A Love Letter to the Frozen Future
The hour is late. Or early. The distinction blurs in the concrete canyons of Shinjuku, doesn't it?
In Tokyo, the subways are always on time - at least until the clock hits 12am. Just as many cities are coming alive, Tokyo grinds to a halt. Miss the last train and you’ll find yourself locked out, staring at the gates as the overhead lights blink out like eyelids.
As you climb back up the stairs with hundreds of other drunk Japanese salarymen preparing for a night on the streets, you spot an ATM. In this country cash is still king, the crisp bills and heavy coins changing hands with a formality that feels almost ceremonial. You pull out your sleek, wafer-thin card from this decade and are met with a machine that feels like a cold war relic. The number pad - each button is a chunky, yellowed block of plastic that makes a decisive, satisfying clack when you press it. It isn’t a touchscreen, it’s a tactile experience to make a mechanical keyboard warrior blush.
But you’re stopped in your tracks again. Want yen at this hour? Tough luck friend - your night, like so much of Japan, is steadily patrolled by invisible boundaries. Some ATMs just cease to work in the early morning hours.
Everyone comes here to Japan looking for the future. They’ve seen the movies, read the comics. They expect Blade Runner.
It’s all a lie. A beautiful, elaborate, exquisitely crafted lie.
The truth is, Japan isn’t the future - it’s a photograph of the future, taken in 1988. It’s a country that reached the 21st century so far ahead of schedule that it decided to just… wait. It put its feet up. Lit a cigarette. And it’s been sitting there ever since, aging with defiant elegance while the rest of the world scrambled to catch up, and then blew right past it.
Try booking a domestic flight on a Japanese airline. Their websites look like they have been designed by someone who learned HTML from a library book in 2002 and decided that more was more. Pop-ups spawn other pop-ups, error messages appear in fonts that belonged in a dot-matrix printer manual. Each click feels like navigating through digital molasses, every page load a small eternity. If you finally get your ticket, it’s not because the system works; it’s because you endured this Sisyphean challenge, one confused click at a time.
The irony cuts deep. This is the country that gave us the Walkman and the camera that I use, the country that in the 1980s was so far ahead of the curve that American businessmen studied their methods like religious texts. They were building tomorrow while we were still figuring out yesterday. But somewhere between the bubble economy bursting and the iPhone arriving, Japan fell asleep at the wheel of its own revolution.
One night I spent time trying to find the perfect window seat on the popular Tokyo - Osaka Shinkansen (the Fuji byū seki). Japan Rail system - an incredible network of such complexity and punctuality that defies the laws of physics - shuts down its online seat reservation service at 11:30 p.m.
It just… stops.
An entire branch of nervous system of the country’s transport grid goes to sleep. Not because of a technical limitation. Not anymore. But because, once upon a time, it needed to. The system needed to rest, to reconcile its data overnight. And so it still does. A country this advanced, this precise, still insists on tucking its machines into bed at night.
Meanwhile, just over the sea, China and Singapore have leapfrogged into a future that feels borrowed from science fiction. Their super-apps make western technology look quaint. One QR code, one scan, and you've paid for dinner, called a taxi, reserved your high-speed train, and booked a massage. It’s ruthlessly efficient.
Here in Japan are expansive stores still crammed floor to ceiling with CDs, DVDs, and cassettes, their plastic cases gleaming under fluorescent lights—relics of a physical media culture that the rest of the world abandoned a decade ago. It’s not that they don’t have streaming. They just haven’t let go of the old gods - even the sex stores are full of blue movies in physical form?!
The contrast is jarring. Japan built its version of the future, then decided to live in it forever. But perhaps every clunky interface, every physical button, every analog backup system is a small act of resistance against the homogenisation of human experience.
Japan is living in the 2000s, and it has been for the last 40 years.