Wonder if that will end up helping in the longer term.

Good for them.

Japanese people tend to make a big deal out of the "human touch," especially when it comes to service, so I can see how companies aren't jumping on to the hype. We're also pretty slow to adopt change.

Oh and maybe the shit exchange rate makes it expensive to use the service as everything is pretty much foreign tech.

Not that surprising considering Japanese government only retired floppy disks in 2024 and fax machines are still in widespread use there.

They could have AI on a floppy that faxes generated images.

Japanese people tend to make a big deal out of the “human touch,” especially when it comes to service, so I can see how companies aren’t jumping on to the hype. We’re also pretty slow to adopt change.

And that's pretty cool, seems like a culture best suited for modern challenges.

I've heard\read there are many racist, paternalist, hierarchical and collectivist traits, but at the same time Japan apparently hasn't hit those honeypots most of the humanity has.

And that's very good. You need a newer and better technology for the same job, if it does the same job better. Not for a different job with new "wow effect component" baked in.

We use pencils, pens and writing paper still.

It wasn't an option to have a "new and better" writing paper synchronizing all our records with some vault authoritative people have before. Now it is. Japan apparently has passed the test of people_not_ trying to move everything to that honeypot.

All hail Japan, can they please conquer us? Technically I live in a nearby country, except, eh, Moscow is kinda far from the far east ...

Weeeell... floppies have more downsides that upsides and could've been replaced ages ago (along with implementing backup policies).
They could've at least migrated to data MiniDiscs.

Faxes from what I've heard were mostly because back in the day it was easier to write Japanese on a paper and fax it... in the age of Unicode, fax-to-mail and alike... dunno, maybe.

I generally agree though, no point in adopting new stuff just because.

And that's pretty cool, seems like a culture best suited for modern challenges.

I mean, looking at the Lost Decades it seems to be quite the opposite. Sometimes it helps to take things slow, but other times you really have to think "come on get on with the times already".

Japan has been living in the year 2000 since the 80s.

Look at right now and consider that Japan still has something appearing to be a democracy. USA and the EU are in the "trade and denial" phase, countries like Russia and Turkey - the obvious, LOL.

That's because Japan isn't yet so compromised under the guise of progress.

Fax is an analog system that can be built without very complex production lines in place, that's a good enough reason.