A Dime a Dozen

It's very easy to ascribe all these problems to a "general" Japanese incompetence with technology, but I don't think that this simplified explanation stands up to scrutiny.

Japan was a world leader in many fields during the 80s and 90s, and even up until the late 00s, Japan was considered to be a leader in areas like Mobile Internet (this mobile internet was quite crummy in practice, but it was better than what was available on western feature phones at that time). Even today, there are many pieces of Japanese technology are quite impressive.

It's not just toilets, and in fact they are not unique to Japan anymore: you can easily get your hand on equivalent washlets in China and Korea as well, even if they are not as ubiquitous in public spaces. Public transit payment still beats any other large country I've been to: FeliCa-based IC cards are standardized and accepted almost everywhere, they are faster than MiFare-like cards[1] and you can easily recharge them on your phone (the situation on Android is less than ideal, with almost no support on international models and the somewhat typical corporate low-quality botch job that is Osaifu Keitai[2] - but it still works). Vending machines are still world-leading and many of them (though not all) support digital payment through IC cards, iD or QUICPay. Digital payment on highways with ETC is fast and reliable, even if it's not the best system out there.

I feel like Japan has an industry-wide problem with software (especially in…

Desktop publishing, especially after the release of the LaserWriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter

It used to be really hard to get printer output to look the same on the page as what you saw on the screen, and the small details matter when people are laying out a complicated magazine (or whatever) page and need text to flow around images and other design elements. There was a whole Adobe-vs-everyone battle over things like outline (as opposed to bitmap) font technology since they controlled the standard for PostScript fonts as used by printers like LaserWriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_1

Then Apple created TrueType, and it is the biggest feature of System 7 that I never see anyone talk about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType

Then still lots of back and forth over things like Adobe's multi-master fonts vs TrueType GX which despite being part of the "failed" QuickDraw GX actually lives on in OpenType today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts

https://atadistance.net/2016/09/20/truetype-gx-model-lives-on-in-opentype-variation-fonts/

https://tidbits.com/1994/09/26/preliminary-practical-primer-to-quickdraw-gx-part-iii/

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e: "magazine page" is what always comes to mind because it makes me think of the Diehard GameFAN story:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gamefan/GameFAN.htm

"he calls the layout artist (which was probably Jacob Riskin or George Weising at the time), 'my trusty [Macintosh] Quadra operator'.…

> but then based on my personal experience as print media designer the likes of InDesign are full of various special tricks (and language-specific, too)

That seems to concur with an informative article by AtaDistance from 2019 that I read the other day [0]:

> ...

> The result was InDesign 1.0 J which shipped in early 2001. InDesign J was the first, and only, major software application developed outside of Japan that followed the Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) X4051 typesetting and composition specification (the kumihan “bible”) and traditional Japanese print production methods.

> I have covered some basics of Japanese layout before, but a review is helpful for first time readers. I’ll use a mix of my material and McCully’s presentation to explain.

> ...

> Western created DTP layout is graphics-driven and calculated by margins and font baselines. The western baseline typography model and font metrics is how PostScript and OpenType fonts, and all layout engines evolved. Adobe was well acquainted with the shortcomings of their own font technology and InDesign J got around the problems by adding proprietary Kanji virtual body font metrics and Japanese line break algorithms. None of this exists as an open standard that benefits everybody.

> That is fine for InDesign and print production, but web layout and typography via CSS is an entirely different world. There are 3 huge obstacles for good vertical Japanese typography on the web:

> * No font metrics for virtual…

1. Today we have 4 browser implementors. Only one of them doesn't also own an operating system (FF). We lost opera year or two ago. I would argue that a significant factor in this shrinking landscape is the fact that Apple has locked away ~10% of the market forever (and this 10% is not a random sampling - it includes many high value customers). Sure implementing a browser is technically challenging - my argument is that Apple's policy has altered the environment in such a way that there is no longer any reward for overcoming that challenge unless you have an operating system or some other large interest that requires you to make a browser. This will have effects on the web as a platform for years to come.

You are wrong. I get you’re making a political argument because you have something against Apple, but what you’re suggesting is just wrong on the merits.

Apple’s global iPhone marketshare is around 15%; it’s 35-40% in the US.

When the W3C was going to shove XHTML 2 down our throats, where you had to have perfectly conforming XML markup to have a valid webpage, Apple helped form with Mozilla and Opera, the WHATWG that lead to HTML5 and web standards that made sense.

It was Apple that said no to shipping Flash on the iPhone, which was the beginning of the end for proprietary media plugins.

You seemed to forget about the ecosystem of open source developers that have lead the charge on implementing new open standards; Igalia was obviously able to work with Apple (and…

Only because Western-centric systems don't handle non-LTR text properly.

https://atadistance.net/2019/10/20/japanese-text-layout-for-the-future-hint-there-isnt-one/

> Baseline font metrics will never deliver great CJK typography because there are too many limitations. > > This is why InDesign J implements virtual body metrics based on Adobe proprietary table information for true high-end Japanese layout. There is no virtual body standard digital font metric standard so everybody implements the missing stuff on the fly and everybody does it different. Unfortunately the irony of it all is that Adobe played a huge role in how these limitations played out in the evolution of digital fonts, desktop publishing (DTP) and the situation we have today.

I have a Kobo reader which supports both ePub 2 and ePub 3, and IIRC you need ePub 3 in order to get proper RTL/top-to-bottom text and Japanese typesetting, as well as proper comics support (if you buy an ePub 3 manga, it'll properly flip the page turn direction and the progress bar; a CBZ or other format won't). But most other readers I run into don't understand ePub 3 properly.

Well I've seen some other writeups like https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-evolution-why-gate-speed-matters/ that have also been referenced on HN. Discussions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38694411 and others that are probably easy to search for.

While some people have a reflexive dislike for AI output, I've done maybe a hundred o3 Deep Research queries now and found the reports to be generally high quality as well sourced as most human generated ones. I shared this one since I think it was a particularly interesting review the various systems around the world (I've personally used all those transit turnstiles personally and am generally familiar w/ RFID/NFC/EMV systems and didn't spot anything egregious).

(I find Deep Research reports to on average be high signal to noise than most of the human tokens being output on sites like HN for example.)