The level of computer literacy where I worked in Japan was alarmingly low. Considering the general perception of Japan being so technologically advanced, it was a surprise that no one in the Technical Centre office had a computer at their desk. There were PCs around, but most people avoided using them, doing virtually everything by hand. Desks were piled high with handwritten memos and whole walls taken up by rows and rows of files and folders, containing the only copies of important documents, while all communications were face-to-face or by telephone. My colleagues found it somewhat amusing when I mentioned that many Western companies of similar size (i.e. several thousand employees) use email for business communications, or computerised filing systems for official documents.
In the Quality Control Section, which is responsible for checking the products from all 11 factories and dealing with numerous customer enquiries and complaints, a lone PC sat idle whilst everyone queued up to use an ancient Japanese wordprocessor, lacking a mouse and standard keyboard, but possessing a 5.25-inch disk drive just in case you needed one. This... "machine" (it was little more than a typewriter), was used for all test reports and official documents. Calculations (of which there were many, for quality tests and so on) were all done with an enormous, clunky calculator, the answers jotted down by hand before being entered into a table drawn line by line with the "_" keys on the "Waapuro" (word processor). Even so, I could sense that a technological revolution was on its way, for as I wrote these observations, Takahashi, the head technician, sat across from me reading "Excel '95 - for beginners".
I attempted to speed things along by agreeing to teach my boss (the Head of Quality Control for the whole plant) how to use the basic calculations and graph-making functions on this spreadsheet program. First, I opened a new sheet, entered some random data, then selected a few cells: "Okay, now if we want to calculate..."
"No, no!" he interrupted, "Please start from the beginning!"
I closed this sheet, opened a new, completely blank one, and selected one cell: "Now, if we select this cell, we can enter..."
"No, no!" he stopped me again, "Please start from the
I closed the whole program, leaving only the desktop: "Okay, first of all, you have to open Excel."
A blank look.
"Double click on the Excel icon!"
"AAHHHHHHHHHH!" he whipped out a notebook, and jotted this furiously on the first page.
It was a long training session.