Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But Martin Fackler reports that the country also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology â€" the fax machine â€" that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks and cassette tapes in the dustbin of outmoded technologies.
Last year alone, Japanese households bought 1.7 million of the old-style fax machines, which print documents on slick, glossy paper spooled in the back. In the United States, the device has become such an artifact that the Smithsonian is adding two machines to its collection, technology historians said.
“The fax was such a success here that it has proven hard to replace,†said Kenichi Shibata, a manager at NTT Communications, which led development of the technology in the 1970s. “It has grown unusually deep oots into Japanese society.â€
The Japanese government’s Cabinet Office said that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011.
Japan’s reluctance to give up its fax machines offers a revealing glimpse into an aging nation that can often seem quietly determined to stick to its tried-and-true ways, even if the rest of the world seems to be passing it rapidly by. The fax addiction helps explain why Japan, which once revolutionized consumer electronics with its hand-held calculators, Walkmans and, yes, fax machines, has become a latecomer in the digital age, and has allowed itself to fall behind nimbler competitors like South Korea and China.
“Japan has this Galápagos effect of holding on to some things they’re comfortable with,†said Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian who is writing a book on the machine’s rise and fall. “Elsewhere, the fax has gone the way of the dodo.â€
