When you think of what else Japan can surprise you with, there’s always something that breaks the ceiling.
A colleague and I thought we should organise a presentation of Deeper sonars in a large fishing tackle shop owned by one of the biggest fishing chains in Japan.
We know the manager of the shop, so we call and talk.
Colleague: Hello
Shop: Hello
C: We would like to organise a Deeper launch event with you.
S: Sure, great idea. We’ll have an event for carp angles soon, so we can organise it together.
C: Great. Then we’ll email you with the details.
S: I’d love to, but I don’t have email.
C: You don’t have email????
S: Yes. There is no email and no internet connection in the store either.
C: And then how do you send the files for printing the advertisement.
S: By e-mail.
C: How to mail, electronic files.
S: Well, yeah, then save it on a USB stick and send it by post and we’ll print it in the Convenience store.
Okay, I remind you, it’s 2023 now, and the shop has about a million euros worth of goods on its shelves. I understand that they fax orders, but not having e-mail and sending files by pigeon-mail breaks through all the ceilings.
On that occasion, I recalled some of the more interesting Japanese IT developments. In 2019, Mr Takemoto was appointed Japan’s Minister of Information Technology. All would be well with him, but he was 78 years old at the time. I have nothing against age, maybe a really gifted minister. The only problem is that his own web page, at least for a few months, was disconnected. It turns out he had not paid for the renewal of the domain. The JP newswire is quite active in monitoring those pages, because of political activities and so on, so the question was whether the gentleman really understands anything about IT.
Another cult case that has been sounded all over the world concerns another Mr Sakurada. The 68-year-old Japanese minister-designate for cybersecurity stated that from the age of 25 he had been giving instructions to his staff and secretaries. “I have never used a computer in my life,” Mr Sakurada said. Sakurada has been hailed by insiders as a true internet security guru. How can you hack Sakurada’s web, social network or anything else if he is not involved in cyberspace at all. Simply brilliant.
