High-speed rail
don’t tell America. pretend it’s multiple automobiles welded together and they’ll like it
I honestly think we should build normal light rail stations with RGB gamer lights and crap and hype it like it’s futuristic tech. it works for musk’s tesla taxi tunnel so it should work for actually good public transit too. maybe make the bodywork on the trains look like some dumb sci-fi movie
Some LED strips, diffuser channels, and an ESP32 are all you need to RGB anything. It’s shockingly simple to do this now.
Just tell them they run on coal.
pretend it’s multiple pickup trucks welded together
Fixed for 'murican tastes
Duh, we have high-speed rail in Morocco. It’s called Al Boraq and is the best way to blast from Casablanca to Tangier.
And it is not overpriced like in France, where the tgv is more expensive than a taxi to the airport, your plane ticket, and then another taxi.
I thought I was the only Moroccan on Lemmy.
I also live in an area that doesn’t get served by the Al Boraq. We don’t have trains in general over here and I am jealous.
I also learned about the Al Boraq’s existence the hard way, because in the summer of 2022, my family had to drive me from Casablanca to Tangier and back by car, which took us like 3 hours on one trip.
Tgv is awesome but I do agree that it is quite expensive
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We’re doing fine with that in Switzerland thanks.
Switzerland doesn’t really have a high speed rail network. In fact they design against it. Indeed the country is very small so it’s not a huge deal but then again there are flights between Geneva and Zürich so it’s large enough for that.
Their rail system is by far the best in Europe though and one of the best in the world only surpassed by the likes of Japan. They just aren’t really know for high speed rail.
Switzerland is very mountainous and has pretty fast trains too, although not Shinkansen-fast. Swiss trains are expensive and comfortable and the vista is pretty much always great.
smug TGV noises
Would love to be able to take a sleeper train to the border with Canada, then have one of my friends from Toronto pick me up so I can visit them.
On the flipside, something most developed countries consider normal but would blow Japanese minds is the ability to do all “paperwork” on your phone or laptop without any paper ever being printed anywhere. Japan is somehow still a country of fax.
I heard Japan described as being “stuck in the year 2000 since the 1980’s”. I think South Korea fits the original question better than Japan nowadays.
Yeah, Japan had a massive tech boom in the 80s and 90s, but then just kinda stopped growing that field. It’s still there and still a strong industry in Japan, but the cultural tech hype isn’t there anymore, it seems.
Part of the reason for the original enthusiasm is that they were enamored by the country’s recovery post-WWII when they managed to barely obtain permissions from transistor patent holders to manufacture in Japan which led to creation of many of the first consumer transistor radio brands among other electronics manufacturing.
They were the cheap electronics labour market before China, as China wouldn’t see notable economic improvement until after the 80s.
I was there in the last few years and couldn’t believe how much of the country was still cash only!
I’m there right now from Australia, which is often considered one of the most cashless societies and yeah, it’s really a shock.
To be honest I kind of like it, and the way they manage it.
And when it isn’t cash only it’s a completely random grab bag between credit cards, transit cards, QR codes, app payment and e money. Just hope you have the supported option of like 20 options.
They’ve made a stunning amount of progress in accepting credit cards in the past couple years though. I’m there pretty regularly and the shift has been wild. By spring 2023 I didn’t really need cash anymore. By fall, I used cash maybe twice.
There was one thing I was sure I’d need cash for— nope, the hotel paid them and added it to my tab. Back in the day, that mostly happened only if you skipped out on a reservation and the restaurant wanted to collect the cancellation fee. Which has never happened to me so I guess I’m not sure it worked exactly like that.
I know a lot of people here hate credit cards and only use cash, but it’s honestly a pretty large hassle to get cash in every country you visit. Using the same card everywhere is way more convenient and cheaper (exchange fee + no % back like with a credit card)
Isn’t this because of those special stamps they use in Japan to notorize documents? I heard about them on a podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/
Love that show.
I’ve heard it’s just more of a burocracy thing. A friend there once told me he always puts the date wrong on the top of documents because there is a person who’s job is to double check your work. They’re judged on how often they find mistakes, so it’s easier to put something blatantly wrong at the top that easily fixed so they can quickly find it and he can move on.
We are getting more and more stuff, but they often have a really shit UX. We can do some stuff on PC since the “My Number” card system, but that also requires installing all kinds of software, only works in certain browsers, etc.
sweats in german
You can fax at your local public library. It was only about six months ago that my state’s social services dept. stopped requiring faxes.
