Relevant 99pi: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/
Japan's Paper Culture
51–60 of 164 posts
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#52It's fun, until you live there, and find yourself forever filling out tens of useless forms and workout that pretty much everything requires a form, whether or not it makes sense. Don't get me wrong, I think the art work, Kanji and calligraphy is awesome, there are many amazing things about the 'paper culture' but, there are many drawbacks, especially in 2021 when the rest of the world has gone digital in so many are…
Print out form. Fill out form. Bring it to old man in an office to stamp form. Scan form. Email form.
Disappointed you forgot the faxing.
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#53It's fun, until you live there, and find yourself forever filling out tens of useless forms and workout that pretty much everything requires a form, whether or not it makes sense. Don't get me wrong, I think the art work, Kanji and calligraphy is awesome, there are many amazing things about the 'paper culture' but, there are many drawbacks, especially in 2021 when the rest of the world has gone digital in so many are…
I'd put cleaning the mailbox in second place behind filling forms. They get filled up daily with flyers and paper ads of all kinds. It's so bad that most buildings have a dedicated trash can, just for these. Right next to the mailbox area.
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#54I often want to reteach myself handwriting to be able to write like this. Has anyone here had success in doing this? How did you go about it?
I can do it, but it all goes to shit when I need to write fast
It’s like playing a piano. Start with slow tempo and get everything right. Then gradually speed up while maintaining the quality. And at a certain point it is not possible to write faster without changing the shapes of letters to be more cursive like, and that is ok.
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#55I have been using Midori MD notebooks for quite some time, I really like their format and paper. I recently purchased a pack containing a Kunisawa notebook, it's so nice and well made that I'm sad to start writing in it, I'm waiting to start a project or idea for something interesting enough to release it. That said I also think that there are many things coming from Japan that are incredibly overpriced just for the…
> the prices they reach when they arrive in Europe are sometimes even in bad taste
You can always import products yourself using a shipping forwarder like Tenso [0] or a purchase assistance service like Buyee [1].
[1]: https://buyee.jp/
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#56Pens aren't my thing, but I am impressed with the quality of the article considering its part of a commercial website. Compared to the low quality content marketing most companies put out this was a breath of fresh air.
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Chinese my friends and I are always amazed by the contemporary Japanese art, music and movies. I attributed the success partially to the democratic system and remain hopeful for our own culture. Their cultural marketing is also great
Japan had interesting art and culture before their modern political system, which largely stems from post WWII. Btw, there's a reasonable argument to be made that constraints are what drives creativity. From my own experience, East Germany had much better political jokes than West Germany. Mostly because you didn't need a carefully worded joke in the West, you could just open a newspaper. Compare also https://en.wiki…
I agree constraints can generate creativity, but is there evidence that constraints generate more of it? It seems like no. This is all difficult to quantify, but if I were to attempt to paraphrase history and try to quantify anyway, at least from a Western perspective, it seems like the cultural output of free "Westernized" countries vastly exceeds those from restricted places (Russia, China, etc), or it could simply be because we free countries mainly import and exchange with other free countries and just don't know what Russia or China or Iran are up to culturally. Without going out of my way to dive into Wiki or to find foreign shows/films, I can't say I come across Russian culture very frequently beyond rough stereotypes (or dash cam videos /s), and Chinese culture seems vastly misunderstood or is a complete unknown in the US. Neither really come up in the day to day, or even month to month of daily life. I probably encounter Japanese and European things daily.
As for the parent comment, I think he's alluding that pre-modern Japanese art and culture had a lot more overlap with pre-modern China's, which makes it somewhat less notable from a Chinese perspective (e.g. something like England vs Australia; different, but there's overlap).
But post WWII we see a massive divergence in cultural export and exchange (e.g. England or Australia vs the US). South Korea is another example (I've actually seen Japanese entertainment consortiums lamenting at the perception that the S. Korean entertainment industry seemed to be better funded and more able to export their culture). Just looking at Chinese history, the golden age of creativity and inventions seemed to occur when there were more freedoms (which I would argue is pretty much any era prior to the PRC since their control is unprecedented in conjunction with modern technology). Granted it was the olden times, so there were more things to be discovered, but it seemed like China back in the day was on a roll (off the top of my head, movable type, paper, matcha, bonsai, porcelain, celadon, silk, gunpowder)
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#58It's fun, until you live there, and find yourself forever filling out tens of useless forms and workout that pretty much everything requires a form, whether or not it makes sense. Don't get me wrong, I think the art work, Kanji and calligraphy is awesome, there are many amazing things about the 'paper culture' but, there are many drawbacks, especially in 2021 when the rest of the world has gone digital in so many are…
[deleted]
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#59It's fun, until you live there, and find yourself forever filling out tens of useless forms and workout that pretty much everything requires a form, whether or not it makes sense. Don't get me wrong, I think the art work, Kanji and calligraphy is awesome, there are many amazing things about the 'paper culture' but, there are many drawbacks, especially in 2021 when the rest of the world has gone digital in so many are…
I'd put cleaning the mailbox in second place behind filling forms. They get filled up daily with flyers and paper ads of all kinds. It's so bad that most buildings have a dedicated trash can, just for these. Right next to the mailbox area.
To be fair, my last apartment in NYC was like that. Convenient trashcan right in the mailbox room. Though I suppose my mailbox didn't literally get filled daily. If that's the case in Japan, that's pretty bad.
Re: Japan's Paper Culture
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd put cleaning the mailbox in second place behind filling forms. They get filled up daily with flyers and paper ads of all kinds. It's so bad that most buildings have a dedicated trash can, just for these. Right next to the mailbox area.
To be fair, my last apartment in NYC was like that. Convenient trashcan right in the mailbox room. Though I suppose my mailbox didn't literally get filled daily. If that's the case in Japan, that's pretty bad.
This drives me crazy. Greater than 90% of our mail is junk mail and goes straight into the recycling bin. I was watching some recycling process videos the other day, and when it came to bailing up the sorted paper, it looked like it was basically all junk mailers. We literally have systems that supply time and money to design the mailers, supply ink and paper and probably some plastic to make them, mail them, pass them around in the mail system, deliver them, then they're promptly thrown away or recycled, then they're carted off to be processed, and then the mailers eventually end up in landfills or partly recycled. It's insane. It's a closed system that does literally nothing but expend resources and output emissions.
I wish the government would make it illegal to mail advertising mailers. But then the USPS, which has had funding purposely cut by those who want their privately held investments to win out in the postal game or just hate anything that is available for everyone, probably relies on a lot of the revenue that comes from those mailers. So it continues.
I've found it's basically impossible to get rid of receiving them.