> Yes you have had reliability issues with email. And so has everybody else who has ever used it. It's inherently unreliable by design, and errors can happen anywhere along the chain and often don't reported back.

Uh, no I haven't. I cannot remember a single instance in which I sent an email and it failed to arrive in the recipient's inbox. Just stop and think about it - you're actually defending fax machines, which are KNOWN to regularly break down.

> I have used Netflix. It's the best legal solution I've seen so far, but the selection still sucks and it doesn't work internationally. Not solved.

The reason it doesn't work in Japan is because Japan is way behind when it comes to the internet. Because Japanese companies are lumbering behemoths loathe to adopt the internet. Because consumers don't show interest in streaming their movies and TV shows instead of going to Tsutaya.

> Most Americans you know may have stopped buying CDs in 2005, but not most Americans I know, and (more to the point) not most Americans in general[1][2]. I dabbled in buying digital music back then, but it was inferior, crippled, DRM-laden shit. iTunes didn't fix that until 2009[3]. US digital music sales didn't surpass physical sales until 2011.

Of course digital sales didn't surpass physical sales for a long time - with digital sales, people started buying singles instead of whole CDs, so they were spending a lot less money. And a lot of the people were just pirating their music instead of buying it. You would have to compare total digital vs physical music consumption, not music sales, in order to figure out how quickly digital music was adopted. Just because someone purchased a $10 CD doesn't mean they actually listened to all the songs on it. And just because someone who listens to music all the time has never purchased a song digitally doesn't mean they buy CDs (they could have pirated it all).

And what about Japan? How is digital music doing there in comparison to the US? Oh yeah, people are STILL buying/renting and listening to CDs.

> I'm saying the horrible, garish store pages on Rakuten -- apparently as shocking to your sensibilities as they are to mine -- are actually what the Japanese people, in aggregate, seem to prefer. Understanding that goes a long way toward understanding why all my Japanese bank websites look so heinous[4], why my coworkers here prefer Yahoo to Google for web-searching, and so on.

How much concrete evidence is there that the Japanese don't prefer cleaner website designs? You could've said the same thing about American websites in the 90s, but things have changed.

As for preferring Yahoo to Google, that has more to do with historical preferences than the site design. After all, Bing has a clean and simple design, and is largely comparable to Google in terms of results, but Americans continue to use Google. Old habits die hard. The difference in Japan is that they are even more attached to doing things as they've always been done. It takes a dramatic event, like the Meiji Revolution, or losing in WW2, to engender rapid change in Japan.

> Some differences I like (e.g., not prematurely accepting cunty DRM-ridden systems that aren't really as good as the old systems they purport to replace).

I don't think it has anything to do with DRM. The Japanese are happy to deal with Apple's draconian App Store policies as they buy tons and tons of iPhones. What proof is there that it was DRM that stopped them from buying music on iTunes? The real reason is that the record industry in Japan refused to put their music online until recently.

> those markets take an Apple or Amazon to spearhead. Japan is not those American companies' first priority

Why not a Japanese company, like Sony? Sony had an E-reader in Japan a long time ago. But it could never move forward, because a few companies have a stranglehold on the publishing industry and aren't receptive to change.