High-speed rail
don’t tell America. pretend it’s multiple automobiles welded together and they’ll like it
I honestly think we should build normal light rail stations with RGB gamer lights and crap and hype it like it’s futuristic tech. it works for musk’s tesla taxi tunnel so it should work for actually good public transit too. maybe make the bodywork on the trains look like some dumb sci-fi movie
Just tell them they run on coal.
pretend it’s multiple pickup trucks welded together
Fixed for 'murican tastes
Don’t quote me on the exact time but I heard somewhere that they run so close to schedule that a bullet train arrived something like 18 seconds late and the company apologized for the delay. ( might have been a minute or two but I recall it was really, really short. )
Confirm. That’s Japan. The driver is in trouble when it’s a minute or more
Duh, we have high-speed rail in Morocco. It’s called Al Boraq and is the best way to blast from Casablanca to Tangier.
And it is not overpriced like in France, where the tgv is more expensive than a taxi to the airport, your plane ticket, and then another taxi.
Tgv is awesome but I do agree that it is quite expensive
Would love to be able to take a sleeper train to the boarder with Canada, then have one of my friends from Toronto pick me up so I can visit them.
smug TGV noises
On the flipside, something most developed countries consider normal but would blow Japanese minds is the ability to do all “paperwork” on your phone or laptop without any paper ever being printed anywhere. Japan is somehow still a country of fax.
I heard Japan described as being “stuck in the year 2000 since the 1980’s”. I think South Korea fits the original question better than Japan nowadays.
Yeah, Japan had a massive tech boom in the 80s and 90s, but then just kinda stopped growing that field. It’s still there and still a strong industry in Japan, but the cultural tech hype isn’t there anymore, it seems.
Part of the reason for the original enthusiasm is that they were enamored by the country’s recovery post-WWII when they managed to barely obtain permissions from transistor patent holders to manufacture in Japan which led to creation of many of the first consumer transistor radio brands among other electronics manufacturing.
They were the cheap electronics labour market before China, as China wouldn’t see notable economic improvement until after the 80s.
I think Shanghai/China fits it even better. The convenience and technological advances are moving crazy fast.
Meh. They’re head to head for most fields, only thing I can think of that they’ve made noteworthy advances in would be superheated coal burning efficiency to squeeze out more power and at the same time capture more emissions than any comparative western facility. China as a whole has some of the lowest per capita emissions of any nation, though their numbers might not be as accurate for several reasons.
Even their rocketry is kind of pathetic, I think India might even have the edge over them on that front.
That might be true, I have no idea but for day to day stuff, is amazing.
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sweats in german
We are getting more and more stuff, but they often have a really shit UX. We can do some stuff on PC since the “My Number” card system, but that also requires installing all kinds of software, only works in certain browsers, etc.
Isn’t this because of those special stamps they use in Japan to notorize documents? I heard about them on a podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/
I’ve heard it’s just more of a burocracy thing. A friend there once told me he always puts the date wrong on the top of documents because there is a person who’s job is to double check your work. They’re judged on how often they find mistakes, so it’s easier to put something blatantly wrong at the top that easily fixed so they can quickly find it and he can move on.
Love that show.
You can fax at your local public library. It was only about six months ago that my state’s social services dept. stopped requiring faxes.
Are you talking about Japan here?
No, Indiana.
Excellent public transportation
WITCHCRAFT
Is is a joke I’m too European to understand?
Japan’s current fiber-optic commercial internet connections use optical fiber transmission windows known as L and C multi-core fiber (MCF) bands to transport data long distances at record speeds. Meanwhile we (USA) have fiber back to copper and Cat3 for the last few hundred feet in most cities at best making the entire idea into a bottle neck.
There are a lot of very good reasons to switch back to copper for the last portion of a run. I highly doubt that consumer internet in Japan is terminating fiber directly into peoples’ computers. Fiber is a lot more expensive both for the line, to run it, more prone to breakage, the network cards are more expensive, etc. It’s really not needed for most purposes.
Also no one uses cat3 for data and it can’t be run for ‘hundreds of feet’. And LC fiber IS used in the US - that’s a kind of connector not the kind of fiber.
I highly doubt that consumer internet in Japan is terminating fiber directly into peoples’ computers.
You run fiber to the home and gigabit ethernet or whatever internally in the premises. All your other complaints re: cost and etc aren’t really an issue for last mile consumer grade fiber.