Are you talking about Japan here?
No, Indiana.
They have a device which progressively shines a light on a piece of paper while moving across the page and converts the brightness of the reflected light into an audio signal. Once it reaches the edge the paper is incremented and the process repeats. Each of these segments of sound are sent via a standard telephone connection to a similar device on the other end which uses the sounds to reproduce the image on the original paper on a new sheet of paper. This can be used to send forms, letters, black and white pictures, and even chain letters. It also forms the basic underpinning of a significant fraction of formal communications with landlords, employers, medical systems, government offices, and so on.
Fax machine?
I think he’s saying that, for as futuristic as Japan may seem, they also still rely on outdated methods for certain things, just like every other country.
I’ve sometimes heard it phrased that “Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980.”
I think it’s because the country did not significantly recover from the 90s financial crisis, and their society is so conservative that they literally could not try anything modern again afterwards
They literally went “industrial society and it’s consequences have been a disaster for Japanese society”
I agree with the first part, but not the second.
The impact of the financial crisis reverberates to this day, and that drives a huge proportion of the issues, but the crisis in my opinion was inevitable. From my perspective, the Post-War Economic Miracle, as it’s called, catapulted Japan through all the stages of economic development into an almost accelerated version of the same problems that are afflicting the U.S. and other Western countries.
The dream of infinite growth in the Japanese context fell flat for the same reasons it is falling apart in other developed countries. A rise in standard of living and wages led to offshoring and outsourcing of production, the hollowing out of the middle class, a work culture at odds with family life, and so on. The country’s land and businesses were valued in the late 1980s as though it could remain competitive internationally with a mostly domestic supply chain, even as the production costs of its goods continued to rise along with the needs of its population, which in a globalized economy turned out to be a pipe dream.
We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton. But the conservatism of Japanese society certainly plays a role, in that the country is highly resistant to change, and also due to a rigidity that stifles innovation, making it hard to start new businesses outside the keiretsu/conglomerate structure. The U.S. has somewhat mitigated its manufacturing decline through the creation of new service sector and especially tech businesses that operate internationally, which path is less available to Japan due to the rigidity of its business structure.
But the part I disagree with is the idea that Japan has rejected industrial society. Japan is still extremely proud of its culture and the impact it’s had globally. They love that people in western countries eat ramen and sushi, play Nintendo games or watch anime, and they have a deep reverence for their globally successful businesses and particularly the auto industry. They have no desire to reject or withdraw from industrial society, they just haven’t been able to figure out amidst external economic barriers, and internal cultural and financial barriers, how to move forward.
We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton.
That is the lie they tell us. Meanwhile we do everything we can to make we don’t have an industrial base.
- We zone factories far away from everything instead of allowing them to be in normal commuting range
- We tax the land they are on the same way we tax commercial property. Which you might think is fair but we don’t do that to farmers. Especially considering how easy retail gets it, with governments willing to give plenty of free roads and police protection to them
- We treat inventory as taxable which punishes factories that want a buffer and rewards the quick turnover of fast fashion places. Ever wonder why they never have your size and you have to go to the website to get it?
- Thanks to our shit medical system any workplace injury is going to be devastating which means that the insurance as a whole will be very high.
- Factory investments take longer to pay off which doesnt mean much when we all think quarterly. A tax on rapid stock trading could probably fix that but that isn’t going to happen.
There are other factors as well. We don’t hire women to do factory work which limits the labor pool. There is still a lot of discrimination against Latinos and African Americans. Which again lowers the labor pool and kinda leaves us with…well the kind of people who feel only comfortable only working with white Christian men.
oh nice! i hope i get to use that at a party before i forget it!
Ironically, I just noticed this morning that the pizzaria on the corner (here, in the US) can take orders via fax (as well as in person, via phone, and on the Web).
I don’t know about today, but back around 2000, stuff on the Japanese market was quite a bit ahead of the US in small, portable, personal electronic devices, like palmtop computers and such. I remember being pretty impressed with it. But then I also remembered being surprised a few years later when I learned that personal computer ownership was significantly lower than in the US. I think that part of it is that people in Japan spend a fair bit of time on mass transit, so you wanted to have small, portable devices tailored to that, and that same demand doesn’t really exist in the US.
Then everyone jumped on smartphones at some point after that, and I think things homogenized a bit.
