Christina Kinney

Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 4, Issue 11 - August 2003

Advanced Technological Interface in Japan

ABSTRACT

When I moved to Tokyo, I was well prepared for a technologically advanced country. What was surprising, however, was the fact that Japan was not just a futuristic, gadget-saturated technological utopia. Rather, that Japanese people have attained an extraordinary level of comfort in their daily interactions with machines is something of a very different order from what I was used to in America. I have watched elderly people operating astonishingly advanced digital cameras with the ease of a child of the computer age, seen the frequent, relaxed use of Global Positioning Satellite Units, and even observed children who have just learned to write using their cell phones for conversation and email. It was not one specific moment, but a gradual flood of instances that exemplified to me, better than any shallow stereotype about its technological culture, that Japan is a nation that has come to a very sophisticated, comfortable level of interaction with smart machines. I wanted to investigate whether or not these interactions were different between Japan and the US.

Sherry Turkle, a member of MIT’s media program and one of the most interesting people writing on the subject of humans and machines has studied similar questions about the interaction of North American children with the first generation of personal computers. She has been my motivation in approaching this problem. In her book LIFE ON THE SCREEN, Turkle proposes that “Computers don’t just do things for us, they do things to us, including to our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people (Turkle 26).” She talks about computers creating in humans split and contradictory selves, and though she asserts the relationship between man and machine, she is also quite clear in defining the ideas of difference, anxiety, and the sense of Other that many westerners take on when dealing with machines…

As human beings become increasingly intertwined with technology and with each other via technology, old distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex… The traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain (Turkle 21).

Several scholars have explored the questions of man versus machine. Early on, theorists like Marx explored the alienation of labor, the relationship of worker to machine, and the obvious tension therein (Marx 110). Since that time, and probably even before, this problem of human-nonhuman has been part of the western tradition.

Even after the modernist era, when the subjugation of space to human purposes was a given, the thinker Frederic Jameson was concentrating on spatial categories, attributing the postmodern shift to a change in our experience of space and time. He talked about machines as an ‘object-to-think-with’, a ‘new way of spatial thinking that permit(s) us to… register the complexities of our world. (Jameson 84). Though his view of machines is more favorable than Marx’s, the fact that they are held at arm’s length, that there is still a certain distance in his consideration of them is quite important.

Whether within the context of modernism or postmodernism, in each of these cases, machines are treated with a sense of difference or distinction. There is a history of tension between human and non-human, and it is in these terms that the west thinks. This is a powerful reality for those enculturated within the United States, and I hypothesized that this reality would be expressed if given the proper arena. Whether or not the same would be true in Japan was yet to be seen, but the fact that technology could affect different responses from different social formations is what I wished to investigate. Most of the literature on this subject deals with the possible reasons behind the different ideologies of technological integration, assuming that there is a difference across the two cultures. I wanted to see exactly what the difference was, if indeed there was any.

Through observation of usage of technology in Japan, personal interviews and surveys with a specific cross-section of Japanese society, I hoped to begin to assign a structural basis to motivating factors as well as individual attitudes toward integrated technology, and help to explain Japan’s unique position in the information age. A parallel study of a similar American cross-section was also conducted to consider alternate approaches to new media and to decide if there is truly a differing philosophy of technological integration across the two cultures. The survey questions and responses constitute the bulk of my research and also provide the most readily analyzable data. Survey participants included students, housewives, businessmen and women, teachers, and bar-goers. Survey questions follow with information organized into charts and graphs.

The groups sampled for the survey had an average age of 24 for Americans and 25 for Japanese with a standard deviation of 4.9 and 6.3, respectively. The maximum values lay at 48 for the United States and 51 for Japan.

When asked the question, ‘Would you rather go to a convenience store or a vending machine to buy a drink?’ 75% of respondents from the United States preferred the idea of going to a convenience store while only 31% of Japanese respondents preferred the store to a vending machine. While this question doesn’t seem entirely relevant at face value, upon closer inspection it does reveal the level of comfort with which people deal with machines. In the survey as well as in further interviews, Japanese people showed preference for machines ‘because they were more reliable’, while Americans expressed discomfort, anxiety, and mistrust in similar dealings.

Figure 1. Would you rather go to a convenience store or a vending machine to buy a drink?

Cellular phone, or ‘keitai’ technology in Japan is a perfect example of the culture’s fluid technological interface, and served as an excellent point of departure for my investigation into this subject. Far more than simple telephones, these keitais can be found with imbedded digital video cameras, transit passes, the ability to play movies and music, and internet connectivity – a function still conspicuously lacking in most American versions until this year. In the United States, mobile service providers have yet to equip the vast expanses of their North American networks with hardware sophisticated enough to support even the most basic keitai technologies common throughout Japan. Cell phones carry with them another issue of technology – that of connectivity with other humans. In many personal interviews, time after time, Americans expressed distaste with being constantly ‘on call’, having a machine on their person, and ‘selling out’. Japanese people that I talked with expressed a feeling of freedom that came from being able to go anywhere yet still be in touch, a sense of interconnectedness, and very little anxiety about carrying or using a machine regularly.