I have seen installers run a fiber drop cable across from a power pole, bring it down an outside wall , then staple it to joists under a house, cleave off the end and stick a mechanical splice on it, bang it in the power meter, all good, plug it in the fiber modem, good to go in less than 20 minutes. All this stuff uses standard components and technology that’s been available for 10+ years now.
Also no one uses cat3 for data and it can’t be run for ‘hundreds of feet’. And LC fiber IS used in the US - that’s a kind of connector not the kind of fiber
It’s probably the standard “last mile” half assed solution where they decide to use existing phone lines and VDSL from a box down the street instead of biting the bullet and running fiber.
This is how it works in the UK too. I’ve got Fibre To The Premises (FTTP), and the installation was pretty much exactly as you described.
This is like arguing that SMS is still a good messaging platform.
No it’s not? Fiber is a bad solution for short runs for residential use inside people’s homes. Copper can pull 10 gig speeds or more.
Well, almost all apartments in the city I live in has fiber. They all have a box in a corner somewhere.
Then we pull a standard ethernet cable to our router and we run full speed.
Maybe I’m not knowledgeable enough on the area, but why is that bad?
They are arguing that inside the nlhouse ople don’t use fiber, they use the ethernet copper cable from the router. Which is like, fine, okay, that’s true, but also not at all what people are arguing and not something that should be required to be pointed out in this context.
People are arguing that in some US cities the Internet distribution is done through copper for the whole building/complex, and just like you, in my home there’s a fiber port into my router, which then I use cat7 copper cables for my stuff. But up until my router there’s fiber, which is awesome.
Anyway I hope this clarifies it.
Typing from my Tokyo fiber-to-the-home connection now. They ran it off the pole, installed a little thing in my house, ran the fiber to the modem they make me rent, and it works like a charm.
Yeah, it’s not terminated in your computer though for all the reasons I said.
I don’t think I understand unless you’re expecting me to buy some router and network cards that natively support fiber to go from the modem (which is fiber in from the pole outside).
I have fiber to home in Canada
Have fiber to home here in Arkansas in the US
Yeah, it’s not terminated in your computer though for all the reasons I said.
And so what? I have 1.5 Gb symmetrical with latency to many sites and game servers under 10 ms (on Wi-Fi!)
And you would be wrong.
I’m in Italy and I have a fiber internet port inside my home
Not on your computer though
Sweden is also quite well connected with fiber.
Yes, but nowhere compared to the Netherlands and Denmark
Ofc the size of the countries makes it easier.
Cat3? As in most cities in the US are limited to 10mbps?
No, the average internet download speed in the United State is about 171 Mbps. Though disclaimer, I’m not sure of the exact reliability of that number, different sources are reporting quite a range of speeds, though I don’t see any under 100 Mbps average and I see many reporting well above this. You’d also have to consider median vs average since people with fiber sitting at gigabit speeds may be dragging that number up, median may be lower.
https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/fastest-slowest-internet
There are certainly some areas, especially rural, that struggle though. And upload speed is often much worse unless you have fiber. Major cities are definitely getting much better than 10 Mbps down though.
Cat isnt actually a thing, but people call house phone wiring that. Runs DSL quite well.
Cat 3 is a thing and is basically unshielded twisted pair. You can abuse it quite a bit from its voice grade days to cram a few hundred megabits of VDSL over it if it’s only from your house to the curb.
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Can’t believe noone has mentioned the hot beverage vending machines.
Its so fucking nice to spend $1-$1.50 and just get some hot tea or coffee right there without issue. And they’re everywhere so you can pretty much rely on them.
So much more convenient than having to go to a coffee shop so you can pay $5 for the same thing, and the vending machine version still tastes great.
This comment made me remember that the tech school in my (US) hometown of ~4000 people had a machine like this roughly 20 years ago and I’ve never seen another one since.
My college had a french fry vending machine. That was pretty awesome.
They also have much more popularized versions of canned coffee than us; I occasionally see bad overpriced Starbucks coffee bottles in grocery store checkouts, but not something small, quick, and convenient like BOSS.
I had one at my old workplace and it certainly served me better coffee than the mud I could get from the mcdonalds across the road.
It’s likely not as cool as Japanese vending coffee, but in the UK there are Starbucks/Costa etc vending machines all over. Do Americans (sorry assuming you are from US) not have those?
