Comment by ks2048
I thought Japan had a reputation for pointless bureaucracy (faxing useless paperwork around to get something approved, etc).
I thought Japan had a reputation for pointless bureaucracy (faxing useless paperwork around to get something approved, etc).
Don't forget when your coworker prints out a memo, asks you for edits on the paper, then you go in and edit the virtual document.
A couple of jobs ago one of my colleagues went to work with a Japanese partner for a few days to do an integration. Apparently they had to import a bunch of data and one of the Japanese employees, who seemed to have an axe to grind, printed out pages and pages of a spreadsheet and handed it to my colleague. Whenever my colleague asked him to just send the file, he pretended to not understand. In the end they had to OCR it but at least it was a story.
To be fair, while it’s antiquated and there is a lot of needless paperwork, the rules are always clear and if you follow them you more or less always get the result you’re looking for. And they almost never make you wait on hold or in line for inordinate amounts of time; generally when I go to city hall, or a doctors office, or call a telephone line, or go to the post office, or whatever it is, I generally don’t need to wait more than 2-3 minutes and usually I get service immediately.
It's a surface level joke but if I remember there were reasons for it, both culturally and regulatory, something about Hankos? I think I read about it on a post here talking about them finally changing some of those requirements.
Faxing... So very convenient!
We have to personally take the paper orginals to various offices around the city, wait hours in a queue, get another paper document, go make copies, assemble another folder and go to yet another office/institution.