"I think I'm turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so!"

I love the Japanese. I'm a big fan of the Japanese. I'm Chinese myself, but can hobble along in their language, even. I will be the first to say that I love a lot of what those wacky Japanese do. From their anime and manga, their strict culture and language (some of it originally ripped off from the Chinese, and it might piss off some Japanese to read that, but it's true), the weird culture (including their bizarre fashions), their oh-so-drool-worthy tech...the list goes on.

This article shows just how far behind the Japanese we are, at least in terms of how people are comfortable using their phones. The article highlights how the ubiquitous mobile devices of the Japanese have become eWallets and have lessened the need to carry cash and/or credit cards. This is not really news. The article is dated April, 2006, but it started way before that.

My question is actually not about the technology, but why the same usefulness isn't embraced by the American public...it's not like the technology isn't there (if we wanted to implement it, we could just copy the Japanese), and it's not like the technology hasn't been here. Nokia and 2Scoot first introduced their "mobile cashless payments" technology in 2001. 2001! Why didn't it ever take off?

As for barcode readers, no one really hypes this, but there have been Samsung phones that shipped to the US with built in scanning capabilities for the specific purpose of reading barcodes! In 2003! (A later model, as the article points out, was shipped with OCR software to capture and read text.) Why isn't it used more frequently? Why isn't it advertised?

Apparently, we have to let the Japanese put two and two together for us before we move toward a newer way of using existing technology...and then we'll adopt it like two years later. And once the Japanese put those elements together, tweak some things, and show us the pretty packaging they've wrapped so delicately around it, we'll "ooh" and "ahh" and glomp onto it like it's the best thing since the VCR (which, incidentally, was not invented by the Japanese; they only made it better and gave it global popularity). I suppose it's what they're good at--after all, just look at their language. ^_^

In my opinion, the American tendency to accept most things Japanese is why the prevalent English word to describe the pictographs in both Chinese and Japanese are called "kanji" (Japanese specific) as opposed to "characters" (more general, but usually understood as referring to Chinese), but's another post altogether, and it's 12:30 am, and I'm sleepy.