Have used a couple of hot coffee vending machines in the US and all of them were absolute garbage.
The Tick: Armless bandit… Empty your bladder of that bitter black urine men call coffee! It has its price and its price has been paid!
I don’t mind vending machine cappuccino but that’s only like half credit as coffee lol
the ones at racetrac are pretty great imo. i get the lightest roast they have (more caffeine) and dump a bunch of sugar and cream into it but it’s pretty good black, too
Australia here, nothing similar here.
But this is like basically every street has a set of these vending machines. They’re everywhere.
But are those like a hot coffee dispenser, where you grab a cup and put it under a spout, push a button and it pours out a hot drink? Because we do have those in Australia.
But in Japan they have vending machines for canned drinks and cans of soup that are heated.
As someone from the west coast of The States, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a hot drink vending machine in real life. At least not here where I live.
As someone from the west coast of The States, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a hot drink vending machine in real life. At least not here where I live.
We used to have them, but I haven’t seen them for over a decade now.
If you remember the Terminator 2 movie, the scene where a security guard gets a cup of coffee, those are the kind of dispensers that used to exist.
(The link above shows the scene I’m speaking of. I tried to embed the URL into this comment so the picture itself would display, but I couldn’t figure it out.)
Also from the US west, I’ve seen a bunch of hot vending machines! In several hospitals and schools in different states, a few gas stations. They will have coffee, tea or cocoa selections, a cup pops out and gets filled with fresh brewed coffee. They were usually around 1.50 to 2 dollars a cup, maybe more expensive now though.
Ditto. Also rest stops.
I’ve seen these around in the US, but they seem to be getting rarer for some reason.
Can you get sugar or cream or do you have to drink the coffee black?
You have a variety of options usually. Different brands, and then ones that have no milk, ones that are milky etc.
You also usually have the choice of having things cold or hot as well.
I’d steal from them
Good livestock conditions so that food is actually edible raw
There are places in Japan that actually serve chicken sashimi.
I’ve tried it, and I ate the whole plate, but I wouldn’t do it again.
Raw chicken tastes like it smells, and it’s just inferior to every other sashimi - not outright repulsive, but just not as good.
I honestly don’t understand how those specialty chicken sashimi places stay in business. I guess there must be an audience for it, but I can’t imagine why.
It’s completely normal for stores to keep cooked, deli style chicken on non-refrigerated shelves all day. I don’t trust it.
This is what we heard. So when visiting my brother, the whole group tried it. Everyone got salmonella poisoning and had explosive diarrhea for two days. That was an interesting shinkansen trip.
Your intuition is right on this, don’t eat raw chicken.
I googled.
“When cooked, chicken can be a nutritious choice, but raw chicken can be contaminated with Campylobacter, Salmonella, or Clostridium perfringens germs. If you eat undercooked chicken, you can get a foodborne illness, also called food poisoning.”
Yeaaaaaah, no way I’ll try it.
Then I think I would like to try cookie dough sashimi
What if you get salmonella!?
I would kill for their bidets everywhere.
If you like them, you can just buy one for your home. Expensive, but probably a better option than the murder you suggest.
Dude, bidet add-ons are like $40 that work great. I agree I wish it was more widespread though.
$40 for the basic ones. They still work great, (I have them on all my toilets at home!) but they definitely aren’t as flashy as the Japanese toilets. Self-cleaning seats, heated seats, heated water for the bidet, etc…
Next time out down the katana and just learn some Japanese. You can say:
Toire o tsukatte mo ii desu ka?
And they will just let you use the bidet
We have plenty of bidets here in the States, they just install them outside the bathrooms and they mount them kind of high so they’re kinda awkward to get a good clean angle, though.
I’m in Portugal and bidets are standard in all home toilets around here.
And it’s not just here: the word itself - “bidet”- is actually French.
That said, they’re invariably plain and no-frills around here.
Useable transit
Would definitely blow minds in the US, but most of the rest of the western world is pretty much up to par.
Japan currently doesn’t have this in the more normal sense. That Japan is still super high-tech is more of a PR move. I literally had to send a fax to get my current internet (though it is fiber-to-the-home).
Where Japan is innovating is in robots and also its crossovers with an aging population. Possibly also some space stuff.
