Twenty Years On, Japan Government's Digital Ambitions Still Stuck In Piles of Paper (reuters.com) 49
Two decades after Japan rolled out an ambitious plan to go digital, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the government's deeply rooted technological shortcomings as ministries remain stuck in a paper-driven culture that experts say is hurting productivity. Reuters reports: While Tokyo has made "digital transformation" its main policy plank this year, the switch may not prove so easy as bureaucrats from different ministries still aren't able to hold teleconferences together and little of their administrative work can be done online. Analysts say the lack of government digitalization could reduce the incentive for the private sector to go digital in a blow to Japan's efforts to boost productivity.
Much of the problem stems from Japan's preference for paper documents and seal for approval at government offices. "Paper documents and seal are still prevalent. Politicians whom I deal with also prefer face-to-face meetings," a government official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Adding to its digital woes is Japan's vertically structured bureaucracy: each ministry as well as local governments, for instance, have developed their own computer systems that aren't compatible with each other. Currently, each ministry has developed its own LAN network with various vendors, making it difficult to hold teleconference with each other because of differences in their on-line security policy, a Cabinet Office official in charge of IT strategy told Reuters. Currently, each ministry has developed its own LAN network with various vendors, making it difficult to hold teleconference with each other because of differences in their on-line security policy, a Cabinet Office official in charge of IT strategy, who declined to be named, told Reuters. Overall, it could cost the government 323 million working hours per year if it doesn't go digital, translating into personnel costs of nearly $8 billion, a government regulatory reform panel estimated in a report released in July last year.
Much of the problem stems from Japan's preference for paper documents and seal for approval at government offices. "Paper documents and seal are still prevalent. Politicians whom I deal with also prefer face-to-face meetings," a government official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Adding to its digital woes is Japan's vertically structured bureaucracy: each ministry as well as local governments, for instance, have developed their own computer systems that aren't compatible with each other. Currently, each ministry has developed its own LAN network with various vendors, making it difficult to hold teleconference with each other because of differences in their on-line security policy, a Cabinet Office official in charge of IT strategy told Reuters. Currently, each ministry has developed its own LAN network with various vendors, making it difficult to hold teleconference with each other because of differences in their on-line security policy, a Cabinet Office official in charge of IT strategy, who declined to be named, told Reuters. Overall, it could cost the government 323 million working hours per year if it doesn't go digital, translating into personnel costs of nearly $8 billion, a government regulatory reform panel estimated in a report released in July last year.
This is by design (Score:1)
Anyone who's spent any time in Japan and has seen how inane some of these paper-pushing jobs are knows this.
I'm not surprised Reuters self-styled "experts" are incapable of making this realisation on their own however.
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It's to provide karoshi.
Re:This is by design (Score:4, Funny)
It's to provide karoshi.
I wouldn't know about that. I can't sing.
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Anyone who's spent any time in Japan and has seen how inane some of these paper-pushing jobs are knows this.
Oh, I've seen it first-hand. Pushing paper into your basic box and cube is easy enough, but then you have to move on to the boat and crane, pretty much a mandatory requirement for Japanese paper-pushing, and then that finger-puppet thing for the kids, and then the frog, and next thing you know you're trying to fold the fucking Taj Mahal from Japanese paper.
Re: This is by design (Score:2)
Just try to ssh into a filing cabinet...
Re: This is by design (Score:2)
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This is actually tied to conformity. To change the system, some has to be the first to change it first and of course when they do, they disrupt those who have not changed, so conformity keeps them trapped. They all have to change at the same time, as lead by their government, a big ole promotion of kawai, to promote the change and they all change at the same time. Then they are conforming in the change to the new system.
Digitally this is hard because coders are crap and they can not producing working code
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Japanese stuff is generally hi quality. So maybe their coders can get it right the first time around since there is no benefit in being first to market with a shoddy product (The silicon valley way)
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Although they do extremely well at mechanical engineering, Japanese software is shit. Actually pretty much all of Asia shares that in common, there's more of a desire to fight a really crap UI with bugs than to simply make better software. Look at basically every Korean, Japanese, or Chinese website...it's like 1995 still. Toyota has amazing cars, but their entune system is a complete and utter dog shit fest.
