Whenever Steve and I take a major trip to a foreign country, I like to reflect on what I learned from a tech perspective. I didn’t expect to have many observations about tech in Japan, but I found a lot to talk about.
Our trip was on a tour by a company called Odysseys Unlimited, organized by UCLA Alumni Travel. It was a relatively small group with only 24 travelers and one guide named EK. On most of the trips we’ve been on, I find it enjoyable when people realize I know a lot about Apple products and line up to ask me questions. Oddly, that pretty much didn’t happen at all on this trip, which was kind of sad.
One exception occurred when we went to the Hiroshima Peace Museum. At the entrance, there was a tall apparatus that had two digital clock displays. The first said, “Number of Days since the First Dropping of the A-bomb”, and the second one said, “Number of Days since the Latest Nuclear Test”. Every person walking in was compelled to take a photo of the clocks.
However, the LED displays of the number of days were refreshing at a rate that was out of sync with the shutter speed of the camera. That meant that every photo they took had half of the digits of the clock displays missing. Our friend Mike asked me why this was happening and how he could fix it. I immediately knew the solution.
I had him turn on Live Photos and retake the photo while making sure to hold the camera very still. I then instructed him to view the photo, tap on the word “Live” in the upper right to reveal the dropdown, and then select “Long Exposure”. Immediately, his photo zoomed in a little bit and then showed the number of days clearly. I was proud of myself, but even more delighted that the group formed a line behind Mike, each asking me to help them fix their photos.
In case you’re wondering, while we were there, it had been 29,111 days since the atomic bomb was dropped, and only 340 days since the latest nuclear test.
I knew that Mike would need to enable Live Photos because of a question he’d asked me earlier. On the bus a few days before, he’d asked how to permanently stop his iPhone from taking Live Photos. I explained some of the advantages of Live Photos (like making nice, smeary waterfall photos), but he was adamant. He eventually explained the problem. He has an iPhone, but he downloads his photos to a PC. Windows breaks Live Photos into a JPEG and a sidecar movie file, which he finds really annoying. I sympathized and showed him the control in Settings → Camera → Formats, where you can change it from “High Efficiency: to “Most Compatible”. Under that setting, it explains that “Most Compatible” will use JPEG as the format. So I guess one person appreciated my knowledge.
Toilet Tech
Probably the most interesting tech difference we observed in Japan was in toilet tech. As you probably know, the Japanese are quite fond of the bidet-type of toilet, or as EK playfully dubbed them, “shower toilets”. EK also called bathrooms, “Happy Place”. I will adopt that convention.
What surprised me was that nearly every happy place we visited had shower toilets. They were in hotels, shopping malls, train stations, and even a happy place out in the woods on a hiking trail!
The other thing that surprised me was that about 80% of them had heated seats. Now I get why a heated toilet seat is quite comforting, especially on a cold morning, but you didn’t have to turn on the heater — they were already hot when you sat down. Think about the amount of energy that is being wasted right now by all of those toilets being heated while no one’s tushie is getting the benefit of that heat.
If Japan used primarily renewable energy, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but only 26% of their energy generation is from renewable sources. They have a lot of geothermal available, but the mineral bath folks have blocked use of this valuable energy source.
Anyway, back to the fun of these shower toilets. Most of them had three-ish buttons: two buttons to turn on the jet in two different directions, and one to stop the joy. Discovery of the flush button was a continuing adventure, as no two toilets had it in the same place. There were electronic buttons, levers, twisty knobs, and even quite a few that flushed automatically.
Some of the shower toilets were more complex than others. In one, I found there was a little door I could open that revealed about 20 different buttons. As they were all labeled in Japanese, I chose not to experiment!
Amid all these high-tech toilets, I was surprised to find what I would call squat toilets. They were a small, rectangular trough mounted into the floor, and sported a handle on the wall to help you support yourself. Evidently this is an old traditional style that is still in fashion in some places.
The reason I bring the squat toilets up is that their existence means that some folks are confused about how to use what I’ll call a “normal” toilet. I know that because many toilets had a sign instructing the right and wrong way to sit on a toilet, where the one with the red X through it showed a person squatting on a normal toilet.