But for an everyday person, I don’t really see anything that doesn’t already exist somewhere else. I was raised in the US and have been living in Japan most of the last 10 years.
Japan’s been living in the year 2000 since 1980
but they’re still in the year 2000…
Yeah, that era has ended in the early 2000s
Those crazy toilets
New band name
If you are referring to the squat toilets, those are quite popular throughout all of Asia and are actually better anatomically speaking for taking a shit
No, I meant the ones with all kinds of buttons that has 5 different bidet settings and heated seats and plays music when you flush
plays music when you flush
Please tell me this is something you can customize. I didn’t realize until now that I need a toilet that plays John Williams’ “Olympic Fanfare” when I take a dump.
Therapist: Japanese toilets aren’t real, they can’t hurt you.
Japanese toilets:
I saw an ad for the Squatty Potty and decided to put 2 phone books in the bathroom instead. it worked well enough
Where did you find a phone book?
Next to the landline
I use my kids’ step stool.
A mindset of quality.
CNC Machines that are built in Japan are so much Mount Betterest than their ‘Made in America’ counterparts. Even under the same company name.
Visit any shop that requires quality around the world and you’ll see Japanese made machines almost everywhere.
I remember touring a Harley Davidson factory in Milwaukee and noticing that, while the tour guide continued to repeat the “made in America” mantra, all the machine tools were either Japanese or German.
A place I worked had a noodle machine made in Japan. The manufacturer had us send noodles to them from our shop in the US to ensure the machine was working properly and that our noodles were good, I had never heard of any other sort of company doing that. Where I work now has top quality machinery and they are mostly made in Japan.
I work for an OEM and we will request photos after installation and samples of raw material before sale for anything unusual, so I got to say that is more impressive
Thanks to Demming…
Wow, that’s fascinating! What do you think would be the best thing to read from Deming from an lay engineering or lay civic perspective? What’s most accessible, I guess?
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button. This is the optimal solution as the door doesn’t open needlessly but still allows for ease of access.
Ordering machines, where all your menu options are clearly listed and priced. Pressing on a combo of buttons will print a receipt which you can sit down and show the staff/cook your order.
Water (hot and cold) tapped straight to your dining table for self serve drinks.
Unfortunately becoming less applicable with the smartphone domination finally reaching Japan, but their flip phone technology.
taco bell in particular is embracing the kiosks and it’s wonderful. they have signs in the lobby saying ‘order at the kiosk’ even. and why wouldn’t you? why do people in the US have this pig-like stubbornness where they must have a human stand there and ‘PeRsONaLIze tHE iNtERacTion’ or some shit
Every US McDonald’s I’ve been to for the last…5+ years has had the kiosk system.
i just want to pay cash, otherwise i prefer kiosks… but i see a future of hostile, nagging UI design…
like at some stores self checkout, you have to click 80 different confirmations and give your phone number, email and social security number…The auto kiosks in Japan take cash and they are also mechanical and not touch-screen based (at least in most stores). They are tactile buttons. :D
That’s why you have GDPR.
There was an article published last year, maybe the year before, where they tested the touch screen kiosks in McDonald’s. Every single one of them has traces of faeces on it.
Even if that wasn’t true, it takes me significantly less time to tell someone my order than to scroll through however many sub menus the restaurant has decided to put their food into, and then select the options for each item and add it to my basket, then check out.
That’s because there’s feces on every person all over them. Your nose works because it detects chemicals of something. If you smell feces it is because it is inside of your nose. Feces is in the air. Smell a fart? It’s now on you. Bathroom smells like shit? It is in the air around you and on you.
Just about 20 years ago when all those soda fountain dispensers tested always had feces detected on them, it wasn’t because some bandit was going around the world smearing shit on them every day, it is because it is always every where.
According to the BBC article that talks about the McDonalds touch screen, they say the same thing.
I didn’t even consider that, America is just filled with ‘people’ who barely even qualify as such. it’s no wonder we can’t have nice things.
Having to crawl through multiple menus to order is not that big of a deal for restaurants. They don’t value your time, they value their staff time (because they have to pay for it). There is probably very little ongoing cost to double the number of order kiosks while every additional human taking orders needs to be paid minimum wage. The restaurant owner watches with hate as their money slowly melts away while you decide if you want pickles, fried onions, and jalapenos on your burger.