Figure 2. How many cell phones do you carry?

29 percent of Americans surveyed carried no cellular phones, 69% carried 1, and 2% carried 2 phones. Among Japanese respondents, only 4% carried no cellular phones, 88% carried 1, 6% carried 2, and finally 2% carried 3. Though in both instances people who carried a single phone were in the vast majority, in the US, the number of people with no cell phone was statistically significant at 29%. Also, though only 2% of Americans had more than one phone, 8% of Japanese interviewed carried more than one cell phone. This question makes clear that there is indeed a different spirit with which people approach the problem of machines in one’s everyday life.

To investigate the trend of cell phone usage, I asked the question, ‘When did you buy your cell phone?’ The purchase of cell phones along the US line has spiked in the past 3 years, and was almost non-existent before 4 years ago (in 1999). The trend of Japanese cell phone purchasing peaked 4 years ago, but had a definite presence from as far as eleven years ago.

Figure 3. Ages when cell phones were purchased

Though my sample group was limited to 102 and 108 people in America and Japan, respectively, in order to more effectively extrapolate I used the question, ‘What percent of people who you know carry mobile phones?’ American answers were laid out quite obviously in a bell curve, with a peak at 50-70 percent, and the lowest numbers at the ends (0-10 percent and 90-100 percent). There were only two Japanese responses – both at the right end of the spectrum at 70-90 percent and 90-100 percent. I am therefore able to extrapolate not only from previous questions’ results, but from these as well that Japanese people do indeed carry more cell phones than their western counterparts. Perhaps this saturation is more than a reason for advanced technological usage, but rather a symptom of something more important – that Japanese people are more comfortable with objects, so objects surround them.

Figure 4. What percentage of people you know carry cell phones?

For the question ‘Name the first five machines that you think of’, the responses for Americans were typically mechanical. Answers like door lock, hinge, car, etc. were not uncommon. Japanese responses were typically digital, with answers like cell phone, GPS, and PC among the top three responses. For the next question, ‘What is the most useful machine?’ answers were similar, with Americans answering with mostly mechanical responses, and Japanese people preferring digital.

Figure 5. Mechanical versus Digitial Devices

For the questions, ‘What is your favorite machine?’ and ‘What is your least favorite machine?’ answers were, as one would expect, similar to the other surveys; Americans’ favorite machine was by far the car with other answers including ‘toilet’, ‘glasses’, and ‘door lock’, and Japanese people’s favorite was the cell phone, with other answers including ‘PC’, ‘GPS’, and ‘Laptop’.

Figure 6. Most favorite and least favorite devices.

Possibly the most illuminating question in the survey was, ‘Name five words you think of when you hear the word, ‘technology’. I divided the responses into positive words (good, useful, convenient), neutral words (silver, machine, robot), and negative words (bad, evil, end of the world). The answers of Americans were mostly neutral with a substantial amount of negative. The fewest responses were positive. Japanese people tended to answer with positive words, then neutral, and finally, with negative responses equaling a mere 5 percent.

Figure 7. Name five words you think of when you hear the word 'technology'.

There were a number of unforeseen variables within my experiment. I conducted the surveys and interviews in Tokyo, Japan and Gainesville, Florida, USA. Because of possible differences in respondents’ answers according to the size of the city in which they live, I made sure that most (91% of the respondents in Japan) of the survey participants were not, in fact, from Tokyo originally. Few of the American participants (10%) were from big cities (i.e. NY, LA). However, other problems like human variables still remained. Though I tried to remain as unbiased as possible, since I personally gave out the surveys and answered questions of the participants there was room for human error. It is a possibility that I could have unknowingly influenced the responses.

However, despite these difficulties, it is not unreasonable to conclude that there is a difference – and an apparent difference, at that, in the way Americans and Japanese people consider and deal with machines. My hypothesis, that the ways in which humans interact with technology are different in Japan and the United States, seems to have been tested satisfactorily. Each question in the survey brought to light the fact that technology is more pervasive, more advanced, and more accepted in Japan while in the west, the difference between humans and things -- machines—is underlined and italicized in the common mind. In America there remains strong uneasiness in dealing with machines and in accepting their pervasiveness while contrastingly, there seems indeed to be advanced interface with technology in Japan. Though any attempt to explain why is far beyond the scope of a short research paper such as this, and with my methods it was not possible to uncover specific explanations for the apparently seamless integration of technology and culture in Japan, the fact that there was indeed a difference was quite evident through the answers gleaned in this research project.

By understanding Japan as an alternative to the model of machine as other, questions about the fluctuating nature of human interaction with a new, technology–driven world may one day be answered. By defining the attitudes toward technological integration, I hope to have come to some understanding of the true spirit of Japanese and American people in dealing with machines. Such awareness will prove invaluable in this strange new world – a dynamic global community in which humans are increasingly defined by technology.

REFERENCES

Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984).

Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. International Publishers, 1964.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Touchstone, 1997

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