back to where we were before they blew out their bubble economy and everybody will be quoting terrible Michael Crichton novels about the dangers of Japan buying everything in the world.

Dunno... I'm not so optimistic. At least not on that scale. Japan's had every chance to wake up and make big changes, but they've failed. Hatoyama was supposed to be that guy, but he totally **** the mattress. The only times Japan has made huge policy shifts is when the America made them. The main source of my worry is that I truly find this place more conservative (and by that, I mean less progressive) than when I moved here in 1998. There are half as many Japanese students studying abroad as there were in the 90's, and the ones that are studying and working abroad are having trouble getting jobs as returnees. To me that's a sign of the times. If Japan wants to continue to cater to Japan, cool, but all the giants make the majority of their dough overseas. They need to wake up and smell the coffee. Japan is also, by and large, still awful at web design.

That is actually one thing that irritates me about this line of thinking, that Japan's economy is in trouble because Japanese 20-somethings aren't having babies. The Japanese economy has been coughing up blood for two decades now, before the people they're blaming were even born themselves. They managed to screw things up quite nicely without any help from millenials or whatever they're calling the current generation of young people.

The birth rate has been in decline about as long as deflation has been going on, and to an extent they go hand in hand. It is definitely not the sole reason, and perhaps not even a major contributor. I think it's one piece of a really bad snowball effect. Why would you buy a house when it's going to lose value? Why would you have a kid when the cost of them goes up over time but your investments go down? The said thing is, even with the dispersion of wealth starting to reward entrepeneurs a little better than before, the average Tanaka-san can extrapolate his pay until retirement... and it ain't pretty.

davemerrill wrote:Give Japan time, in 15 years we'll be back to where we were before they blew out their bubble economy and everybody will be quoting terrible Michael Crichton novels about the dangers of Japan buying everything in the world.

I really hope you are right and I've thought the same thing. However before the bubble economy, the smaller towns weren't in peril of becoming obsolete. Too many generations are fleeing the countryside for the bigger cities. It won't be good for Japan to try to balance when everyone is living in the hugest cities and rural areas are full of ghost towns.

gaijinpunch wrote:Japan is also, by and large, still awful at web design.

Japan is just bad at computers in general. I have always been appalled at the lack of computer literacy here. I remember as a child, I had a subscription to 3-2-1 Contact magazine (that show was great) and there was a column called the Slipped Disk in which kids wrote in with computer questions and there was a page just for computer programming. Kids were using Apple IIs, Ataris, TRS80s, and Commodore 64s to create. Meanwhile in Japan, it's always been "Eigo wakarimasen."

I think a main part of the problem is that these kids can't even get past the keyboard at first. Everyone would rather send messages on a keitai because pressing the number keys repeatedly is easier than trying to learn proper phonics. I try teaching my elementary age students how to phoneticize their own language, by dividing kana like か into the sounds of K and A together to make one sound. They are bewildered. I sat in on a 6th grade computer class and I saw kids using cheat sheets converting the kana into corresponding alphabet letters. If they would only get these kids started in the first grade with the alphabet and at least the level of phonics to help them understand how to take apart their own syllabic pronunciations, Japan wouldn't be so adverse to using computers.

And now everyone is using these stupid-ass scratch-n-sniff iPads instead of real computers. Sheesh. A new generation of kids will grow up not with getting their hands on technology, but sliding their greasy fingers over a dumb screen, thus ensuring that even fewer people will know how to type properly! I mean, iPads are cool to play around with (I fell in love with the idea when they were called "desks" in the Ender's Game novel), but to replace real computers with those is not good for computer literacy in the future.

Anyhow, this could be its own topic...

The problem is far deeper than that, and doesn't necessarily require it's own topic. I've thought a lot about this, and again, these findings are based on my own tenure and, a few journalistic pieces of the years. You can blame horribly designed web-pages, 1990's shopping carts and bulletin boards, as well as all around computer illiteracy almost solely on NTT.

In the late 90's, the US was implementing cable broad band, and DSL was right around the corner. NTT couldn't do anything about cable... the lack of cable in many homes did that on it's own. However, they did decide to sit on DSL, skipping it entirely to get more value out of their expensive ISDN infrastructure, and go straight to fiber. Fiber itself was rolled out to the home as early as 2004 (or maybe 2003) but who knows what would have happened had NTT not gotten sued and lost. NTT had to open their lines to 3rd party DSL suppliers, and broad band was born. However, it was too late. How many years head start the west had on Japan is hard to say, but with free local calls in the US, the only barrier to dialup was the brutal times (but we didn't know any better then). Japan's local phone costs can spiral out of control quite quickly. Email was generally downloaded, read, and replies were batch sent at a later time. Surfing was minimal at best. Online gaming? Forget about it.

