AHC: Make Japan an actual "high-tech wonderland"

Umm, how about fax machines get thoroughly abolished from Japanese workplaces by 2000. I've heard reports of people being shocked at still seeing them in use even in recent years.

I use a fax machine at home and sometimes at work. What’s wrong with that?
 
When I was reading this article about how fax machines are still widely used in OTL Japan, I wondered why China didn't have the same issue.

One reason is that computers, at the outset, never worked well for the Japanese. The country’s language — a mix of three syllabaries, with thousands of complex “kanji” ideograms — bedeviled early-age word-processing software. Until the early 1990s, Japanese was nearly impossible to type. Even today, particularly for older Japanese people, it’s easier to write a letter by hand than with a standard keyboard. Japan also relies on seals, called “hanko,” that are required for most official documents.

While the typing difficulties also apply to China, the country never got stuck in the fax stage, tech experts say.

I asked on r/askhistorians and r/asksocialscience, and got two different answers.

keylian talked about how there wasn't a single dominant character encoding standard for Japanese, but multiple competing standards. Unlike in Mainland China or Taiwan, which settled on Guobiao or Big5 encoding, respectively. Also, "things like computers and phones didn't have a unified standard either." While China today has tablets that could recognize handwriting, fax machines were already prolific in Japan, businesses and households were already used to them, and there weren't really any incentives to switch to a new system.

While redthendead talked about how China's economic rise began later than Japan, so when they started to catch up in GDP, they skipped the fax machine. "PRC kids of the 80s and 90s" didn't have parents using fax machines in the workplace, so when they grew up, they adopted the latest technology. Basically, the Japanese economic miracle/bubble ended up entrenching fax machine usage in businesses (especially with the convenience of handwriting). This is related to what @Nivek said in another thread:
japanese prefered not using PC until those were better at Kanji(plus China leapfrogged the japanese using direct english and windows)
 
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The key to making Japan more high-tech is really about having their economic rise start later than in OTL.

From "The Japanese Software Industry: What Went Wrong and What Can We Learn from it?" by Robert E. Cole and Yoshifumi Nakata (Vol. 57, No. 1, Fall 2014 of California Management Review)

(pg 17)
Japanese leaders, with their strong success in manufacturing hardware, found it much more difficult to envision software as a full partner, much less alternative model. It is also a plausible hypothesis that the weakness of American manufacturing globally, relative to Japanese firms, gave American firms stronger incentives to search, sense, monitor, and respond to the new opportunities created by software.

(pg 31)
[Arthur] Stinchcombe stressed the importance of understanding what enables those founding characteristics [of an organization] to persist over long periods of time. The answer lies in what researchers have come to label the path dependency of organizational and technological learning. A firm’s prior organizational routines, norms, and corporate culture (its history), often reproduced over long periods, can constrain its future behavior. This is partly because opportunities and incentives for learning often will be close to previous capabilities. The more a firm uses a technology, the better it get at that technology with cumulative sunk costs in human and physical capital. If a firm succeeds over time using a given technology, dynamic increasing returns may cement its commitment to that technology.
One can apply this understanding to the hardware-centric origins and sustained commitment to their technology on the part of established Japanese electronics and other high-tech firms. Their very success reinforced these capabilities over long period of times. In the case of electronics firms, electronic engineers were dominant in the founding of these firms. This occupational specialty dominated management as they evolved into IT firms. It is plausible that this history continues to constrain their transition to software.

(pg 39-40)
Japan typically ranks among the lowest-scoring Asian nations in English language proficiency scores. The Korean case reminds us that policy makers in other nations can choose to build strong English language proficiency not only among those aiming for IT professional occupations, but indeed among the broad population. The potential benefits for growing an IT industry by having the youth of the society grow up with English languages skill (accessing the English language internet from an early age on a regular basis) should not be underestimated.
 
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