You’d think (or hope) I was done talking toilet tech, but you’d be wrong. We stayed at some super nice hotels, and one that was a “ryokan”, which is a traditional Japanese Inn. The beds were up on a shin-height platform, but resting right on that platform. You had to kind of climb onto the platform and crawl across it on your knees to get into bed. It had a beautiful outdoor bathtub on the balcony, and the glass wall of the shower revealed a view of the forest. The inn also had an outdoor hot mineral spring called onsen that was delightful.
But of course, it is the toilet tech that I want to talk about. On the back of a traditional toilet, you have a large tank where water pours in after the toilet is flushed, and empties into the toilet bowl when flushed. The water that comes into that tank is normal clean water, but as soon as it’s in a toilet, it wouldn’t be considered clean.
But what if you had access to that water supply as it flowed in, but before it entered the toilet? That’s exactly what the toilet at the ryokan had. Where you would normally see the tank was a faucet pouring clean water into a shallow sink. That meant you could wash your hands with the clean, incoming toilet water, and it would still be usable for flushing the toilet. I thought that was brilliant.
In two of the hotel bathrooms, Steve noticed that the mirrors had rectangular heaters right in front of the sink so that when you took a hot shower that steamed up the rest of the mirror, right above the sink was a clear area for you to see your lovely reflection. I’m sure that this is yet another waste of energy to have that heater on at all times, but I sure liked it. I’m going to assume they were smart enough to have that heater only be triggered if the light switch was turned on.
If you have ever had a very young child to take care of and yet you find you need to relieve yourself, you know that this creates a real problem. You can’t fit the stroller in the toilet stall, and it’s a real challenge to hold a baby while maneuvering your clothing and your body. In many of the bathrooms, there was a brilliant device to solve the problem. It was a baby seat bolted to the wall with a ring to go around the baby’s waist with holes for their two legs. It was absolute genius, and I want to know who’s going to start installing these in all US bathrooms.
This probably doesn’t count as “tech,” but one sign really made me giggle in a Japanese bathroom. This particular bathroom was the one along the hiking trail on the island of Miyajima. The sign on a half-height door gate said, “Please close the door to keep deer out.” That’s not something you see around where I live.
I had to ask NosillaCastaway David Bogdan about one thing I saw in many public bathrooms. It was a platform folded up against the wall, with a sign showing that you were supposed to rotate it down onto the ground. The mechanism wasn’t mysterious, but I couldn’t think for the life of me what it was for. David explained that its purpose was to create a clean surface on which you could stand in your socks while changing clothes. I hadn’t tracked where I saw these platforms, but I suspect they were in the many train stations, which would be a place you might need to change clothes.
Speaking of clean floors, I’m sure you know that it’s customary in Japan to remove your shoes when you go inside and put on some sort of slipper. What I didn’t know before going to Japan was that they also have separate “Toilet Shoes”. Upon entering the bathroom, there are slippers you’re supposed to change into from your house slippers. Ok, maybe that’s not tech, but I thought it an interesting idea.
With all of this high-tech equipment in public and private Happy Places, I was delighted by one facility that had a mechanical solution to the problem of knowing which bathroom stalls are occupied. Mechanically linked to the lever to lock the stall door were little paper flags, one showing a blue circle for unoccupied, and one with a red X designating occupied. It was a simple, mechanical solution.
Accessibility
Ok, let’s finally move on from toilet tech, but that sure was interesting, wasn’t it?
Most sidewalks in the big cities had a yellow stripe in the middle that was maybe 10 inches wide. The stripe had four distinct ridges running parallel to the direction of the stripe. As NosillaCastaway and Japan resident Frank O’Carroll explained to me, they’re for the blind. Think about how useful that would be to feel with your cane that you’re walking in a straight line. It’s genius. When something significant was coming up, like an intersection, the lines would run into a platform of bumps, also in bright yellow.
When we walked into the train station in Tokyo, I noticed that the handrail had Braille on it. I guess it would be helpful to know which area you were entering, but the chaos of the Tokyo station was baffling even for the sighted!
I mentioned that on the Shinkansen (bullet trains), you have to be ready to jump onto the train when the doors open because they don’t wait for you, and the same is true when exiting the train. Unless you’re getting off at the last stop, you have to stand up, gather your belongings, and wait by the door ready to rush out and let the new passengers on. These trains are quite smooth, but standing in a vehicle that’s slowing down can be a bit wobbly. The tops of the seats have handles with which you can steady yourself, and each handle also has Braille on it. I presume that this Braille is identifying the seat row and letter.