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It's less about "high quality" and more about "what is considered high quality"?
One of the most glaring cultural differences in this is easily observable in how web pages are structured in much of the West vs Far Eastern nations. Here we prefer minimalism, with as little pretty pictures and animations to go with it. Just give us what we want, and as little of additional information as possible.
Opposite is true in Far Eastern cultures. Pages are filled to the brim with information, often with graphical cutes
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In the West, major web-based services now all have hideous design that all bring an older computer* to its knees, thus perpetuating planned obsolescence: Two of these sites with terrible design are desktop twitter and now desktop YouTube: Also twitch and imgur. —
CSS animations and transforms, CSS variables, spinners, multiple requests to download the same webfont for one page, webfonts that often crash older Firefox versions, HTML5 video instead of the less-resour
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You're talking about technical merits of site design. I'm talking about user interface itself. For all their problems, twitter doesn't shove a hundred cutesy animations in your face on every page.
Seniority system (Score:4, Interesting)
The root of the problem is Japan's seniority system and consensus-based decision making.
Most managers are selected by seniority, not competence. Since the key to success is to bide your time until you are most senior, not one wants to take risks. The nail that sticks up will be hammered back down.
By the time a manager reaches top management, he is near retirement and is surrounded by advisors as risk-averse as he is.
Meetings in Japan go on for hours. Hard decisions are avoided in favor of compromise and consensus.
But the seniority pipeline doesn't apply to women. So the "super-secretary" is a common phenomenon in Japan. The aged CEO is an indecisive figurehead, while his secretary runs the company.
Disclaimer: I lived and worked in Japan for 18 months.
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Being a small contracting company helps. You're isolated from the big-corporate way of doing things at the same time as being a dependable resource for them. And you can be a place where talented women can be developers, rather than just serving endless cups of green tea at meetings.
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Small contracting companies still run fax machines today, because their old owners still don't know how to use email.
Comes with the demographic structure of one of the demographically oldest countries on the planet. There just aren't enough young people to force a change.
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The other half is decentralization. Japan still doesn't have a unified electric grid to this day, and is instead a mishmash of 50Hz and 60Hz systems. Demanding unified bureaucracy in a nation so internally divided that it can't even have same electric standards across the nation is folly.
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The last live action Godzilla movie (Shin Gojira) actually covered a lot of that. While it was monster movie a lot of it was about how Japan finds it hard to react to disasters, with an eye on the Fukushima melt-downs. Bureaucracy and endless meetings where little is decided, ineffective managers and the like. In the end some actual engineers save the day.
Of course it very much depends on the company too. Some are like that, some are not.
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Bullshit:
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Granted that's old, I really doubt the trend miraculously reversed. Even though some industries still use faxes heavily, like health care and law enforcement, they don't actually get printed to paper as much as they used to. A health care company I worked for actually got rid of its paper faxes entirely, even though it still uses faxing to work with some medical providers, but if you want a printed fax, you have to download the pdf to your computer and then print it
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Anonymous since I've modded, but this is basically incorrect.
The US is a *huge* country, which many folks (especially snarky Europeans) tend to forget. As such, things like bandwidth updates and other truly nationwide programs can take a long time to roll out. However at a fundamental level, the US is quite advanced when considering the heterogenity of the environment.
50 different States. A billion different companies. Lots of individuals and individual groups who are stubborn and want to do it their way or
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I recall an article recently espousing the technological progress of the United States: it's choking on the paper output from fax machines.
Fax machines in the US are the irksome hallmark of the healthcare, real estate and legal fields. Nobody else uses them.
