Japan’s love affair with the fax machine (2021)
For what it&#x27;s worth, I worked in Canada from 2005 to 2012 as a mechanical engineer and had to use faxes at least once a month for ordering from some old school suppliers in Canada and USA (for things like steel bars and rods). This was at multiple companies. I lived in Japan from 2012-2022, and had to send a fax precisely once, for my first apartment contract. I did it from a 7-11.<p>I know medical and legal places still use them, but that&#x27;s true in North America too. I did a quick check of some suppliers of mechanical parts in USA (McMaster-Carr) Canada (Grainger) and Japan (Misumi) since that is my background and they all still accept orders by fax.<p>But, a difference is outside of conservative industries[1], you still see fax machines a lot more in Japan because it&#x27;s more recent than in North America that they were ubiquitous. You will occasionally see a dusty one in a home or office, and many mom-and-pop restaurants have an unused one in a corner because the online reservation services used to send faxes to restaurants. I think you had the option of receiving a fax or email back in day, but now you get (and probably require) a dedicated tablet or interface to your POS. I didn&#x27;t see a received fax in a tray anywhere since about 2015.<p>Another difference is internal processes in companies and government in Japan have historically required stamps for each approving person, and it was natural to extend the processes to fax, at least as a temporary measure until the physical document made its rounds.<p>It&#x27;s also worth noting that pretty much every company in Japan switched to docusign or similar during covid, and government agencies are also required to switch soon.<p>Overall I think faxes persist a bit longer in Japan, but at this point only in the same industries that use them in other countries too. It&#x27;s a thing that exists but I would hardly call it a &quot;love affair&quot;. As a normal person going about your life there&#x27;s more reminders that fax machines exist, but the actual usage is low and rapidly decreasing.<p>[1] There&#x27;s a reason conservative industries still use faxes. Physical documents and signatures are the benchmarks for legal documents and faxes are still physical documents with signatures that can be produced from a filing cabinet, and whatever your legal predicament is you can be sure there is case law to blame the other party based on documents and signatures. And there&#x27;s no universal&#x2F;international, non-proprietary, widely-adopted standard to replace documents and signatures. If you&#x27;re a doctor sending a prescription from one hospital to another (and both hospitals have strict requirements for record keeping), sending a fax still makes sense.