Fed-Kun's army
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
- Messages
- 100
@Araragiken I'll add more. Japan in general is NOT a "first world ultra high-tech" country. Yes, even if they have these "ultra-smart" toilets in hotels. =) Take a little trip somewhere not very far from cities like Tokyo, and you'll find yourself somewhere in the 90s, if not 70s. A simple example: here where I live (somewhere near the very center of Russia) you can easily pay with your card everywhere. And by "everywhere" I really mean it. Bus, train, local store, supermarket, drugstore, newspaper stall, coffee/vending machine, almost every single place where you can pay for something, you can do this with your PayPass card/phone. I still carry some cash with me, since there are still a lot of places with cash only (small buses, stalls at the local market), but the general trend is obvious, the cash is disappearing. In Japan, you always need a lot of cash, since for many, many places here cards are literally nonexistent, it's even hard to find an ATM, and banks there have a pretty peculiar working hours and policies. You can even remember a story about troubles with transferring international donations to KyoAni. Yes, Japan have some very high technology... but Japanese society and economy is so conservative that it takes dozens of years for these technologies to be implemented widely. When the whole world was using smartphones for years already, in Japan there were still flip phones as the most popular gadget (probably, they still are there). When I got a full-on 100 Mbps connection on optical fiber line in my home in the late 00s (now it's up to 1 Gbps) for 5-7$/mo, Japan (well, a lot of countries in Europe as well) was still using ADSL with hellish prices. They caught up now, though. The same is with streaming services, digital manga and so on, Japan is several years behind everyone else. I'm 100% sure that if I invite a Japanese to my home city, and take him/her to the local big supermarket with self-service checkout, and then show some other "tech" places in the city, it will be a culture shock so huge it will be bad. And I consider my own city in general "a big village from the late 90s", even if it have a 1,5M population.