Yeah, PC games are a nothing market in Japan as virtually no one owns a gaming PC; they’re much more likely to own a console (Sony and Nintendo are domestic companies) or a mobile device.
This used to be the case, but it’s hardly true anymore. PC Gaming has taken off in Japan.
https://www.pcgamer.com/japanese-pc-gaming-saw-another-year-of-explosive-growth/
Keep in mind that that’s been changing over the past couple of years
Clever! I missed that.
And we’re still trying to eliminate fax as a channel we take orders in. We made a big dent a few years ago but we still get a handful a week.
I heard it’s to do with how secure tax actually is compared to email or something.
it’s not, it’s just institutional inertia
“McFly! Read my fax!”
YOU’RE
FIRED!!!
So simply put, it is a facsimile machine?
Bro you actually got me so hard until I read the comment below. I was blown away.
Takkyubin.
If you have a large suitcase or other parcel it may be unwieldy to walk around Tokyo or another city with it. Subways only allow one suitcase of a certain size, so you might have to take a much more expensive taxi.
Instead you can go to a desk at the airport and have your luggage delivered same day or next day to ~any hotel, subway station, or convenience store. It will be insured and kept safe for you there to pick up. And at the end of your trip, you can send it back. The price for this convenience? Around $10.
This is not only a good demonstration of Japanese trust and customer service, it’s also a legitimately hard logistics problem. I daresay that such a business could not succeed in the US both because of our defensiveness and sprawling cities.
Well, airports already manage to lose up to 0.9% of bags, it would certainly be difficult to convince the average American to trust this service.
That’s a lot of bags. Where do they go? WHERE ARE ALL THE BAGS?!
sorry I eated them
Russia. Putin use them to build his palace.
Literally get auctioned off. They try to reunite bags to owners but after x time they just auction them off in bulk.
That’s quite sad. I guess that’s why we put our addresses on the suitcase
There’s definitely a huge difference in service work ethic in Japan, which probably leads to those reliability stats. I don’t even know if I consider it a good or bad thing, because it’s super-nice when you’re relying on them there, but I can also tell that waiting on people hand and foot wears on people’s mental health, and it often shows across that country.
Wow that is fantastic. I’m surprised no one “imported” that one to the states in “make everything a start-up!” days early-mid 2010s.
As a tip, it’s not quite as convenient but most hotels will let you check a bag with them, even if you’re not a guest. I’ve done that at different conferences (usually 1st day and/or last day) when I had a day left, didn’t want to haul my bag, but couldn’t go to from my hotel. I think I got turned down once and it was simply because they were full.
Excellent public transportation
Is is a joke I’m too European to understand?
As I understood, lots of Japan is rural, and travel between places outside of the main cities and tourist spots is limited. It’d be like saying the US has good public transport because of the NY subway…
I got out to the middle of fucking nowhere on a mountain by taking the Shinkansen, then a local small train, then a bus, and finally a taxi because I didn’t want to wait 20m for a shuttle bus
Compared to California (home, comparable size and layout tbh) it’s way easier to get to remote places period thanks to the public transit system
Quite literally to do the same trip I did in Japan in CA I’d have Maybe a slow ass Amtrak line to get me close-ish in twice the time of the Shinkansen and still have an hours drive of my own rented car to get there
I’ve traveled from tiny towns in northern Japan to major cities like Tokyo. All on public transportation. Bullet trains, local trains, they’re very well connected to each other.
We have trains out to hubs in the countrysides here as well. Generally, they only run hourly the in a lot of the countryside.
Japan’s current fiber-optic commercial internet connections use optical fiber transmission windows known as L and C multi-core fiber (MCF) bands to transport data long distances at record speeds. Meanwhile we (USA) have fiber back to copper and Cat3 for the last few hundred feet in most cities at best making the entire idea into a bottle neck.
Cat3? As in most cities in the US are limited to 10mbps?
No, the average internet download speed in the United State is about 171 Mbps. Though disclaimer, I’m not sure of the exact reliability of that number, different sources are reporting quite a range of speeds, though I don’t see any under 100 Mbps average and I see many reporting well above this.
https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/fastest-slowest-internet
There are certainly some areas, especially rural, that struggle though. And upload speed is often much worse unless you have fiber.
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Cat 3 isnt actually a thing, but people call house phone wiring that. Runs DSL quite well.
Cat 3 is a thing and is basically unshielded twisted pair. You can abuse it quite a bit from its voice grade days to cram a few hundred megabits of VDSL over it if it’s only from your house to the curb.
