I would like to answer briefly about your statement of technology as communication. I agree that maybe the perikura is a kind of communication toll in a first instance, although I tried to think technology in Japan in a broader context in relation with the structure of Japanese society. The most striking point about Japan is that it is almost a paradigmatic case of how Capitalist society is functioning today. So this is why it is almost a privilege as a researcher to live here, and, on the other hand, this is way it is so painful for the gendered and leftist body to spend the rest of its life here. No content is possible to find between people, but, to put this in a crude way, only formal, empty, surfaces are communicating and exchanging among themselves.
Capital is the only content, inequality of different sexes the most common mode of living.
Everything is coded and ritualized to the point that only the form of the relation counts and not its content. In such a structure it is possible to hide even better taking a prescribed form in the structure of the image. So what seems just a simple commmunication tool is, from my point of view, a very useful form of taking the prescribed idelogical form of acting, communicating, living.