The first time I came to Japan… more than ten years ago the technology blew me away. Large integreated subways, public phones everywhere, railways that when you put your ticket it upside down it would politely spit it out facing the right way, shinkansen, massage chairs in bic camera, internet sites that you could check train connections, trains that came on time, internet on mobile phones, email on mobile phones, vending machines that sold hot drinks as well as cold. Bic Camera where I could try out gadgets I had never even heard of….toilets that sprayed into orifices I had limited awareness of...
When I moved to Japan I was still impressed, though the immense amount of paper work for any bureaucratic process baffled me. The bank that needed me to buy my signature from the 100Y shop, the local government that would only make payments to my husbands account, the puzzlement of the bank when I asked for internet banking… like what’s wrong with a passbook….it was a trip back to primary school.
And then when I started working full time…. no heating in the staffroom? Are you for real? What do you mean there is no heater available and even if there were it would short circuit the power? After much complaint an unflued relic from the 1950s was brought it to heat the room – unheated during the day it was 14 degrees. After I started to exhibit signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, I found another school…. At both private high schools that I taught at computer use was minimal. I asked if students could do a research assignment and presentation and was told there are six portable laptops and only one room in the school with wireless…. What??? Is this the country of Toshiba, Hitachi, Sony and Panasonic? How can people produce technology that they can’t actually use? Why didn’t the school try and tie up some kind of relationship with a computer company? Why did my students have no idea how open a word document or do an image search?....Teaching in a high school in Australia even ten years ago I regularly took students to the library for research and students were capable of impressive multi media presentations.
And yet as a I felt concussed in school by the banging of a head on a brick wall, I marvelled at the technological progress around me….Suicas that become integrated to Suica-Pasmo and then began link ups with Maruzen,the shops in the station, Uniqlo, Family Mart, Summit supermarket. And then integrated as smart money into mobile phones.
Teaching at university, I was shocked to find no computer communication with students possible. If I wanted to contact them to tell them they were almost at the upper limit of absences before mandatory failing - too bad it was prohibited, – getting an email address was a breach of student privacy and there were no university issued ones. The admin needless to say didn’t see it as their task… Exam results were calculated on paper, entered on paper, handed in on paper. No need for a computer at all. The results from my computer spreadsheet had to be copied out by hand, and handed in to be re-entered on a computer... No possibility to add marks straight into the system…. Ten years ago when I was teaching in Australia our marks went straight into the computer…It was puzzling why such a common sense use of technology was not being used…To be fair this isn’t the case at all educational establishments, at the high level science oriented uni where I am teaching now all of this is in place.
Japan’s technology in global systems – particularly banking and mobile phones – can be frustrating because it’s not always integrated into the global system– and travellers sometimes take this as a bizarre anomaly of backwardness. An ex-firefighter / marine engineer acquaintance, who came out from England the other day to work as a volunteer in Ofunato, Iwate for a couple of months, couldn’t get his head around why he couldn’t SMS me to tell me what train he was on, nor why he was unable buy a SIM card and put it into his UK phone – knowing he wasn’t likely to find a public phone in Ofunato… The banking situation has improved since the World Cup, when post office ATMs started to take overseas cards. But most ATMs still don’t take foreign issued cards, and most Japanese cards can’t be used overseas. In the case of both banking and phones the systems evolved separately from western countries. In the case of mobile phones in particular it is only in the past couple of years that email and phone have become standard on phones in western countries.
But within Japanese technology there do seem to be areas that are higher priority for innovation – smart money and integrated transport, anything to do with toilets and baths, mobile phones, more recently rice cookers. Tobacco sales also seem to gain large research dollars as evidenced by the TASPO card & eye recognition vending machines. Tsunami warning systems are also high priority – despite the loss of life in the Tohoku earthquake – without tsunami warnings, I wonder how much higher the death toll would have been. Lower priority seems to be education and anything that reduces paperwork. Occupational health and safety, especially in blue collar jobs, doesn’t seem to be that high on the technology agenda. Something that surprised me a lot when I came to Japan is the way construction workers don’t wear ear protection, children bounce around cars unrestrained and no-one wears bicycle helmets… not all areas are equally high for technological advancement. One area where Japan does seem to lead international research is in robots – particularly humanoid robots.
Several years ago I read an article in the Economist[i] that discussed cultural differences that made it easier to develop robots in Japan – the land of the kamigami – compared with Judeo-Christian oriented countries that have a philosophical root in humans being created in the image of God. The article also discussed the findingthat many Japanese would prefer a robot look after them in their old age than a foreigner. Though the argument didn’t seem that convincing at the time, I was quite shocked when I related the story to a liberal minded Japanese colleague who said it was quite natural that people would feel more comfortable being looked after by a robot than a foreigner..… Though I am not prepared to ascribe a single anecdote to culture differences, it did force me to recognise I shouldn’t assume my own world view is necessarily shared by others. I was surprised to hear a colleague say the other day though, that TEPCO had rejected purchasing robots several years ago on the basis that humans could do the job. A robot that can play the violin was considered more viable than one that could maintain a nuclear plant....
In terms of shock – the intended subject of discussion – I have said nothing … I wrote most of this last night when I thought the topic was Japan and technology rather than specifically shock related. In terms of shock, or acute stress disorder, though, I am not sure that I have much to say. I think in Tokyo after the initial shock of the earthquake, and the realisation of the tsunami, shock passed reasonably quickly, as shock tends to do. I think in Kanto stress, ongoing stress and anxiety caused by uncertainty, and in Tohoku stress combined with grief is more of an issue than shock. I am not into anime and avoid movies with apocalyptic themes and cannot put it into that context, nor do I wish to do so. Charlie Brooker’s http://wisteriaisland.blogspot.com/2011/04/charlie-brookers-media-critique.html video which I have published here previously, expresses more eloquently than I can the perversity of conflating fact and fiction.
In terms of the specific questions… for the assignment, there is no single response to any of the questions. Faith in technology. I had faith my building wouldn’t collapse – and it didn’t. Our earthquake bag is depleted to the point where it is useless and remains so. The two obvious examples of being unprepared, or mis prepared are the Fukushima plant not having adequate tsunami prevention and evacuation centres being located in areas that were inundated by tsunami. I am not sure I would call this a failure of technology. In the case of evacuation centres, they were located, as far as I know, on historical expectations of where a tsunami would reach. In the case of the Hamadori nuclear plants, they were not designed to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake or a 14 meter tsunami. Rather than a failure of technology it was a calculated risk gone wrong. Where electricity was lost – I presume for most of the areas affected by the tsunami – reliance on television warnings for tsunami would not have worked. I am not sure what percentage of the town public address systems worked – I assume in many places they failed. Where people had no access to mobile phone information, tsunami alerts may not have been received.
Were there already images of disasters in public circulation that might have mitigated the shock brought on by the real disasters?
No doubt. Look at the Charlie Brooker video.... reality and makebelieve are easily conflated. Reality in a distant location can presumably be dismissed as easily as yet another Hollywood apocalypse…though it's not quite so easy to do for people living the reality.
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