There are a lot of very good reasons to switch back to copper for the last portion of a run. I highly doubt that consumer internet in Japan is terminating fiber directly into peoples’ computers. Fiber is a lot more expensive both for the line, to run it, more prone to breakage, the network cards are more expensive, etc. It’s really not needed for most purposes.
Also no one uses cat3 for data and it can’t be run for ‘hundreds of feet’. And LC fiber IS used in the US - that’s a kind of connector not the kind of fiber.
I highly doubt that consumer internet in Japan is terminating fiber directly into peoples’ computers.
You run fiber to the home and gigabit ethernet or whatever internally in the premises. All your other complaints re: cost and etc aren’t really an issue for last mile consumer grade fiber.
I have seen installers run a fiber drop cable across from a power pole, bring it down an outside wall , then staple it to joists under a house, cleave off the end and stick a mechanical splice on it, bang it in the power meter, all good, plug it in the fiber modem, good to go in less than 20 minutes. All this stuff uses standard components and technology that’s been available for 10+ years now.
Also no one uses cat3 for data and it can’t be run for ‘hundreds of feet’. And LC fiber IS used in the US - that’s a kind of connector not the kind of fiber
It’s probably the standard “last mile” half assed solution where they decide to use existing phone lines and VDSL from a box down the street instead of biting the bullet and running fiber.
This is how it works in the UK too. I’ve got Fibre To The Premises (FTTP), and the installation was pretty much exactly as you described.
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I’m in Italy and I have a fiber internet port inside my home
Not on your computer though
Typing from my Tokyo fiber-to-the-home connection now. They ran it off the pole, installed a little thing in my house, ran the fiber to the modem they make me rent, and it works like a charm.
Yeah, it’s not terminated in your computer though for all the reasons I said.
I don’t think I understand unless you’re expecting me to buy some router and network cards that natively support fiber to go from the modem (which is fiber in from the pole outside).
I have fiber to home in Canada
Have fiber to home here in Arkansas in the US
Yeah, it’s not terminated in your computer though for all the reasons I said.
And so what? I have 1.5 Gb symmetrical with latency to many sites and game servers under 10 ms (on Wi-Fi!)
And you would be wrong.
A mindset of quality.
CNC Machines that are built in Japan are so much Mount Betterest than their ‘Made in America’ counterparts. Even under the same company name.
Visit any shop that requires quality around the world and you’ll see Japanese made machines almost everywhere.
I remember touring a Harley Davidson factory in Milwaukee and noticing that, while the tour guide continued to repeat the “made in America” mantra, all the machine tools were either Japanese or German.
more better
ಠ_ಠ
Bettererer
Mount Betterest
A place I worked had a noodle machine made in Japan. The manufacturer had us send noodles to them from our shop in the US to ensure the machine was working properly and that our noodles were good, I had never heard of any other sort of company doing that. Where I work now has top quality machinery and they are mostly made in Japan.
I work for an OEM and we will request photos after installation and samples of raw material before sale for anything unusual, so I got to say that is more impressive
Thanks to Demming…
Wow, that’s fascinating! What do you think would be the best thing to read from Deming from an lay engineering or lay civic perspective? What’s most accessible, I guess?
Can’t believe noone has mentioned the hot beverage vending machines.
Its so fucking nice to spend $1-$1.50 and just get some hot tea or coffee right there without issue. And they’re everywhere so you can pretty much rely on them.
So much more convenient than having to go to a coffee shop so you can pay $5 for the same thing, and the vending machine version still tastes great.
This comment made me remember that the tech school in my (US) hometown of ~4000 people had a machine like this roughly 20 years ago and I’ve never seen another one since.
My college had a french fry vending machine. That was pretty awesome.
They also have much more popularized versions of canned coffee than us; I occasionally see bad overpriced Starbucks coffee bottles in grocery store checkouts, but not something small, quick, and convenient like BOSS.
I had one at my old workplace and it certainly served me better coffee than the mud I could get from the mcdonalds across the road.
It’s likely not as cool as Japanese vending coffee, but in the UK there are Starbucks/Costa etc vending machines all over. Do Americans (sorry assuming you are from US) not have those?
Have used a couple of hot coffee vending machines in the US and all of them were absolute garbage.
The Tick: Armless bandit… Empty your bladder of that bitter black urine men call coffee! It has its price and its price has been paid!
