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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Literally get auctioned off. They try to reunite bags to owners but after x time they just auction them off in bulk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
Would definitely blow minds in the US, but most of the rest of the western world is pretty much up to par.
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…
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
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.
It’s just a small thing. The escalators don’t run continuously. They start running as you approach them.
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.
Automatic opening doors but they don't open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button. This is the optimal solution as the door doesn't open needlessly but still allows for ease of access.
Ordering machines, where all your menu options are clearly listed and priced. Pressing on a combo of buttons will print a receipt which you can sit down and show the staff/cook your order.
Water (hot and cold) tapped straight to your dining table for self serve drinks.
Unfortunately becoming less applicable with the smartphone domination finally reaching Japan, but their flip phone technology.
I guess you have a point. What I meant is that it'll still slide open (like an automatic door does) but you push a button that has a similar feel to a door bell. So, still very accessible and automatic!
Since I don't speak Japanese, it was definitely a much preferred setup that made things very simple for me when I visited.
Water (hot and cold) tapped straight to your dining table for self serve drinks.
This in particular sounds awesome, speaking as a heavy water drinker who always feels like a bit of a heel having to pester busy wait staff to come over and refill my water glass a bunch of times.
I love places where you can just get it yourself. Rare here in North America, but all over the place in Korea
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button. This is the optimal solution as the door doesn’t open needlessly but still allows for ease of access.
Ordering machines, where all your menu options are clearly listed and priced. Pressing on a combo of buttons will print a receipt which you can sit down and show the staff/cook your order
I see those all the time over here in my European country.
The hot and cold water thing is not common at all. A few sushi places and bars have it. But it's quite rare tbh.
Automatic opening doors but they don’t open by a proximity sensor, they open when you press the button.
I think it would be cool to have a hybrid system where you can wave/nod/bow to a sensor to activate it, but also implement an open standard frequency that can trigger it so people with reduced mobility can mount a transmitter on a wheelchair/cane etc. or just use their cellphone. Would eliminate having any external equipment that would be exposed to weather or vandalism and is one less common surface for the public to have to touch.
I work in a pharma research facility, so people can have literally any disease or chemical on their hands, so we have a lot of doors with hand wave sensors.
Just wag your mitts in front of it, and the door opens. They're on the wall a few steps before the door, so the door is usually open by the time you get to it.
I work in a hospital, we use these long vertical elbow buttons or rfid readers with a badge which is also touchless.
And if I need to push a button like in elevators, I use the knuckle of my ring finger.
Some even have this little touch tool on their Keychain to touch screens or buttons.
taco bell in particular is embracing the kiosks and it's wonderful. they have signs in the lobby saying 'order at the kiosk' even. and why wouldn't you? why do people in the US have this pig-like stubbornness where they must have a human stand there and 'PeRsONaLIze tHE iNtERacTion' or some shit
There was an article published last year, maybe the year before, where they tested the touch screen kiosks in McDonald's. Every single one of them has traces of faeces on it.
Even if that wasn't true, it takes me significantly less time to tell someone my order than to scroll through however many sub menus the restaurant has decided to put their food into, and then select the options for each item and add it to my basket, then check out.
Having to crawl through multiple menus to order is not that big of a deal for restaurants. They don't value your time, they value their staff time (because they have to pay for it). There is probably very little ongoing cost to double the number of order kiosks while every additional human taking orders needs to be paid minimum wage. The restaurant owner watches with hate as their money slowly melts away while you decide if you want pickles, fried onions, and jalapenos on your burger.
Refrigerators that make way less noise than the ones we have here. Japanese more often live in small apartments so noise is a bigger nuisance. But, those refrigerators are ridiuclously expensive by our standards. I had been interested in buying one, oh well.
Doesn't anyone check the dB an appliance makes? It's one of the first things I check, as I hate loud devices.
Found at 7-11, combo ketchup/mustard blister pack that when you simply bend and squeeze together, ketchup and mustard come out evenly for your corn-dog and no mess for your fingers.
You have tomato sauce packets? It's funny to think of ketchup as tomato sauce, in the US if you called it that everyone would be confused even though it is really the most accurate thing you could call it
Is it though? There are other things people refer to as tomato sauce and that could be confusing. As an Italian living in Australia i cringe every time someone refers to ketchup as tomato sauce. Tomato sauce should be a beautiful thing that goes in pasta, lasagne and all gorgeous food stuff. Ideally home made.
The vinegary shit that drunk people here put on their meat pie (that BTW would taste beautifully as they comes out of the oven, no need to put any nasty shit on it) - it's called ketchup and you just ruined that beautiful pie.
We would call the sauce for burgers, fries etc ketchup, 'tomato sauce' in the US would be the sort for pasta, like marinara. If you asked for tomato sauce for a burger people would be very confused lol.
No, I meant the ones with all kinds of buttons that has 5 different bidet settings and heated seats and plays music when you flush
plays music when you flush
Please tell me this is something you can customize. I didn't realize until now that I need a toilet that plays John Williams' "Olympic Fanfare" when I take a dump.
I saw an ad for the Squatty Potty and decided to put 2 phone books in the bathroom instead. it worked well enough
Bathroom mirrors that don't steam up after taking a shower.
Vending machines that are competent at accepting cash. Everywhere else that I've been to, you have to smoothen the bill and make sure it has no wrinkles or bended corners, and even then the machine would sometimes give you a hard time. In Japan, you just insert a stack (!) of bills, and the machine will count them within seconds, and also give you change in bills, and not a gazillion of coins.
Gates at the train stations are also better than everywhere else. You don't have to wait for the person in front of you to pass the gate, you just insert your ticket and go. You also don't need to look for arrows or notches or whatever on the ticket to insert it correctly.
Electric kettles that are very quiet and keep the water hot for a very long time.
Trains where all seats face the front, so you don't have to sit against the direction of travel.
Trains where all seats face the front, so you have to sit against the direction of travel.
I recently took a ride on a historic restored railroad where they run sightseeing tours on period accurate trains with period engines and coaches from the turn of the century. The trip was an out-and-back, and there is nowhere for the train to turn around before the return journey. Everyone was immensely surprised, then, when the conductor came down the aisle and demonstrated to everyone that the seats in those old coaches are reversible, and you can flip the backrest to the other side so you're facing the right way regardless of which way the train is going. They're otherwise 100% symmetrical.
Apparently this arcane technology of the reversible seat has been lost somewhere in the intervening 100 years, never to be discovered again. (In America, anyhow.)
Reversible seats sound marginally more expensive to install and maintain. The benefit is to make the customer’s experience better while adding no revenue.
Sounds like some anti-American euro-commie bullshit to me!
That reminds me. All of the change machines I had the pleasure of using were very gentle when taking your money. Felt kinda jarring coming back to the US where they fucking jank the money our of your hand the second you insert it.