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Japan is one of the countries at the forefront of world technology, but it lives with an internal paradox: its population clings to the old fax and floppy disks to transmit and receive information. And it is that many feel even safer operating outside the internet and with palpable supports such as paper.
A Japanese man recently shared on social media that his daughter had asked him, “Dad, is ‘fax’ a bad word?” The man began by clarifying that the entire word was a facsimile and he had nothing to do with the famous four-letter English insult that sounds similar.
Then he explained that the device, which predates the Internet, is not only sold in all electrical appliance stores but is also used in his office, since many clients of his company, in the tourism sector, use the fax to send lists and internal statistics.
Like other industrialized countries, such as Germany, where the reluctance to ditch the fax is surprising, the public sector is the main defender in Japan of a technology that, because it has an analogical element, paper, provides a sense of security that is impossible to achieve in the digital world.
Reliance on the sender’s phone number in the margin of a fax message has led many government offices to accept the sending of documents stamped with a personal identity seal, the Western equivalent of a signature.
The security provided by operating offline is the reason cited by the secretaries of Japanese politicians for requesting that the request for an appointment with the legislator or deputy in question be sent by fax.
In Tokyo’s electronics stores, landline phones offer trendy colors, a variety of button designs, and also a fax option. Those without a fax machine can go to a 24-hour store where there is a corner equipped with a printer that scans the document and sends it by fax.
Another fixation of the Japanese with technologies considered obsolete is the floppy disk and its older brother, the “floppy disk”.
Japan’s Digital Minister, Taro Kono, made headlines in August of this year when he posted on his Twitter account a declaration of war against the floppy disk: “Some 1,900 applications and official forms require companies to use floppy disks, “floppy disks”, CD, MD etc.. We want to change those regulations so that they can be done online” said the message entitled “Digital Minister declares war on floppy disks”.
There are companies that load the payment data on diskettes and take them to the bank where they proceed to download and make the transfers.
Manufacturer Sony stopped making the floppies in 2011, but for those worried about future shortages, a fan announced via social media that a company in the United States has a stockpile of half a million unused floppy disks.
The rapid aging of the population and the great suspicion of the Japanese to protect their personal data, appear as the main reasons for maintaining technologies that were once advanced and today are exclusive to those who can do without haste as a factor in their lives or your job.