I don’t mind vending machine cappuccino but that’s only like half credit as coffee lol
the ones at racetrac are pretty great imo. i get the lightest roast they have (more caffeine) and dump a bunch of sugar and cream into it but it’s pretty good black, too
But are those like a hot coffee dispenser, where you grab a cup and put it under a spout, push a button and it pours out a hot drink? Because we do have those in Australia.
But in Japan they have vending machines for canned drinks and cans of soup that are heated.
Australia here, nothing similar here.
But this is like basically every street has a set of these vending machines. They’re everywhere.
As someone from the west coast of The States, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a hot drink vending machine in real life. At least not here where I live.
As someone from the west coast of The States, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a hot drink vending machine in real life. At least not here where I live.
We used to have them, but I haven’t seen them for over a decade now.
If you remember the Terminator 2 movie, the scene where a security guard gets a cup of coffee, those are the kind of dispensers that used to exist.
(The link above shows the scene I’m speaking of. I tried to embed the URL into this comment so the picture itself would display, but I couldn’t figure it out.)
Also from the US west, I’ve seen a bunch of hot vending machines! In several hospitals and schools in different states, a few gas stations. They will have coffee, tea or cocoa selections, a cup pops out and gets filled with fresh brewed coffee. They were usually around 1.50 to 2 dollars a cup, maybe more expensive now though.
Ditto. Also rest stops.
No, not that I’ve seen except for at highway rest stops. They have automated coffee vending machines that sells some brown nasty tasting water. Definitely not coffee
I used to see these more often in Canada but now they’re pretty unusual. Not heated cans like some Japanese machines, just cups of coffee and sometimes lattes and shit.
Now you’re forced to pay $3+ for muddy garbage at Tim’s/McDonalds and you have to wait in line to get it too. Alternatively drop $7+ at Starbucks for ok coffee? I can make better tasting coffee with a drip machine, let alone my French press.
I’ve seen these around in the US, but they seem to be getting rarer for some reason.
Can you get sugar or cream or do you have to drink the coffee black?
You have a variety of options usually. Different brands, and then ones that have no milk, ones that are milky etc.
You also usually have the choice of having things cold or hot as well.
I’d steal from them
Automated underground bike storage
It’d be cool if they had those here but I swear we have enough idiots that would try to get in for shits and giggles and maim themselves
We can’t have a lot of things because that 1% is fucking morons.
Everything from clean public bathrooms to high end vending machines.
US here… it has less to do with the 1% being fucking morons and more to do with the only infrastructure we actually pay any attention to is cars. Sure we’re having a bit of a bicycle revolution but at least in my area the bikes aren’t being used for transport but for fun, but then that’s with a metro that’s sprawling with a city that’s only 100 sq miles smaller than NYC, with 8,000,000 less people in it. Add that the auto companies were allowed to buy out things like the streetcar that was local and able to tear up the tracks to get rid of competition, it really isn’t a shocker.
But we’re now stuck in a cyclical spiral, of no investment for things like this are happening because it’s not seen as profitable enough. Which means a constant problem of using something like a bike for commuting is “But then I have nowhere I can put my bike where it won’t get fucked with.” so people don’t commute with it, which leads to no investment to the infrastructure.
Dunno how to fix it. It just sucks.
Don’t forget privacy in toilet stalls - I’ve seen the huge gaps in doors in the US.
You could put giant billboards warning for the risk and it would still become a recurring event. Even if it said “warning: this is capable of grinding a human being to pulp”.
New viral challenge…
Now you got me seriously depressed.
“Not only will this kill you, but it will hurt like hell the whole time you’re dieing”
Where is that sentence from?
Why can’t we have basic, objective, uncomplicated worded warnings like that? Maybe the stupid ratio would drop.
I’ve heard of it posted on high voltage electrical panels, but never seen it myself (I’m not an electrician). I don’t know if I got the wording exactly right, but it sounds good.
Meanwhile, I can’t retrieve my bike because someone’s mangled arm is jamming the main lift.
Make it self cleaning. Problem will solve itself after a while
I’d imagine it’s got weight and pressure sensors, so I don’t think a person would get very far. I can definitely see the mechanism getting jammed by garbage or some shit, especially if someone’s trying to jam it.
Maybe, hopefully? I’d imagine whatever idiotproofing they do won’t be sufficient for the wild.
That’s the premise behind /r/ArchitectureForAdults: architecture that’s dangerous for morons, but safe for everyone else
We got a few of bike towers on the ground in Czechia. Very neat.