Elevators in the US often have Braille on the panels, but I’ve always wondered how you’d know where to touch to find them. In Japan, the same raised dot pattern that was on the sidewalks was in front of the elevator’s exterior buttons. Inside the elevators, the floors were identified with Braille, and there was often a horizontal pattern of elevator buttons so someone in a wheelchair would have easy access. When we were in Hiroshima, a gentleman in a wheelchair joined me in an elevator, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask him how well it worked for him. As he rolled out, he said that Japan was a very accessible country. I’ll take that as a ringing endorsement.
Power Outlets
When a nerd goes on vacation, the first thing they pack is their electronics and power bricks to charge those devices. If you’re off to a foreign country, you have to figure out what kind of adapter you’ll need to use for that country. Who can forget the time I asked Bart on Skype before our trip to visit him in Ireland, whether the adapter I’d purchased would work in the UK, and he said it would … but I asked the wrong question, because Ireland isn’t in the UK!
Before leaving for Japan, Steve looked up their power ports and found that they’re the same as the US. What he didn’t realize, though, is that they don’t use a ground pin, so they only have two prongs. For most of our plugs, that was fine, but he brought a power strip with three prongs and couldn’t use it.
Trains
Steve and I live in Southern California, where public transportation is pretty sparse. A high-speed rail system was first proposed in the 1990s to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco, and in 2008, California voters approved a $10B bond to fund the 800-mile train system. By February 2024, the project was estimated to cost between $89 and $128B. I’m not terribly optimistic that we’ll ever have a high-speed rail system in California.
A great delight was riding the bullet trains in Japan. They’re called Shinkansen, where “shin” means “new” in Japanese, and “kansen” means “main line”. They called it the new main line when it was introduced in 1964 to connect Tokyo and Osaka, the very train we rode. Yes, sixty-one years ago, they had their first bullet train, and we’re still waiting.
The Shinkansen averages 125 mph between the two cities, with peak speeds closer to 200 mph. It was so fun to ride! The tricky bit is that this train only stops for a couple of minutes, so you have to be in the starter blocks ready to leap into the train before the doors close. Our guide, EK, told us that since we were a large group, we needed to file into the center aisle as quickly as we could when we entered, not stopping at our assigned seats, so we could ensure everyone had time to get on the train.
Once riding, it was super smooth. Steve was at first concerned that there were no seatbelts, but then realized that at these speeds, would a seatbelt save you?
We also rode the local express trains, which were pretty snappy and super smooth too. One thing that tickled us was that all of the trains are electric, and one we rode was hybrid electric. As I mentioned, Japan doesn’t have much renewable energy, with a lot of it coming from coal, so electric is better than directly burning fossil fuels. The hybrid train (which does burn some fossil fuels) had a cool graphic that showed us when the engine was driving the wheels, when the battery was assisting by driving a motor to the wheels, and when we were slowing down, it would show energy flowing back into the battery with regenerative braking.
Google Translate FTW
For the most part, we were able to communicate in English while in Japan, but there were many times when the ability to read Japanese would have been handy. Steve and I both got hit with allergies when we arrived — those darn cherry blossoms — and we went on the hunt for some Flonase nasal spray. We found a box that looked a lot like the distinctive coloring of the ones at home, but I wanted to be sure.
I whipped open Google Translate on my iPhone, set it to translate from Japanese to English, and snapped a photo of the box. Since I had an active Internet connection with my GigSky eSIM, it immediately translated the name to say “Flunase” and said “Directly affects the three major symptoms of hay fever.” Winner!
We used it from time to time, reading signs and other things. It was a little bit weird that as you move the camera’s view around, it would sometimes change the translation, but overall it was pretty useful.
Safety
When we first arrived in Japan, as I looked at the view from our high-rise hotels, I noticed that many of the buildings across from us had red triangles on every third window. I was curious what they were. At one point, I realized that the window out of which I was gazing had a triangle on it with words in Japanese. I whipped out my trusty Google Translate and discovered that the triangle said, “Fire brigade entrance”, and below that, “Please do not place anything near this area.” Mystery solved.
Just about every historical site we visited started with the explanation, “You’re viewing a replica because the original burned down in such and such a year.” I noticed that other fire-related things were sprinkled everywhere we went. In every hotel and historical site we saw bright red lights with speakers where a fire alarm would blare should such an emergency arise.
