Faxing is still big in Japan

Facsimile transmissions have all but disappeared from the American workplace over the past decade, but remain very common in Japan. Be sure not to overlook them if you are assigned to assist with an electronic production from a Japanese business. Small businesses compromise a very high percentage of companies in Japan, and a large number of private residences have fax machines. Faxing may have become adopted more widely in Japan because early word processing software did not allow for kanji characters to be entered easily.

The Japanese prefer the personal effect a handwritten communication can convey, and some use faxes as a way to avoid exposing their confidential information on the internet. Japanese business also favor using hanko stamps on paper documents.

Fax machines are found in convenience stores all over Japan. Both lunch orders and bank transactions are still done using faxes. The faxed document is typically reprinted on A4 paper.

Many fax machines run on Windows and can be used to simply scan documents as PDFs or JPEGs.