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Comment by drstewart | Hacker News Reader

>I think the state of digital technology is due to structural / hierarchical social reasons that these initiatives don't really address.

Maybe a trite / cliche saying now, but the quote about Japan being the most futuristic society you could imagine in the 1990s just rung so true after visiting.

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I suspect I hit the sweet spot when I lived in Japan from 1993-1995 if I interpret your comment correctly. I remember being impressed by the tech. For example: ATMs into which one inserted not only a card, but also a transaction book which would be mechanically updated (versus spitting out a slip). I still have mine. We're talking about Japan so, naturally, my bank book features Snoopy prominently on its cover.

Wait, were those not universal?

I’m from Spain and I remember those transaction books from my childhood (I was born in 1991).

By the time I was old enough to get my first debit card they were long gone though.

Those still exist and the ATMs still accept them. For savings accounts, you introduce the thing and it prints on all the pages it needs.

Bank books worked like that in Canada in the late 80s or early 90s, yeah. It's interesting what seems impressive.

I'm afraid Building Societies in Britain had transaction books that would be updated by a printer back in the 1980s. Quite useful actually, I'm rather sad we no longer have them :-(

I also lived in Japan in the mid 90's. I was a kid so of course my memory is probably pretty skewed and I have no idea about grownup things like ATMs, but I remember the tech being absolutely amazing. All the game consoles were Japanese (nintendo, sega, playstation) and often got releases first before the US. The arcades were incredible, I remember playing arcade versions of essentially DDR and guitar hero/rockband like 5 years before they caught on in the US. Cell phones also seemed to be a few years ahead of the US (back when flip phones were the rage and smaller was better). Complex vending machines were pretty common, e.g. making things like multi-step hot coffee drinks, I think it was probably a full 15 years later that I first saw one of these in the US.

It's fascinating and also kind of sad to me how much less relevant Japan today seems to be as far as consumer tech goes.

Looking back, I also think a big part of it was Tokyo as a city just being on a totally different scale than anything else I had experienced. In the 90's I don't think there was anywhere in the US remotely similar to a place like Shinjuku. Now days I think parts of midtown Manhattan or perhaps in other ways the Vegas strip might have a little bit of a similar energy, but I had never been to either of those as a child, and back then they were much different than they are today anyway.

The ease of getting around by fast, reliable trains (and especially bullet trains) also seemed super futuristic to me back then. Of course that part is still pretty far ahead of the US to this day.

That might not be a Japan thing: in the late 1990s / 2000s the US was behind Europe (as well as many bits of first-world Asia I guess) with respect to cell phones and consumer banking. For example, free SMS messages came late to the USA. And the USA still doesn't really understand debit cards (think about all the times in the US that you hand over a debit card with a Visa symbol and the cashier says "debit or credit?"; all they do in the rest of the world is scan the fucking card and let the system figure out where the money comes from.)

I haven't been asked that question in a long long time in the US. The cashier just swipes it.

Then again, I don't know anyone that uses a debit card after high school. Not using a credit card kinda implies that they're financially irresponsible right now (leaving cash back/points on the table) or were in the past and ruined their credit.

FWIW, this is not even remotely true in Europe. People use debit cards day to day, more likely to use a credit card if they don't have enough in the bank I suspect. At least where I am, there isn't much to be had in terms of points or whatever.

In the US every merchant factors in an extra 3-4 cents on every dollar for credit card transaction costs on all of their prices. If you pay with cash or debit card you eat that cost yourself, if you pay with a credit card you can make back like 2 - 4 cents of that amount depending on the purchase category, and it can really add up over time.

It's a very bizarre system, and incredibly regressive, and would actually probably be pretty simple to get rid of with federal legislation. I actually can't believe none of our current wave of progressive politicians have thought to come after it yet.

That's reversed in Europe. Using credit is what implies financial responsibility. On that subject I've seen American financial devices, such as cashback and so on, slowly sip in on this side of the Atlantic and I find it worrying.

Or are financially independent, and don't care about the equivalent of some colored class pearls.

You forgot to tell about the cheques.

Ah. Good point. The cheques/checks!

My pet theory as to why is the 90s is when japan was at its peak productive (late 20s, early 40s) population demographics, and now with the county having more seniors than children, they are stuck in the past, since the dominant age group still wields all the political and business power. The olds see no reason to change, as olds are prone to do.

You see it in the USA today too with their aging boomer ruling class, but since its not as bad as japan, they’re not staying as stuck in the past.

It is 2021, and you can still insert a transaction book along your card in Japanese ATMs. I do it regularly.

An alternate history world where technology grew without centralized cloud services and privacy is still a thing.

Their systems are often inferior on a pure ease-of-use aspect, but it's not "strictly worse". I found a lot of it to be just different compromises. It's still possible to live comfortably there without a smartphone. Not so much in other "smart cities" around the world.

the fact that one of their big things to show off in their expo is the deep sea submarine they got running in 1991 is kind of telling of that.

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