There were also green arrows with a little green running person prominently displayed showing you the safety exit.
The most interesting tech we saw regarding escaping danger was a large metal box sitting on the upper-story balcony of a building on the island of Miyajima near Hiroshima. We were curious what it was, and looked closely at the graphic description on the front of the box.
The graphic showed a woman opening the top of the box, throwing a sandbag out of the window, flipping out a “chute”, and then climbing up on top of the box and jumping into the chute to the ground. No details were given on what would happen when you hit the bottom, but I guess hitting the ground was better than burning alive.
iPad Control of Hotel Room
You know how most hotel/motel rooms in the US have an HVAC system built in 1962 with dials that are mysterious and often don’t properly control the temperature? You may get lucky and have a small panel on the wall that controls temperature, but they never seem to work well either. And then there’s the curtains that never quite close to give you full darkness, so you have to resort to Dave Hamilton’s life hack of using one of the hangers designed to hold pants to clip the two sides closed.
The coolest hotel we stayed at was called the 1000 Kyoto Hotel. Their mission is to build a sustainable world for the next 1000 years. It had a lot of cool features (like the toilet flushing when you walked out), but we were baffled by the simplest things, like how to control the lights and air conditioning in the room.
On the bedside table, we found an iPad offering to let us control our room, which solved all of the problems I described. The iPad had a bespoke interface with obvious buttons to control the lights, air conditioning, our do not disturb status, set an alarm, and close the blackout curtain. I’m not sure this is the best interface for mainstream folks, but it was great tech for two traveling geeks.
Robots
We saw more robots in Japan than we do at home. To be fair, we don’t see any at home. In a few restaurants, we saw them delivering dirty dishes back to the kitchen, having been loaded by the human wait staff. In the fancy 1000 Kyoto Hotel, Steve ordered some ice to be delivered to our room (using the iPad), and a robot delivered it to him. But the best one was when on our birthday (yes, we share the same birthday), a robot delivered two birthday cakes to our table, and sang happy birthday to us!
Walk/Don’t Walk
I was intrigued by the walk/don’t walk signs in Japan. There are two little figures, one above the other, where the top shows someone standing still, and the bottom shows someone walking. On either side of each figure, there are vertical countdown lights that show you either how long you have to wait until you’ll be allowed to cross or how much time you have left to get across. They work quite well, and I’d love to see them instituted in the United States.
Elevators & Escalators
It would seem that there’s not much room for advancement left in elevator and escalator technology, but we found a few cool elements in Japan. I know this one isn’t earth-shattering, but the fact that we didn’t figure it out for two days made us laugh. Many of the fancy hotels restrict you to going up only to the floor of your room. To tell the elevator your floor, you were to tap your key on a little pad. In one hotel, we would tap the card, and then press the button for our floor, but finally realized that it was automatically lighting it up.
Steve’s favorite elevator tech was that the button to tell the elevator doors to close worked immediately. Maybe you’re used to that where you live, but in the US, those buttons are practically placebos, just giving you something to do while the elevator takes its own sweet time closing the door.
We saw a cool escalator technology that I’d also like to see worldwide. In the 1000 Kyoto Hotel, there was an escalator from the first to the second floor to the dining areas. One person in our party noticed that the escalators moved very slowly if no one was on them, but as soon as you got on, they would smoothly speed up. Think about how smart that is. When they’re not in use, they burn far less energy moving the steps. You could have them shut off when no one is on them, but that would create several problems. It would use a lot of energy to start them up each time, it would be a possibly dangerous jolt to those who stepped on, and finally, how would you know they weren’t just broken? I thought it was cool.
Vending Machines & Convenience Stores
Everywhere you go in Japan, you will see vending machines. I don’t mean a single machine with just drinks from the CocaCola corporation, I mean vast banks of them. We went on a walk around a palace, and there were ten of them stacked side by side.
The other thing you see everywhere is convenience stores. I’m stretching the definition of tech here, but it’s very different from the US. Just about every other block had a 7-Eleven or a Family Mart where you could buy full pre-cooked meals and snacks and make a latte from a machine.
