Finally, Japanese Faxes Get Their Swan Song

In Ridley Scott's 1982 film "Bladerunner," the future of the world is very heavily Japanese. It was a prediction which seemed appropriate at the time, Japan was the source of much of the world's consumer electronics. Sony Chairman Morita Akio and Populist/Nationalist Politician Ishihara Shintaro, in their book "The Japan That Can Say No," opined that both super powers, the United States and Soviet Union were dependent on Japanese-developed technology. They wrote that it was the "end of a modern world developed by Caucasians" and the beginning of a new era of Japanese technological supremacy.

That hasn't panned out so well. Japan went through the "Galapagos Syndrome" era where its technology developed independent of global trends, and today its vaunted corporations which dictated what technology was used and by what standards today is in disarray, often requiring the humiliation of capital injections from foreign companies just to stay in business. Japan seems in many ways to be stuck in the 1980s, and no example is more glaring than the amount of official communication done by fax machine.

The fax machine was invented in 1843 by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain, and English inventor Shelford Bidwell invented scanning phototelegraphy in 1880, but the first modern fax machine was invented in 1964 by US firm Xerox which could use transmission of sound over telephone lines.

The exponential growth of the fax machine in the 1980s coincided with a period of Japanese dominance in consumer electronics, and of course many of the fax machines of that time were from Japanese manufacturers. Japanese manufacturers like Sharp, Brother, and Ricoh were dominant in global markets and practically an oligopoly in the domestic Japanese market. Japanese telephone provider NTT was one of the first countries which allowed faxes to be transmitted over regular phone lines, and Japanese government agencies like the police, the Japanese National Railroad (predecessor of JR), and the Weather Service were all early adopters. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) dropped the depreciation schedule for fax machines from 10 years to 5 to encourage faster turnover of fax machines in corporate settings and to ensure a fairly fresh installed user base. Several Japanese government agencies also recognized faxed documents as legal, something other countries did not, as the documents did not contain an original signature.

However as Japan entered the "lost decade of the 1990s," economic malaise encouraged belt tightening, and the previously rapidly modernizing Japanese firms became frozen in place, putting off technology updates until better times which never really came. Japan continued using fax machines and requiring hanko seals on official documents long after the rest of the world had moved on to electronic signatures and documents.

But in life there are only two things which are certain, death and taxes, and death may finally be on the way for Japanese fax machines (and maybe hanko). A decision was taken at a discussion on digital and fiscal reform held at the Prime Minister's official residence to accelerate the digitization of administrative operations in schools. As a result, the use of fax machines and 'hanko' for these activities will be phased out entirely by fiscal 2025. The plan also involves supplying all schools with tablet devices to do research at least three times per week by 2026 and introducing digital textbooks by 2028. In the same meeting, ridesharing received limited and conditional approval to start in April of 2024.

The real question is what will happen with all those aged fax machines. I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Fax machines on fire over the section leader's shoulder. I watched rolls of thermal fax paper glitter in the sun as they fell off the back of a delivery truck near the factory entrance gate. All those faxes will be lost in time.. like tears in rain... Time to die.