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japan has the most advanced mundane technology imaginable. incredible train system, convenience store food, vending machines, toilets, etc. it also has the shittiest software imaginable. i wonder how that came to be.
i don’t have a go-to article, but some examples include: the train station ticket machines, hotel booking websites, the old “smart” mobile phones which were both extremely ahead of their time and very strange, many of the touchscreen vending machines have horrible UI, etc.
the train station fare gates are especially retrofuture. for some journeys, you may need multiple tickets simultaneously, so you feed a stack of tickets into the fare gate, and it automatically separates them, reads them (the tickets are printed on special magnetic stripe paper), stamps them, and returns them to you in a neat stack on the other side, all in under a second. also the ticket machines have some of the best coin funnels i've ever seen on any coin operated device (because clearly you're going to use your bag of 500 yen coins to buy a 100,000 yen shinkansen ticket, why else?)
the ticket machines have the most confusing interface imaginable. thankfully there is a help button that video-calls in a customer service person who remote-desktops in to help you navigate the interface or even click on buttons for you. there's even a little tray with a camera looking at it, for you to show your existing tickets to the support person, rather than having to hold them up next to your face and praying that they can read it.
it's all so well thought out and completely outdated at the same time.