Gatunka

This article about the topic is a classic (2008): https://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/ Tl;dr: It's the writing system.

http://blog.gatunka.com/2009/11/03/japanese-computers-still-living-it-… This blog post explains perfectly why I am slowly falling in love with what Apple is doing for displays. I don't have anything to add separate to it, but thought it was relevant.

Interesting article. There's also one on how typing Japanese is done on modern computers: https://blog.gatunka.com/2009/09/12/using-a-japanese-ime/ It all sounds horribly complicated, although it may be one of those procedures that's easier to do than to describe. These kind of writing systems really don't seem suited to being input via a conventional keyboard, even with software assistance. I wonder if things will change [or have changed] with the advent of touch screens and styluses? [stylii?] which would allow the characters to be written manually, using finger or stylus and then have the software convert this to the appropriate typed character?

It's been about 10 years, but I used the IME in Windows 2k quite extensively. http://blog.gatunka.com/img/Convert3.gif I recall this window strongly, with ~10 items in it being common. Playing with it now in OS X perhaps it's improved in recent years.

This reminds me of the article "Why Japan didn’t create the iPod", which adds lots of details to the same issue: http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/ Notably, the "appliance mindset" (people own many devices which are not interacting), average japanese people not owning a PC in 2001, the popularity of gaming consoles and mobile phones.

The main reason is the complexity of Japanese language, namely technical barriers that existed for text entry and displaying the characters on personnel computer in 80s-90s (http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/) Thus there is a strong culture of complex specialized gadgets and a weak general-purpose personal computer culture.

One of the better discussions of this is probably in http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/ , which makes a much weaker claim about the 8-bit era of computing in particular, which I'd think is easier to discuss for a lot of reasons. One other point I'd make is that I think people may be accidentally overestimating the friendliness of English for printing, to some degree, because sometimes it sounds like that people think that Japanese, Arabic, or whathaveyou people are just completely unwilling to make any practical concessions to the fact that technology might have some problems reproducing their language. But it's not as if English was not itself compromised by technology. How much of this discussion sounds like "No English-speaking country would use a typewriter because English is written with a different amount of space allocated to each letter, which typewriters of the era could not reproduce."? English speakers adapted to the tech. Telegrams historically looked like crap... they couldn't even have punctuation!... but they were popular even so. Granted, English may have a particularly easy time of it (it is, admittedly, quite nice to fit a quite usable subset of your language into five bits), but I'd like to see some more concrete evidence that all these other cultures were unwilling to bend for a while, because they were so much more concerned about... whatever it is they were concerned about. (Also, to be clear, I'm speaking about…