Stuck in the 90s

We just finished up three weeks in Japan. I last visited in 1992. I remembered the usual things--the bullet train, the fancy toilet seats--but also a clean, organized, and ultra-modern place. So I was excited to return and see how things had changed. We have seen lots of technological changes in the US (order by touchscreen at McDonald's!) so I wondered what they had cooked up in Japan!?

The reality was somewhat striking. In many ways, the "look" of the place is still stuck in the 90s. There are vending machines everywhere, still, but they are mechanical and none take credit cards. In fact, credit cards are somewhat hard to use in general. For example, you can buy train tickets from 90s-style ticket machines, but only with cash. If you want to buy train tickets with a credit card you need to stand in line and talk to a human. The shinkansen is still very fast, but doesn't feel appreciably fancier than similar high-speed trains in Italy or Spain. 

The electronics stores were fascinating. They DID have fancy 8K TVs and amazing noise-canceling headphones, but they also had analog-dial radios, portable CD players, and some evolved version of the Sony Walkman. You could buy record players and standalone blu-ray players, and they have huge sections with physical DVD movies.

Becca outside a functioning Tower Records, complete with CD sales and DVDs.

The cherry on top, though, was that we encountered several franchises of Tower Records full of customers and, apparently, prospering. We listened to new music at listening stations, click-clacked our way through stacks of new CDs, and explained to the kids that we used to go to Tower Records to look for music that was hard to find or that couldn't be recorded off the radio, and then patiently explained to them why we couldn't just "stream" that music at the time. They got it, they even found it interesting, and they considered buying a couple of CDs but were put off by the going rate (of about $25).

Of course none of this is to say that Japan is backwards. Far from it. But at least walking around on the street I no longer got the feeling that the society is at the cutting edge of development and engineering, at least not in the way that I felt it in 1992. We are also visiting South Korea and Taiwan on this trip, both places with more-recent leaps in economic output, so it will be interesting to see if they also feel "stuck in the 90s" or if the walk-around experience feels more modern.

All of this is just anecdotal, of course. The "how does it feel walking around" measure is based on individual perceptions and influenced by chance encounters, the weather, the number of bugs, and so on. Really, though, isn't that what all travel is about? I loved Buenos Aires because the "walking around feel" of the place was modern and clean and safe. Not as modern and clean and safe as Tokyo, but much more modern, clean, and safe than Mexico City. In Buenos Aires that facade is hiding a lot of economic pain and suffering. And perhaps the slightly aged "feel" to Japan is hiding a lot of underlying prosperity--certainly Japan still ranks high on almost any measure of human development (the kids are working on short essays today on Japan's life expectancy rate, so we will see what ideas they come up with about the place.)

Either way, for Becca and me it was delightful to stumble onto a few vestiges of our college years, even while it was a bit perplexing to need to get cash out of an ATM just to feed it back into a kiosk to buy a train ticket.