You are at a neighbourhood clinic in Tokyo, filling out a form by hand on a clipboard, because that part at least you were braced for.
The receptionist takes the finished form, walks it to a beige machine against the back wall, and sends it exactly one floor up, to a doctor she could reach by shouting. A dial tone. A screech. A slip of paper prints out on the other end confirming it arrived.
You ask, gently, why not just carry it upstairs, or email it. She looks at you the way you might look at someone who asked why a receipt needs a printed total. "This way there's a record," she says, and goes back to work.
Start with the thing that makes this stranger than plain nostalgia: Japan did not fail to notice the fax machine was obsolete. It tried, on purpose, at the highest level of government, to kill it — and lost.
In September 2020, incoming administrative reform minister Taro Kono announced that he was going after two symbols of Japanese bureaucracy at once: the hanko personal seal and the fax machine. Nine months, he said, and both would be gone from government business. It was treated, correctly, as a declaration of war. The hanko is a carved stamp, dipped in red ink, that has stood in for a signature on Japanese paperwork for over a century; the fax was its natural ally — a way of sending a stamped, physical, undeniably-signed document without anyone having to leave the building.
COVID-19 had just shown the world exactly how load-bearing that alliance still was. Through the first wave of the pandemic, hospitals across Japan were legally required to report new case numbers by filling out a form by hand and faxing it to their local public health centre, which then re-entered the numbers by hand into a national tally. Doctors described losing hours a day to a system built for a 1990s newsroom. It was not until May 2020 that the health ministry switched on HER-SYS, an online reporting portal, and even then the rollout crept — Tokyo's 31 testing centres were still faxing results that August, months into a national emergency.
So Kono had a case. He also had, it turned out, an entire government working against him. In June 2021, his own Headquarters for the Promotion of Administrative Reform ordered every central ministry and affiliated agency to stop using fax internally by the end of the month, and to report back if there was any reason they genuinely could not comply. The replies came back not as excuses but as formal objections — roughly 400 of them, in writing, from ministries and agencies insisting the fax stay. The abolition order was quietly shelved. Japan's Digital Agency opened that September anyway, tasked with modernising the rest of the state; the fax machine had already out-argued it.
The scoreboard since then tells its own story. Kono did win one fight: by June 2024 the government had stripped out 1,034 regulations that specifically mandated the use of floppy disks, and the disks went quietly extinct in official Japan. The fax did not. As of a 2020 survey, 33.6% of Japanese households still owned one — though that figure collapses by generation, to just 1.9% among people in their twenties — and a 2023 regional survey found ownership still running above 30% in the Kansai region, led by Kyoto Prefecture at nearly 37%, against under 10% in Okinawa. A machine every marketing department agreed was dead in the 1990s is, by some measures, still in roughly one household in three.
The instinct is to read all of this as failure — a technologically brilliant country too stubborn or too old to let go of a machine everyone else buried decades ago. But 400 government bodies did not defend the fax out of nostalgia; they defended it in formal written objections to their own reform minister, which is not what confusion looks like. A fax leaves a physical page that visibly, provably moved from one building to another, with a printed confirmation slip at both ends and no version history that could quietly be edited afterward. It does the exact job the hanko does — undeniable proof that a specific document passed through a specific hand at a specific time — just down a phone line instead of in red ink. Japan was never confused about email. It simply never agreed that a PDF proves anything an email admin couldn't have altered.
- Fax ownership splits hard by age: 33.6% of Japanese households had one in 2020, but only 1.9% of people in their twenties did — a technology surviving almost entirely on the households that grew up trusting it.
- When the government ordered its own ministries to drop internal fax use by the end of June 2021, it received roughly 400 formal objections back, and shelved the plan. The Digital Agency opened three months later to take on everything else.
- Kono did succeed once: by June 2024, Japan had removed 1,034 regulations requiring floppy disks, ending their use in government business for good. The fax had no equivalent regulation to repeal — it survived because agencies said, in writing, that they wanted it.