Maybe Japan Really Isn't the Future

Alexis C. Madrigal Jul 13 2010, 3:26 PM ET

The popular image of Japan is as a wildly technological place that strides boldly into the future. Sometimes, visitors to Tokyo will swear that the city already is the future.

But a wonderful feature by the BBC's Michael Fitzpatrick suggests that Japan may not be as tech-crazy as casual observation indicates. Check out these two pieces of evidence:

One government poll shows that although 44% of Japanese use the internet at least once or twice a month, the rest responded that they use it 'hardly at all' or 'not at all'.

"Japanese banks, post offices, government offices, all are staffed with three to five times the employees because they must do every process once on paper and then again on computer," says Taro Hitachi a technical editor and patent reader at Hitachi. "Do you see the pattern here? Japanese aren't all that happy about spiteful machines and distrust automation."

Check out the full piece, too. It's got great color.

Via Matt Novak

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Alexis C. Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More

The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.