5 really outdated things that are still big in Japan

It’s easy to characterise Japan as a place full of robots, robo toilets, insanely quick trains, and dancing robots. And did I mention robots? But it’s all a lot more complex than that. An aging population and slow-moving national institutions mean that Japan is sometimes way behind the curve when it comes to some techie things.

Here are five prime examples.

1. CDs

I stopped buying CDs nearly a decade ago when I bought my first iPod – a svelte silver Nano that I’ve still got in a drawer somewhere. I then gradually turned all the CDs I’d bought since I was a teen into m4a or mp3 files to stick into iTunes. I used this Brobdingnagian step forward to discard a bunch of pop music I felt confident I could find on a P2P service the web at any time, filling my scant disk space instead with decent quality copies of the music I treasured most, like Sigur Rós, Meredith Monk, Toumani Diabaté, and some not-so-common recordings of Billie Holiday.

Most people have already made a similar transition. But that’s not so much the case in Japan, which is the world’s second biggest music market.

Over in Japan, 85 percent of music sales are on CD, wrote the New York Times in 2014. That’s the most recent reliable figure available. Sure, CD sales are falling in the nation – from almost US$1 billion in 2009 to just US$400 million in 2013 – but Japan is still trailing developed nations in the switch to digital downloads or streaming music.

In the US, revenue from streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music eclipsed sales of CDs for the first time in 2014. America’s digital transition happened even earlier if you look at music downloads, which are now falling out of fashion as more people opt for streaming.

Tower Records is pulling in US$500 million every year from physical music sales.

Japan is so far behind the curve that it’ll soon run headlong into a hipstery retro CD revival.

Tower Records – the huge music chain where I wasted many hours as a student in London, sweating at the sight of the US$20 to US$30 price tags – is still open in Japan, years after it shut down everywhere else. In fact, it has 85 branches across the country, points out S. Mubashir Noor in a recent post on Medium. And Tower Records is pulling in US$500 million every year from physical music sales.

2. Newspapers

3. Faxes

4. DVD rentals

5. Flip phones