My first real inkling of this thing was the classrooms at school. Although some classrooms are equipped with projectors mounted on the ceilings and most have ethernet ports and TVs with DVD players, that's about as much technology as you get. The TVs also have actual VCRs hooked up to them. And the strangest thing is that every classroom I've seen, with the exception of the three computer labs and a few classrooms in the new building, have old-fashioned chalkboards, with CHALK and CORDUROY ERASERS. I was like wtf? Even stranger is that they advanced the technology of this antiquated tool by making electric eraser cleaners. There are these plastic machines with a shallow basin that you put the eraser in, and there are a couple small slits in the basin. When you turn the machine on, it works like a vacuum, and as you rub the eraser back and forth, the chalk dust gets sucked into the machine, cleaning the thing off. It's ridiculous, although it beats clapping them together, like in the old days.
I managed to get a picture of one:
When I told some of my students that chalkboards went out in the States like twenty years ago, they were quite surprised. I guess it's normal for schools to never have replaced chalkboards with whiteboards, and especially nothing as modern as like a Smart Board or whatever they're releasing lately.
Another crazy thing at school is that the supply room next to my office has this cabinet full of VHS tapes. They've kept them around for years, decades, which I guess is defensible if they've still got VCRs and they work, but there's only ONE DVD, and get this, there are are least TWO beta tapes in there. As if. The library is also full of VHS tapes, although previous foreign teachers have requested the library to order DVD copies of movies they want, so there's now a fair collection of modern media.
Something I just learned recently, from this article (http://japandailypress.com/japans-fax-fixation-113935) is that over half of Japanese homes still have a fax machine--that they actually use. Apparently because of reasons like Japanese language having three types of writing, one of which has thousands of symbols, and high cost of high-speed internet being typically high, fax machines provide a quicker, simpler solution to some of the issues that everyone else uses computers for.
I tried to find out how many Japanese homes have a computer, but it looks like more work than I'm willing to put in to find out. A map-making website listed the top ten PC-owning countries from 2003-04, with Japan at number two, with about 62 million computer users (halfish), but that's pretty old data. There are several articles to be found that say that PCs are being ousted by cell phones, high-tech TVs, cameras that connect directly to printers, etc. There's less use for them here now.
The one thing that seems both advanced and common, though, is cell phones, and this could be a big reason people think Japan actually keeps some of its own technology, instead of just exporting it all. Here, 3G on phones is the bare minimum, and from what I can tell, people use their phones (keitais) for internet more often than computers. They've all got touch screens and cameras and apps and some have GPS, and blah blah blah. It's nothing that we don't have back home, but it's just that what we tend to think is a bit higher end is the standard here, although they pay just as much, or more. When I tell people I don't have a cell phone yet (because I haven't had anyone to call yet and I don't want to waste my money), they go into shock.
It's not to say that technology doesn't actually exist here, though, even excepting keitais. Even the above article about the fax machine says there are two Japans: one old-fashioned and the other super slick and futuristic. I live in what Asia considers to be a small city (about 650k), so this isn't Tokyo. Plenty of people have tablets and iPods and so forth, but stuff like that isn't ubiquitous around here. The Kindle will soon be released here, as I read in the paper recently. I showed my Kindle to one of my students last week, when she said she didn't know what one was, and it was like being on Star Trek and encountering some primitive culture who had no idea what a data pad was. She looked at this thing (and it's only the $79 version) and watched me pull up text from a book and turn the pages, and she was like amazed, man. Last night I showed her and another student (these two often come to my room to ask questions about English newspaper articles) my iPad, and I let them play Fruit Ninja on it. It was the best thing in the world. They were barely cognizant of this kind of device. They also jumped on the notion of the camera and decided we must take a picture immediately, because in Japan, everything is a photo op.
Anyway, I don't have the whole picture here, but this is what it's all seeming like to me so far. I may have more insightful insight later on in my stay.
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