Our favorite vending machine was at a truck stop where EK let us go to the Happy Place. Steve and discovered a vending machine that dispensed tasters of sake! You put money into one machine that dispensed tokens, sort of like Chuck-E-Cheese. I bought the three-token pack, and that let us taste three different sakes. There was an attendant there who helped me choose dry sakes, and they were all delicious. We didn’t have time to buy any sake there, but it was still a fun experience.
Auto Tech
In some of the smaller cities, we saw a lot of wee tiny cars by different manufacturers, but they were of the same form factor. An example was the Honda N Box. That’s a great name for them because these vehicles are made of a box with a large passenger compartment, but just a tiny bit of car out in front to house the engine.
I sent a photo of the Honda N Box to NosillaCastaway Michael Westbay, and he explained that you can tell the size of the engine by the color of the license plate. The photo I sent him showed a yellow license plate, which means the engine is no bigger than 660cc. As he explained, that means it’s the equivalent of a mid-size motorcycle engine!
I was intrigued by these cars because they were well-suited for their job of carting humans around inside a city. They looked quite roomy inside for the passengers while not requiring a giant gas-guzzling engine for city driving.
Airline Baggage Drop Doesn’t Exist
On our last day, our lovely guide EK carefully deposited us onto the Shinkansen from Hiroshima to Shin-Osaka. (Remember “shin” means new, so this is the new Osaka station.) He had another guide meet us at the station and take us on another train to the airport in Osaka, called Kansai International Airport.
Kansai is unusual in that it sits on two man-made islands, built so the planes wouldn’t bother people in the city. Sounds like a grand idea, but isn’t some part of your brain sarcastically saying, “What could possibly go wrong?”
You should listen to that part of your brain, because the airport is sinking at an alarming rate. It opened in 1994, and it had already sunk 8m (26ft), which is more than they expected it to drop over a 50-year period. To date, Kansai Airport has sunk 11.5m (38ft). (Reference: essential-japan.com/…)
In addition to that technical solution and ensuing problem, there’s something else interesting about the Kansai Airport. In the US, when you get to the airport, if you plan to check baggage, you go to the baggage drop-off for your airline.
Our secondary guide had enthusiastically told us we were to go to Section C to find Japan Airlines’ baggage drop-off. It was a massive airport, and after bidding our travel mates adieu, we managed to trudge our way to Section C, but couldn’t find JAL.
I asked someone who worked for another airline at Section C, and she said, “It’s not here yet.” I assumed it was a language barrier problem and asked someone from another airline, and got the same response. We checked the big board ourselves, and it confirmed that JAL should be at Section C.
I’ll cut through the mess and give you the punch line. Instead of every airline having a permanently designated baggage drop-off, all of the signage is temporary, and they rotate through the different airlines based on which ones have upcoming flights. We were at the airport more than 4 hours before our flight, so JAL had simply not been swapped in.
By the way, I’m not talking just about digital signage that gets changed. There were these tall, square posts in front of each baggage bay with the name of the current airline on all four sides. I went up to one to test a theory — I wondered if the names were magnetic — and sure enough, they were.
We weren’t pleased with the situation, but I have to assume this allows more efficient space utilization in a very crowded country. I had to tip my hat to their analog situation with magnetic names.
Analog Weather Map
I’m going to close this article about tech in Japan with the funniest thing we saw. We were in a store where we had to wait for an order to be filled, and there was a TV on to keep us entertained.
The TV was playing the weather, and instead of a green screen display with fancy weather patterns moving, it was a physical board with a guy moving little pieces of plastic around! He had an arced one with little lines on it designating a weather front, and a plastic yellow disk that I assumed was sunny weather. If you’re old enough to get this reference, it was like the Colorforms of our childhood.
Correction: NosillaCastaway Michael Westbay who also met up with us in Tokyo explained the yellow disk — it’s not the Sun. He wrote:
The Kanji on the yellow circle in the weather news says “yellow sand.” This is a weather phenomenon that often comes over from China. I thought it was their pollution when I first heard of it, but it’s actually dust from Chinese desserts that blows over, causing a yellow haze to settle over several cities on the west coast. That’s also why he held the circle over the west coast when the front moved east.
And get this, it was the national weather, not some podunk local weather station!
Bottom Line
It’s hard to bottom line such a diverse set of technologies we observed for an entire country, but the Shinkansen was definitely our favorite tech in Japan. My overall impression was that Japan is more tech-forward than the U.S., and we could take a cue from much of their tech. Except for analog weather maps…