It LOOKED like Miya's control unit had something like a microcontroller on board. It's relatively trivial to set up a real-time clock on one of those, even in the early 2000s, which you want for basically ANY piece of machinery you have running while you sleep.
There always seems to be a huge disconnect between costs, values, and salaries for me when I read about prices anywhere in Japan, so this is helpful. In my head, I equate 1 J yen to 1 US .01 $, so 10m yen works out to about 100k US$, which is pretty high end for an IT salary here, but not unheard of.
Also since the appearance fee is an additional compensation on top of the usual pay it will be taxed at the highest tax bracket, so it will be far from just 10%. In my country it would be more similar to 50%...
It LOOKED like Miya's control unit had something like a microcontroller on board. It's relatively trivial to set up a real-time clock on one of those, even in the early 2000s, which you want for basically ANY piece of machinery you have running while you sleep.
It's freakin' everywhere. It's so common that if something DOESN'T have a clock in it, it's an aberration.
A good example. I'm a CPAP patient due to some severe sleep apnea. You don't think about those things NEEDING clocks because they're supposed to keep you asleep and not wake you up. But if you look at the logs it keeps, and HFS does it keep a lot of logs, it's timed down to the millisecond. It'll tell you down to the heartbeat when you started having trouble breathing. (Theoretically, you need a doctor to read those and make adjustments. Good luck finding a GP who's trained to do that.)