Why does this remind me of Death Stranding?
Good livestock conditions so that food is actually edible raw
There are places in Japan that actually serve chicken sashimi.
This is what we heard. So when visiting my brother, the whole group tried it. Everyone got salmonella poisoning and had explosive diarrhea for two days. That was an interesting shinkansen trip.
Your intuition is right on this, don’t eat raw chicken.
I googled.
“When cooked, chicken can be a nutritious choice, but raw chicken can be contaminated with Campylobacter, Salmonella, or Clostridium perfringens germs. If you eat undercooked chicken, you can get a foodborne illness, also called food poisoning.”
Yeaaaaaah, no way I’ll try it.
Then I think I would like to try cookie dough sashimi
What if you get salmonella!?
Their ability to actually build things. The amount of construction projects I saw while visiting was insane, and they get it done fast.
Fast my ass. Once they finally start maybe… But it takes ages to lay the first stone. There’s not enough people available to build everything they want to build. It’s a serious issue
Ok, well maybe they have a long pipeline of projects ready to be built, but they are getting things built. I went with a friend who was there like 5 years prior and he said everything looked totally different since the last time he was there. I don’t know about the planning process but even if that’s slow that’s still way better than most places where it also takes ages to get something started, takes ages to get something built, and they don’t have enough projects going through the planning process in the first place.
They had a lot of practice with all their empty scam apartment buildings.
Are you thinking about China?
Oh ye. Sorry.
When your xenophobia is eager but bad at geography.
Pretty common unfortunately in America.
I still think about how Blizzard originally made their WoW expansion, Panderia, to include Samurai and sushi. And someone had to explain them the difference between China and Japan.
It’s so stupid.
That’s not even necessarily mixing the two up so much as failing to distinguish cultures within “Asia” in the first place. A lot of people think of the whole region as one place. Put some soy and garlic on something? You’ve got an “Asian” dish. Never mind that there are numerous regional culinary traditions within China alone.
See also: Africa.
There are people on the Web unable to distinguish between Asia as in “China, Japan, Kamboja, Vietnam …” and Asia as in “Iran and Saudi Arabia”.
There’s a reason “USA doesn’t know geography” is a worldwide joke
This has absolutely nothing to do with xenophobia. This was based on a documentary of chinese economic waste and the people that fall into poverty because of it.
Well can’t fault honesty
Useable transit
Would definitely blow minds in the US, but most of the rest of the western world is pretty much up to par.
I would kill for their bidets everywhere.
If you like them, you can just buy one for your home. Expensive, but probably a better option than the murder you suggest.
Dude, bidet add-ons are like $40 that work great. I agree I wish it was more widespread though.
$40 for the basic ones. They still work great, (I have them on all my toilets at home!) but they definitely aren’t as flashy as the Japanese toilets. Self-cleaning seats, heated seats, heated water for the bidet, etc…
I’m in Portugal and bidets are standard in all home toilets around here.
And it’s not just here: the word itself - “bidet”- is actually French.
That said, they’re invariably plain and no-frills around here.
We have plenty of bidets here in the States, they just install them outside the bathrooms and they mount them kind of high so they’re kinda awkward to get a good clean angle, though.
Next time out down the katana and just learn some Japanese. You can say:
Toire o tsukatte mo ii desu ka?
And they will just let you use the bidet
It’s just a small thing. The escalators don’t run continuously. They start running as you approach them.
We have those in Europe as well, not Hyper commin, but still
We have escalators that don’t stop in Europe? I didn’t even know those existed.
We even have those in Brazil. Not everywhere, I reckon most are older than those but I’ve seen them in some malls and airports at least.
I’ve seen some in the US that run slowly until you get close. I guess they think that if it was stopped completely, people would assume it’s non-operational.
They can put a sign saying it’ll run when there’s a person. Eventually it’ll be common knowledge. I’m just thinking re efficiency.
Japan currently doesn’t have this in the more normal sense. That Japan is still super high-tech is more of a PR move. I literally had to send a fax to get my current internet (though it is fiber-to-the-home).
Where Japan is innovating is in robots and also its crossovers with an aging population. Possibly also some space stuff.
But for an everyday person, I don’t really see anything that doesn’t already exist somewhere else. I was raised in the US and have been living in Japan most of the last 10 years.
Japan’s been living in the year 2000 since 1980
but they’re still in the year 2000…
Yeah, that era has ended in the early 2000s