Because I don’t want to be bombarded with ads and “did you consider this offer” shit and take 5 minutes to use some usability nightmare? Because I do not want to touch a greasy screen that 362 people used today without washing their hands after taking a shit? Because I do not support corpo greed that will not rest until every employee has been fired?
“BUt I LiKe tOucHy fLaSHy SCreeNy!!”
What are you, morons?
“Would you like fries with that?”
“Would you like to supersize that?”
“We have an offer on…”
“Paying by card? Type your pin into that well used machine. Cash? OK hand me the piece of paper that have touched hundreds of hands and maybe nostrils”
Maybe my people are bad at their jobs but my fast food people just take the order without any real upsell most of the time. PIN is only for debit. I almost never have to actually touch payment controls these days. NFC tap and away.
I often see buildings in Japan that have a manual sliding door followed by either a push button or proximity automatic door. If I am going to have to open one door myself, I might as well open both. If one is automatic, the other might as well be too.
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If you have to push a button, does it really count as an automatic door?
I guess you have a point. What I meant is that it’ll still slide open (like an automatic door does) but you push a button that has a similar feel to a door bell. So, still very accessible and automatic!
Oh yeah, I agree, just needless pedantry on my part :-)
Good food in convenience stores.
That technology just hasn’t made it to the US yet.
Do gas stations count? Because Kwik Star and Kwik Trip in the Midwest offer excellent food options.
Casey’s breakfast pizza is another. There is zero reason for a gas station to have good breakfast pizza at a reasonable price. But they do.
Their regular pizza is also decent for the price.
Bathroom mirrors that don’t steam up after taking a shower.
Vending machines that are competent at accepting cash. Everywhere else that I’ve been to, you have to smoothen the bill and make sure it has no wrinkles or bended corners, and even then the machine would sometimes give you a hard time. In Japan, you just insert a stack (!) of bills, and the machine will count them within seconds, and also give you change in bills, and not a gazillion of coins.
Gates at the train stations are also better than everywhere else. You don’t have to wait for the person in front of you to pass the gate, you just insert your ticket and go. You also don’t need to look for arrows or notches or whatever on the ticket to insert it correctly.
Electric kettles that are very quiet and keep the water hot for a very long time.
Trains where all seats face the front, so you don’t have to sit against the direction of travel.
Trains where all seats face the front, so you have to sit against the direction of travel.
I recently took a ride on a historic restored railroad where they run sightseeing tours on period accurate trains with period engines and coaches from the turn of the century. The trip was an out-and-back, and there is nowhere for the train to turn around before the return journey. Everyone was immensely surprised, then, when the conductor came down the aisle and demonstrated to everyone that the seats in those old coaches are reversible, and you can flip the backrest to the other side so you’re facing the right way regardless of which way the train is going. They’re otherwise 100% symmetrical.
Apparently this arcane technology of the reversible seat has been lost somewhere in the intervening 100 years, never to be discovered again. (In America, anyhow.)
Reversible seats sound marginally more expensive to install and maintain. The benefit is to make the customer’s experience better while adding no revenue.
Sounds like some anti-American euro-commie bullshit to me!
That reminds me. All of the change machines I had the pleasure of using were very gentle when taking your money. Felt kinda jarring coming back to the US where they fucking jank the money our of your hand the second you insert it.
Bidets. General cleanliness everywhere, kinda like what we had when everyone was cleaning like crazy during the pandemic, but even more so.
The cleanliness of Tokyo is mind blowing.
Saw a video from Denmark I think where everyone is biking everywhere and the metro station has an enormous numbered rack for depositing bicycles for storage. The entire thing is spotless, well maintained, and has zero graffiti.
All I could think is that in the US the fabric of our society and the integrity of the social contract is so degraded that even if we somehow had the political capital to build it - it would be destroyed by individual anti-social behaviors. And we’d certainly never have the wherewithal to maintain or repair it.
I think the problem would be not considering the upkeep. Just look at the roads in the US, individual anti-social behavior didnt graffiti those potholes.
Probably helps that kids are instilled with a sense of cleanliness at a very young age. Kids help cook school lunches on a rotating schedule, and everyone helps clean up afterwards. Litter is also a big social taboo (which is funny because public trash cans are basically nonexistent. You’re expected to carry your trash with you until you get home.)
I believe the bidet is actually French. I assume that counts as the “Western world.”
