Japan's love affair with the fax machine: A strange relic of technological fantasies

With Japan riding the crest of its postwar economical miracle, Sony president Akio Morita and Japan's Minister of Transport Shintarō Ishihara unleashed a manifesto. The document, published successful 1989, contained a prophecy that propelled it to home bestseller status, and into the acrophobic hands of officials astatine the CIA.

At the time, the authors noted, the American and Soviet superpowers had go "dependent connected the inaugural of the Japanese people" successful processing caller technology, arsenic exemplified by the country's ascendant accumulation of semiconductor chips. For Morita and Ishihara, this signaled "the extremity of modernity developed by Caucasians" and the emergence of "an epoch of caller genesis" led by Japanese technological supremacy.

Fast guardant to 2021, and Japan's high-tech representation is peeling away. "Japan needs a bundle update," the New York Times tells us. The country's octogenarian IT minister, Naokazu Takemoto, has been mocked for his inability to support a functioning website. Japan, it seems, is lagging behind successful the planetary contention to digitize, contempt being the location of Panasonic and Mitsubishi, of slug trains and neon-lit municipality life.

And obscurity is this amended symbolized than successful the country's ongoing emotion matter with the fax machine. The 20th-century exertion is inactive a fixture successful galore Japanese offices, wherever determination remains an insistence connected insubstantial documents bearing personal seals. But alternatively than asking wherefore Japanese businesses person patiently stood by their buzzing fax machines, possibly we should truly beryllium asking: wherefore bash we find it truthful surprising? Why bash representations equating Japan to precocious technologies persist truthful tenaciously, contempt grounds to the contrary?

An evident culprit is "techno-orientalism." One exertion of the word orientalism has been successful describing the romanticisation of the east, successful the eyes of the west, arsenic a spot of exoticism and mystical wisdom. Japan's booming microelectronics manufacture opened a caller anticipation for orientalist fantasy: techno-orientalism, oregon the thought that the eastbound could correspond an exotic, technoscientific future. Think present of however neon-lit Tokyo helped animate Blade Runner's aesthetic and Neuromancer's television-colored skies.

But look further back, and there's a deeper history, entangled with modern imperialism, that feeds into our thought of modern Japan. The phantasy of precocious technological improvement has agelong been cardinal to defining Japanese nationalist identity—as "modern," comparative to some its Asian neighbors and the west.

Japanese identity

It was nary mishap that erstwhile Akio and Shintarō spoke successful 1989 of Japan's rise, they framed it arsenic "the extremity of modernity developed by Caucasians." Japan entered the modern planetary bid staring down the barrels of cannons mounted connected American steamships. In negotiating the country's opening, occidental imperial powers impressed upon Japan their overwhelming mechanical might, reinforced by an "ideology of dominance based connected technology."

In response, technological improvement became the cornerstone of Japan's nationalist agenda. As encapsulated successful slogans specified arsenic "oitsuke oikose"—"catch up and overtake"—the extremity was to make autochthonal industries, infrastructure and subject capableness that would yet connection Japan parity with, oregon adjacent superiority over, the west.

This "techno-nationalism" besides served arsenic a cardinal motive for Japan's imperial expansion. By the precocious 1930s, Japanese engineers referred to their enactment successful the puppet authorities of Manchuria (an country covering Northeastern China and parts of neighboring Russia) arsenic "gijutsu hōkoku," oregon "service to the state done technology."

One of Japan's earliest and astir important investments successful faxing occurred successful 1936, connected the juncture of that year's Berlin Olympics. A telephotographic web was established betwixt Tokyo and Berlin to transmit not lone pictures of the event, but besides an illustrated photoletter from Hitler to Nippon Electric.

Shortly after, successful 1941, the Japanese Planning Agency outlined a vision of however Japanese engineering combined with earthy materials from its Asian empire mightiness make an autonomous portion escaped from domination by Western technologies. Foreshadowing the words of Morita and Ishihara fractional a period later, this imaginativeness of a "new order" intersected with broader wartime debates astir however Japan mightiness "overcome modernity"—a word mostly understood to beryllium synonymous with overcoming the West.

Reality bites

This nationalist fantasy, a projection of what Japan could oregon should go astatine the level of authorities and industry, persisted done Japan's 1980s technological ascendancy—just arsenic the fax instrumentality was enjoying its heyday. But the exuberant postwar bubble would burst.

During the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan's system entered a recession, past shrank. An aging colonisation and marked sex and income inequality became the substance of regular headlines. From this perspective, dilatory digitalisation is simply 1 scale of a wide malaise gripping the state since the extremity of its economical miracle. Nevertheless, adjacent arsenic the spread betwixt phantasy and world widened, Japan's high-tech representation remained an integral portion of the fashionable imagination.

The persistence of this representation successful the look of contradictory grounds is little astonishing fixed however technological prowess has been a cardinal portion Japanese nationalist individuality for implicit a century. If renewed attraction connected Japan's emotion matter with the fax instrumentality tells america anything, it's possibly little that Japan is mired successful the pre-digital past, but alternatively that the property erstwhile Japan defined its narration to modernity done precocious exertion whitethorn beryllium coming to an end.

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This nonfiction is republished from The Conversation nether a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.