I take pity on Japan as the only nation on Earth to fully internalize grind culture as their source of existential meaning to an even more toxic degree than the United States.
If they didn’t exist, I probably would deem such a thing unsustainably improbable, but there it is.
To be clear, I’m not referring to places where the poor are exploited to work even longer hours at more physically brutal jobs for basic survival, I’m talking about self proclaimed “developed” nations whose citizens are indoctrinated to proudly jump into the productivity volcano as some kind of honor/life’s purpose/sense of identity in itself, and who wouldn’t have it any other way.
That said, when there was a proposal to increase standard work hours in South Korea recently, the people rejected it loudly. There is a desire in SK by many to achieve work life balance, which would be something of a slur in Japan.
Everything I’ve ever seen of Japanese culture would indicate so much as speaking against something like that would get you ostracized by the vast majority.
I find it pretty funny seeing people talk about how Japan is not as advanced as people think. Meanwhile my home state the majority of people don’t have Internet. I’ve been getting pretty convinced that most places use fax machines due to how few places have Internet. Anyplace that has any amount of beurocracy uses paper files. There are a considerable amount of places were cell signals simply don’t work. The only way reason I know of public transport busses is because of movies. VHS player are common place for house holds. Many work vehicles were made in the 60s and we still use buckets to collect sap when sugaring. Card readers are rare so some gas stations require you to pay with cash. All around the only advanced tech things Vermont has to offer are our winter cars and the f13s that occasionally blow peoples ear drums out.
Yeahhh but when the race you’re making fun of isn’t threatened, doesn’t face any meaningful discrimination, and pretty much runs the world, I think it’s safe to make fun of us.
Either race-tinged observational jokes can be funny if good spirited (I subscribe to this view) or they should be considered poor taste 100% of the time. (That’s fine too)
But this self-flogging “lol but it’s ok to be racist against people that look like me because the stereotype is some bad people also look like me, so I totally deserve it based on my ancestry, right guys?” Schtick isn’t good for anybody.
(Unless you literally don’t face any injustice on your way to running the world, then I totally misunderstood lol.)
But the idea that you should denigrate yourself to appease others’ misguided hatred of your racial “impurity” is…the exact concept we want to eradicate isn’t it?
As a white person, I am authorising and allowing this joke to be made, and I am retracting and removing any racism labels associated or attached to it.
Most people don’t have home Internet because almost everyone has it on their phone. Plenty of people don’t own a computer anymore unless it’s for work.
Both things can be true, but Vermont doesn't have a giant "We're a high-tech place!" image harped upon constantly that can feel like false advertising.
Also they’ve been paying for stuff with their phones for years and years—on exactly what basis are they a cash society (though there’s nothing wrong with that)?
Yeah actually i think a steady flow of physical currency moving hands is a great thing. And with the large amount of cheap shops and vending machines they move cash around plenty.
But also i once bought groceries while waiting for a train in japan that involved selecting everything through an app paying ahead digitally and picking it up at a special location right outside the station.
Yeah like its literally the future we dream of complete with respect and re-use of goods that still work with a massive second hand market.
Japan is such an anomaly. They are certain ways that don’t exist anywhere else, that would be impossible anywhere else. If Japan didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have believed it could.
Yeah well you live on a small island that doesnt have much physical resources and has weird wildlife like murder lizards and glow in the dark jellyfish washing up on your beaches and see how your civilization turns out. LoL
Faxes and egregiously copying temporary things to paper are the worst.
Sorry, I just worked in a community computer center where people wasted so much paper trying to print stupid things from websites, and were forced to send 80 pages to their lawyers/government/propertylords/whatever, through a dial-up connection in terrible black and white, for $1.00 a page.
It took like 5 seconds per page and to actually send took between 5-20 minutes. . .if it didn’t just error out and force you to start over.
The worst nonsense is forcing people to download and print some 50 page agreement just so they can sign two pages and fax it back. That should be a jailable offense lol.
Cash and paper can stay.
Can we PLEASE just make normie-friendly email encryption so faxes can die for good though?!
I noticed you mentioned fax twice. Sorry if you’re a paper company rep or something. I’m just speaking from a place of pain lol.
weirdly enough, transidentity is not that badly seen, but if you’re japanese, you’ll be considered your desired gender if you do the surgery.
edit: idk about public opinion about it, tho
but if you’re homosexual and your partner is violent with you, the police won’t do anything about these violence or something like that. needs to be checked but it’s what I remembered reading on Wikipedia
Don’t forget the impending population disaster (because they never feel the touch of another person these days, their government literally has to try and encourage them to drink just so they’ll fuck already- and can’t stand immigration) and all those depressed young people using seemingly everything from the slopes of Mount Fuji to their own apartments as log-off locations, and then nobody noticing their bodies for months.
Not to mention the impending massive economic crisis they’re about to go through - Japanese automotive industry is heavily in debt and watching China eat their lunch. While China was building battery plants and electric cars, Toyota was chasing hydrogen and other go-nowhere technologies.
I kinda want one of those disks for my collection though… “This is my 5150, Vic 20, Nuclear Missile Launch Floppy, Thinkpad 300…” Some quality conversation starters I thinks.
Floppy disks? How old is this meme? In the nearly twenty years I’ve been in Japan, I’ve never even seen a floppy disk.
Paper filing is an option if you want it.
And as for cash, electronic payments have really taken off in the last year. I still value my privacy though. So I stick it out in the slow line up.
All in all, there’s a kernel of truth to the meme. What the outside sees as a Blade Runner society drenched in neon, the reality is more “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kinda place.
You can list 100 other forms of tracking if you’d like to, but the point the person is trying to make is they specifically don’t want tracking on their exact purchases.
Buy something on a credit card and the CC company knows exactly what you bought, where you bought it, when you bought it etc. Unless you’re a really high profile target, no company is going out of their way to get all that info when you buy something in cash.
Your argument basically amounts to “why would anyone put a lock on their front door when someone can climb their fence, smash a window and climb through?”
Point is people freak about privacy to make lame excuses about stupid shit like using cash. I don’t even go to businesses that are “cash only”. It’s incredibly dumb.
to make lame excuses about stupid shit like using cash
I don’t think anyone is making (or needs) an “excuse” to use cash. They’re simply stating why they do it and for some reason you feel the need to explain how they’re somehow “wrong”.
I swear, people on this website will try to convince you that your favorite flavor of ice cream is wrong.
Yep. Having worked in the industry for a long time, including trying to transition to EMR and such, I get this. In Japan, one of the reason fax machines are still important that is not often talked about is that they generally have a bank of pre-programmed numbers. This is seen as a way to reduce the chance of exposing PII to others by accident. This is not wrong, but the same could be implemented for other systems such as email (or the host of EDI that exist). I literally just had a training that said we should not even send a fax ourselves, but have someone observe that we hit the correct pre-programmed button for it.
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