Everyone who is saying there is nothing wrong with cash is right. However, there is one major drawback to cash which is no longer a big problem in societies which are mostly cashless. Namely, if your wallet gets stolen and you have $300 in it, you've lost that $300 forever. If your wallet gets stolen and they get your cards, you can just cancel them and aren't even charged for fraudulent purchases.
I realize that means less privacy, but I can't afford to lose that kind of money just walking to the supermarket to buy groceries.
You put paper filing and cash society on the "bad" list. It's like it's wrong for people without an internet connection or privacy conscious people to file stuff. "Pls use our brand-spanking new web UI that loads a shit ton of Javascript and steals your data on top of it!" Oh and cash society. No, why would anyone want to pay in a privacy-conscious way. Naw man, pay with a card...
As someone who filled out multiple copies of the same contract by hand to buy a house recently, which had to be stamped with my seal and not signed, AHHHHHHHHHHghgghhg. On average, I only have to fax something once every several years. NTT, the main telecoms provider, STILL requires that you fax paperwork to get internet (at least for NTT East as of two years ago).
Using cash is great (except for my airline miles account), but one of the biggest banks in Japan is notorious for outages. ATMs here also, until very recently, had business days and hours. That's finally mostly gone, at least. They can still run out of money at the year-end holiday season as everyone is home with family and they're not always restocked in some locations, but more ATMs also helped to solve this. The problem with things transitioning to electronic payment is also those payment processors take a cut. We have all kinds of payment apps here, but many small businesses I know hate using it. The ones I know that use it most generally have larger foreign customer bases (anecdotal to business owners I know; may not be generally true in all of Tokyo/Japan).
I take pity on Japan as the only nation on Earth to fully internalize grind culture as their source of existential meaning to an even more toxic degree than the United States.
If they didn't exist, I probably would deem such a thing unsustainably improbable, but there it is.
To be clear, I'm not referring to places where the poor are exploited to work even longer hours at more physically brutal jobs for basic survival, I'm talking about self proclaimed "developed" nations whose citizens are indoctrinated to proudly jump into the productivity volcano as some kind of honor/life's purpose/sense of identity in itself, and who wouldn't have it any other way.
Cash Society isn't a bad thing imo.
I find it pretty funny seeing people talk about how Japan is not as advanced as people think. Meanwhile my home state the majority of people don't have Internet. I've been getting pretty convinced that most places use fax machines due to how few places have Internet. Anyplace that has any amount of beurocracy uses paper files. There are a considerable amount of places were cell signals simply don't work. The only way reason I know of public transport busses is because of movies. VHS player are common place for house holds. Many work vehicles were made in the 60s and we still use buckets to collect sap when sugaring. Card readers are rare so some gas stations require you to pay with cash. All around the only advanced tech things Vermont has to offer are our winter cars and the f13s that occasionally blow peoples ear drums out.
That's what I'm saying for a long time after being in Japan a couple of times.
30 years ago, Japan was 20 years in the future, and they liked it so much, they never changed since.
Needing to ask your boss so he can ask his boss so he can ask his boss so he can verify if you can sharpen your pencil
Japan uses cards, it's just that they love their trains so much, they put their money on their fare cards I stead of using credit cards.
I still have my Suica card, it's got $50 on it still.
The future has way too much nationalism and misogyny.
Don’t forget the impending population disaster (because they never feel the touch of another person these days, their government literally has to try and encourage them to drink just so they’ll fuck already- and can’t stand immigration) and all those depressed young people using seemingly everything from the slopes of Mount Fuji to their own apartments as log-off locations, and then nobody noticing their bodies for months.
Living the casette futurism dream.
All of those apply to Germany as well. Except floppies ...
They have those cool blue plastic trays with rubber mats that you put your money in though. And they're everywhere.
japan being the most cyberpunk nation besides communist China and South Korea
Filet mignon from a vending machine is for everyone in Japan.
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