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Insurances still use them too. :/
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That's what I was going to say. I work in RV repair and we still have to fax things to insurance companies. It's the only way they will accept certain documents. But then, RVs are stuck in a time loop. They still overwhelmingly utilize standard (not metric) fasteners for example, and virtually none of them come with preinstalled solar, though some have very crappy wiring for it put in (with SAE instead of MC4 connectors.)
Faxing in Japan... (Score:2)
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/0... [nytimes.com]
I wonder if they are still using faxes these days.
US Government Pension System (Score:3)
The US government pension system is still completely paper-based. It's one of the largest single-purpose offices in the US government. The weirdest thing is that it's located in a cave in Pennsylvania.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Re:US Government Pension System (Score:4, Interesting)
The GSA once did a study on how the photocopier affected efficiency.
The conclusion was that if the photocopier had been invented in 1940, we would have lost WW2.
NSA must be going crazy (Score:3)
This inefficiency must be driving NSA crazy. When things are not online its so much more difficult to spy on your allies. Cant the Japanese learn from the Germans?
It's nationalism (Score:3)
I was sent to help solve this problem. In 1974. (Score:4, Insightful)
I was part of a team developing a word processor - in those days the term applied to dedicated hardware - that, given the power of the day's mighty 6502 processor, could handle the kanji character set directly using a tabletop-sized keyboard, rather than forcing users to sound out words using the phonetic alphabet, a process that given the structure of the Japanese language causes the meaning of words to be lost. The business world liked the idea and gradually warmed up to our new way of doing things, but as described in this article government remained aloof. And yes, the sacredness of the hanko signature seal was a part of the problem.
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first-hand reports (Score:3)
I can report on several aspects of this one, but must disclaim that my own language skills remain intermediate.
First example involves the Japanese fire hose of money sprayed at the covid-19 crisis. Part of their response was some money sent to each resident of Japan, and it arrived as a piece of paper that had to be sent by snail mail to a new office they set up. Trying to make sure I got it right, I took it to the usual government office and we struggled with it for quite a while, whereupon I sent it in, because they couldn't do anything more at that old office. And eventually the money arrived. But it's still almost impossible to get tested.
I can think of three or four more electronic projects that they have been fumbling around with but I think the worst one is only half electronic, but a bigger fail, because it's supposed to promote travel in a time when traveling should not be promoted. That's this new Goto Travel campaign which is already in its death throes on its second day.
I wish I could say something constructive, but it's really hard for me to come up with anything. My various Japanese government contacts have been remarkably shall we say inflexible in their approaches to these computer things.
One more word of caution. On my smartphone and dictating so anything may have been messed up and I'm trying to correct.
I left Japan 22 years ago and it hasn't changed (Score:5, Interesting)
My first job out of college was for Mitsubishi Electric in Japan. I was recruited to help internationalize the workforce and encourage them to do simple things like take holidays and finish work around 5pm. I was an electronic engineer and I'd just come from the UK with a degree specializing in micro-electronics, VSLI design, and other specialities. I was excited to go to the home of consumer electronics having grown up with brands like Sony, Sanyo, Hitachi, Panasonic, Toshiba, Casio and Mitsubishi. I thought it'd be like a ballet dancer going to Paris, the chance to work with the best of the best. Holy crap. It was like going back in time. Everything was paper-based. Circuit design was done on paper. PCBs were laid out on tracing paper, one for each layer. Reports were hand written and submitted each week. You bought your own notebooks and 0.5mm pencils. The idea of using CAD, or simulators, was unheard of. Thankfully, I had worked at GEC-Marconi Research in the 80s and learned how to make technical drawings and my written Japanese was not too bad, so I survived. However, it was all grind. The highest technology they had was an ISDN fax machine that could send pages through extremely fast. It was a sight to behold.
