Japan’s low-tech life (BBC quotes Taro!)
The BBC is having a slow news day and decided to “expose” the painfully obvious to anyone who have lived more than 10 minutes here in stone-age tech Japan….
Revealing Japan’s low-tech belly
BBC News | by Michael Fitzpatrick | July 14, 2010—Police stations without computers, 30-year-old “on hold” tapes grinding out tinny renditions of Greensleeves, ATMs that close when the bank does, suspect car engineering, and kerosene heaters but no central heating.A dystopian vision of a nation with technology stuck in an Orwellian time warp? Not at all. These are aspects of contemporary, low-tech Japan that most visitors miss…
“Japanese banks, post offices, government offices, all are staffed with three to five times the employees because they must do every process once on paper and then again on computer,” says Taro Hitachi* a technical editor and patent reader at Hitachi….....more…
Damn, this quote is old—I was interviewed last April and I thought the BBC had forgotten the story. Here’s the full text of my BBC interview:
Until the 1960s, Japanese had problems with surplus population needing make-work having three to five guards waving their arms aimlessly directing traffic while four workers repair a 2-inch pothole in the road. To this day, the majority of gas stations are full-service with half dozen guys in jump suits and a couple girls in uniform shorts (winter or summer) to wash your windows and empty our ash trays. Why? Because self-service gas is “dangerous”—actually it was dangerous since sloooowly self-service stations are making a dent in the market (maybe 15%). Likewise, most bank ATMs close by 5pm to 7pm because no bank employees would be on hand if a machine—oh the horror—ate a bank card. During bank hours 9 to 3, larger bank ATMs are staffed with a half dozen part-time employees because the Japanese public is so old and dotty they are afraid of the machines. Japanese banks, post offices, government offices, all are staffed with three to five times the employees because they “must” do every process once on paper and then again on computer. The worst case is the suffering of Japanese nurses who AVERGE 12+ hour days because they have to do update their patient charts on computers after the end of the work day–UNPAID.
Do you see the pattern here? Japanese aren’t all that happy of about spiteful machines and distrust automation.
*According to the strict requirements of Hitachi copyright, I had to use the pen name Taro Hitachi—sort a corporate ‘John Doe’– on all the documents I wrote (but now I’m simply Pu-Taro
).
UPDATE:
The author of the BBC report, Michael Fitzpatrick, just wrote me to say that he used my, “robot quotes for the [same story in] The Independent newspaper…[that] should be out this week.” Mr. Fitzpatrick quoted me on the fraudulent claims Japan makes about being No. 1 in robot usage. See the rough draft in the Comments section below–sort of an expose’ on how Japan’s hyped robot workforce is not largest in the world.
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July 15th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
July 15th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
The BBC wanted to feature me explaining the totally fraudulent claims Japan makes about being No. 1 in robot usage.
However, the BBC cut my musings because I didn’t have the official stats. Here’s the beginning to my expose’ on Japan’s hyped robot workforce is not No. 1 in the world…
July 15th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I can’t believe some journalists still fact check! :o
July 15th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Yeah, the lack of my proving Japan’s public policy of GROSSLY inflating Japan’s number of “employed robots” ruined a great story.
I specifically know that plain-old routers that were pushed along a funky sheet-metal template/stencils by compressed air to cut plastic faceplates at Hitachi Odawara Works were counted as “robots.”
My grandfather at Western Electric in 1939 made the same kind of “pneumatic router jigs.” He would be greatly amused that in Japan he would be called a “roboticist” and a “production engineer.” Ninety percent of the time when I meet an “engineer” in Japan I discover they don’t have any kind of engineering degree.
July 15th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
And here I thought the majority of robot population were sarariman and reporters!
July 15th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Slow news day, yes. But it still was good of the BBC to distill all those (obvious to us long-term Japan residents) observations into one convenient report.
July 16th, 2010 at 5:59 am
Per this PV (Promotional Video), Robots are sararimen….haunted by women who drop rings of power, and endless repeated activities in repetition, creepy masked entities that lurk in the company office spaces…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZBk1nOOcto
July 16th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
I don’t recall ever reading a positive article in the British press about Japan or at least one that does not end on a negative note.
This goes back to the time of the Osaka Expo ‘70.
July 20th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Hi. I just tried to email you about this low-tech article but I can’t get in touch with you. Please e-mail me when you have the time. Thanks.
July 20th, 2010 at 10:53 pm
What question do you have about my interview with the BBC about “no-tech Japan”?
Yours,
T!
August 3rd, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Thank you for such a great post Japan’s low-tech life, I found your post while surfing the Net. However, I dont see eye to eye with all that you have written about Nippon. Your prose intelligently writ -ten and well presented as you appear to have your finger on the pulse and can describe things in a lucid and motivating approach. Well a sufficient amount of the blatherblather good luck and keep posting.
August 7th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Why did you remove my post… My post was actually useful unlike most of these comments. I will post it again. Heya guys, I’ve been using a great way to make a lot of money on-line…. CUT
August 7th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
☠ NOTE: Your comment was CUT because it was off-topic SPAM.
Any comment spam will be treated as toxic waste—especially drivel from SEO fucktards.
August 18th, 2011 at 9:12 am
In order for robots to melt into the background in office or home environments, the robot has to adapt to *our* environment, not us changing around our world to fit the robots. I’m extremely picky about getting my computer set up just the way I like it, because computers should serve *me*, not the other way around. Same goes for robots. I don’t want to rebuild my home or office for the convenience of robots.
I do a lot of homebrew robotics. I, and everyone else, brings robots to club meetings in a motley assortment of tubs, bins, and cartons, and big robots go int the back of pick up trucks. — bah, how primitive. A home service robot needs to be easy to transport. That means it has to fit in my car, exactly where a human would sit, without any accommodation. It needs to get to the second floor by going up the stairs, not by some “robot service elevator” put in just for it. So I think in the end we need to have a robust bi-pedal robot platform that folds in the same places that humans do and is human scale, because the world is built to human scale and built for beings that fold where humans do. Robots will only be useful when they can operate in our world without us having to remodel the world for robots.
Bi-pedal robots aren’t worth pursuing for anthropomorphism — bi-pedal robots are worth pursuing because they could fit easily into our world and disappear into the background.
March 15th, 2013 at 1:51 pm
Hey, check out this Y.A.U.R.—Yet Another Useless Robot from Japan…
May 4th, 2013 at 2:15 am
w0w . reached here from cracked.c0m and really is astonishing to know such things happen in a c0untry hyped as most techno-savvy.