I think by the time "cheap practical internet" was available in the home, it was a day late and a dollar short. Many Japanese were experience the online world on their phones, which were admittedly much more feature rich than their US counter parts. Mobile-adapted webpages as well were very navigatable on tiny res screens, but of course, limited. I think this hindered Japan in the long run. Throw in the fact now that the west has caught up (and then some) on the mobile industry, and you have a sad tale of times past.

You can take this however you want, but mobile phones and terrible interweb representation is something I've always thought of that illustrates Japan's (still) reclusive tendencies and slipping markets. Ask any gaijin that lived here in the early 2000's. The thought of Japanese using a western phone? Preposterous. Yet, here we are. I don't know if it falls under the "failure to adapt" scenario I painted earlier, but it's obviously not a good problem for Japan. If you want a real depressing one, look at how much money Japanese manufacturers are losing on flat screen TVs. :-/

Yes, I certainly remember that. I lived in Japan from 2000-02. Internet sucked, and Japanese people wouldn't be caught dead using a Western cell phone. Western cell phones were so primitive, and it wasn't until the iPhone when they finally surpassed Japanese phones.

I remember when I first visited Japan in '98, I thought the ISDN ports on pay phones were so cool. But even at that time, ISDN was becoming outdated. They really did try to cling to that format for far too long.

Fascinating stuff, Gaijinpunch. It's hard to realize how big a part infrastructure plays - it's a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Cheers. I try to keep my disdain based on facts.

I have Googled and Googled for some of the past NTT atrocities, but they are hard to find. As such, I have to go from my memory, but I do remember that the first DSL provider in Japan was Tokyo Metallic. I was a member. They were tiny, and had a gaijin on the staff to talk to all of the foreign members. A lot of the info I got was from him, but basically, the guy that founded the company was a former NTT board member. He quit and sued, and won. One of the articles I found made it sound more like he convinced them to open the lines. So, not sure. Also, many homes required NTT to come and do a hardware fix on the lines. The repairmen would come and sign people up for NTT DSL at this point as opposed to the 3rd party provider that made the appointment for the construction. By the time they found out, it was too late.

NTT has been a thorn in the world's boo-tay for ages...specifically the international telecoms world. Their ridiculous costs have kept foreign providers out of Japan for decades. As such, the US has always hated them. Another story that I can't find any record of, but was a real deal, was NTT tried to buy a major backbone in the US. At the time, NTT was 55% (or more) government owned. They put the bid in, and the FBI pulled the national security card, and the J-government had to divest enough NTT stock to make it majority privately owned. That was 1999 if memory serves.

EDIT: Actually found it here. No mention of the year, but they do mention the Clinton administration. It just seemed like a massive finger to NTT for not playing ball on their fees. I can't say I blame them. The result was the aforementioned divesting.

NTT still sucks, big time, but their grip on the public in general has slipped a lot. Mobile phones have made landlines almost useless. Until a few years ago they required a one-time fee of 70,000 yen or so for a "ken" which was basically your contract with them to have a land line. It was resellable which was nice, but it was still ridiculous, and a perfect example of Japan's retardedly expensive infrastructure which I'm convinced has stagnated it's economy for 2 decades. It's simply too expensive to do very basic stuff, which makes the cost of business rise, which is then passed on to the consumer. In the bubble, this was great. Now? Not so much. Here's some crap you have to put up w/ when you're doing business in Japan.

-Incorporation costed me about 300,000 yen -- note that probably half of that was having a 3rd party set it up
-Closing said corporation will cost about the same.
-Filing corporate taxes is a minimum of 70,000 yen. This is a filing fee, NOT your tax. If you make negative money, you still owe the government 70,000 yen for the fiscal year.
-Changing the address of your company is a 1-page form, and costs 40,000 yen. Chalk up another 40,000 yen if you're dumb enough to have a 3rd party prepare it for you (I was once).
-Changing the address of the owner of the company is a similar form, and 10,000 yen.
-The business line costs above (at least)
-Reikin (key money) is almost gone, but moving fees are still pricey. This goes for homes or businesses. Key money originated from the government introducing rent control. They just didn't go anywhere after rent control ceased. Of course, the government didn't come in and regulate key money.

Anyway, you get the idea. I'm in no way one of these "small business Republicans" (quite the opposite) but there is something to be said about giving people and small businesses financial freedom to make some dough.