At first, none of us had computers. The programmers had them, but electronic engineers had nothing. There were old HP Apollo workstations in a computer lab that could be used. They were also connected to the internal IP network. There was no external network access, but weirdly, you could receive emails from outside the company. One day, I found out that my American friend who worked at a Mitsubishi site in Kobe could send email outside the company. After some research (no WWW back then, so I just read books), I found out that I could send email outside the company if I added the domain name of the Kobe facility to the end of the outbound email address, for example anon@foo.com@kobe-mitsu.co.jp. This was in the days before spam and when smtp servers would forward anything. As I could receive email directly, this enabled me to have an active working email! The next step was to get a tool chain for the workstations. To do that DEC had an FTP by email service. You'd send a bot a request to FTP something for you and then it'd email it to you in unencoded chunks of emails. I downloaded gcc and other tools and managed to build a number of binaries to run on the work station. However, what I wanted to do was have a way to get email on my newly acquired Compaq black and white passive matrix LCD laptop that was at my desk back in the main work hall (a place of about 500 desks full of people where I worked every day). My laptop was on the same LAN as the Apollo workstations, but it was running Windows 3.1 and DOS. I had an email client called Eudora (or something similar) that I wanted to use. The issue was that I needed something to run on the workstation that I could talk to. I found what I needed - Popper, a POP3 compliant postmaster app that would enable me to access the email on the workstations. However, it needed to run as root.
After hacking around on the system for a week or so, I managed to find out that the /etc/rc directories were actually world writable! This was incredible, because anything placed in them would be executed as root on boot up. I didn't have the ability to reboot the workstations, but I had access to the power cable. So, I stuck scripts in there, yanked the power cord (sorry hard disk) and power cycled. Popper was installed and suddenly, the whole section had email at their desks. No one asked me how I did it, but they were all using it.
After about a year, the local IT folks suddenly got the message that sending email externally was something that would actually be useful for work and so we were told they would enable it. However, they would only allow it on a white list basis. You had to provide a list of email addresses that you wanted to send email to and have it approved by your boss. It all had to be printed out, prefaced with the appropriate req
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That was a fascinating read, and well worth reading past the continuation all the way to the end. I knew about some of the differences between the USA and Japan, but I had no idea it resulted in things being so lo-tech and/or restrictive.
When I was in tech support in the USA back in the 90s, they had really nice Plantronics headsets for us, one at each station. At some point they issued us all white headsets (assigned to the tech, not the station) with the intention of replacing the Plantronics, but the w
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The Japanese are very aware of industrial espionage, and that is the reason they keep work stuff so sequestered from the Internet.
Nah, I'm quite certain the real reason is they don't want to rock the boat. Unless kacho-san wants something to change, it generally won't, and he's got his bosses that are just as reluctant to change and he won't want something to change unless they do too. This can be difficult to understand if you don't know why "hai" usually doesn't mean "yes". Many difficulties. It can't be helped. Go watch some gaijin movies: Gung Ho, Mr. Baseball, Lost in Translation, maybe The Bad News Bears in Japan too.
The resist
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They have been trying to do away with stamps for ages.
In Japan people buy a custom made rubber stamp with their name on it. Being hand made every one is a little different, even if two people have the same name. They are used like signatures.
Problem is you can't stamp electronic documents so they print them off, stamp them and then scan/fax them. A few attempts have been made to create electronic stamps that work on PDFs and other documents but the fact two major problems.
1. There is a lot of different soft
Re: I left Japan 22 years ago and it hasn't change (Score:1)
That was not a comment, it was a book.
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Holy crap. It was like going back in time. Everything was paper-based. Circuit design was done on paper. PCBs were laid out on tracing paper, one for each layer. Reports were hand written and submitted each week.
I saw a bit on the NHK World news (on my PBS station) last week about the Golgo 13 mangaka. For decades, he's been doing a layer-based process on paper, where each page would get passed around between different artists who would do their special thing to the page (such as being really good at drawing cars), then pass it on. Only now, because of the Chinese virus and the need for social distancing, is he starting to get computers involved. I think he's going to find out that computers can do the layer thing
I visited a Mori Seiki R&D facility (Score:2)
Twenty years on Slashdot editors still.... (Score:2)