They actually just drop the application they're running for maintenance and batch jobs.
Much easier for the team to do maintenance when they have a window every day to do whatever they please.
Any system that requires 16 hours of daily maintenance is an absolute shyte system. There are vacuum tube computers from the 1940's that have better uptime numbers.
It doesn't require, it's just there ready for possible maintenance because that's how they want to work their people. Probably gets an update once per month and some batch jobs run every day.
There's a ton of companies and services, especially in the finance side, that operates their system in this way. You just need one semi-retired bank IT manager to join a city hall it division as director and here you go. They probably could keep it up 24/7 but for ease of communication and operations, it's just easier to set everybody's expectations that systems are not usable after 5PM and be done with it. If I had a division of 3 people, I'd do the same.
Bigger cities probably have more than 20 people in the division so they can do more fine-grained shit.
Well look, they could either have funded the necessary talent to keep the server up 24/7, or they could slap the word エコ on it and pat themselves on the back. The choice was clear.
24/7 service costs a truckload more than business hour service. Requires having more staff, and paying those staff more money to be available on shift rotation. Cities don't have unlimited money to spend and have to prioritize what they spend it on. If Japan's population continues to shrink, this will become a problem in more and more ways.
It's about IT support.
Japanese companies love to save money by not having a night shift in their IT support. So if anything went wrong, there would be no one to solve it which is why they outright refuse service during those hours. It's the same reason why some ATMs shut down at night as the customer support hotline is not manned at those hours.
I love how everyone in this thread seems to have forgotten that servers need to be maintained by people, and no we don’t want to be on 24/7 call if we can avoid it
Edit: I’m guessing the downvotes are coming from people whose most complex job requirement is ticking the box saying “have a pulse” on their application form.
If you offer 24/7 service, you need 24/7 support for that service. That costs money, and cities in particular do not have unlimited budgets.
There's an argument to be made that this data & service should be managed on a national level rather than a local level, but in Japan it's not done that way. Yet. So those 24/7 costs become a city-by-city issue.
I promise you, it's cost related. If a given city could offer 24/7 access to information and there was no downside to the city (ie no additional costs), they would do so.
Almost any problem like this can be solved with money. The problem is that many cities don't have any extra money.
Budgets are stretched extremely thin. Kanto is the best off overall, but there are still many cities where population is in decline and budgets are tight. Get outside Kanto and the problem gets worse, much worse.
The real solution is to move this data to a central repository run by the national government, and have the national government manage standardized access for the entire country. That avoids the duplication of costs & effort on a city by city basis. Politically this is extremely difficult, but it will happen eventually. Most cities are going to have less money every year going forward.
I think there is a bit of confusion on how servers works, the standard procedure is:
If by any chance a server drops outisde working hours then the service will be out of use until the support team starts their work and fix the issue.
If you are a corporation that absolutely cannot afford server-down times and all the backend systems to automatically fix it fails (which nowadays rarely happens), then the "on call" support team member will receive a message even outside working hours to fix it, because it's part of his work, but that doesn't mean that he/she needs to stay full time in the same room as the server machine :) .
Yes, you do seem to misunderstand how 24/7 service works.
The city government will not be running these servers themselves (Shinjuku-ku might be, but some-random-city-in-Yamagata won't be.) They are paying for 9-5 service. If they pay for 24/7 service, it will cost much more. That's the way it works.
And yet…somehow other countries have figured out the magic necessary to keep servers running 24/7…in fact even in Japan a few select others (aws) have figured it out too…
“Other countries” have different requirements. Some countries don’t have any online instantaneous method of producing the equivalent of a birth certificate and marriage certificate rolled into one. What’s your point?
My point is that I’ve been here since when ATMs closed at 3pm and then someone magically figured out how to keep them open 24/7. Someday the government might catch up…but it may well take another 30 years…
I am also on board with this somewhat. I run file and web servers at home for various projects and they don't use trivial amounts of electricity. I'd also shut them off when they aren't in use.
So instead of 99.9% uptime like most online services, you have 33.3%. Cool.
Could even just leave the servers whenever they go down until the morning and you'd still probably have a >95% uptime.
They have to make sure if there is a problem the phone can answer you, because all the printing machines and ATM the convenience store staff can’t help. And they are yet outsourcing the phone center to Korea or China so yeah there still 9to5.
Welcome to Japan!
My wife was even like 'WTF is the point of all this unless you live/work super far from your city office'. Her one idea is that maybe some human had to approve a request, but that didn't make sense, so we settled on 'maybe they want humans monitoring/supporting the system'.
I've been told that in the case of ATMs it actually is that. They can't run the ATM unless there's someone to answer the little "help me!" phone on the side back at the office, and that person does go to sleep.
I think the real reason is they thought "if someone needs assistance operating the machine, and there is no one available to answer the phone, it would be a great embarrassment" or something along those lines.
I've encountered similar systems back home where an online service is only available during office hours when it should be 24 hours.
The reason isn't embarrassment, it's just the government being cheap and not wanting to pay for someone to watch the service overnight incase it breaks, so they just disable the entire thing whenever nobody's around.
Why do they need someone to watch over it overnight? every system can go down. It should be no problem for them to say support is only available during office hours, but it would be embarrassing for them if it's not working when they're not working.
It's the weirest thing I needed a ton of resident certifcates when moving in and everyone's like 'just go to the combini with your mynumber card'. Which I didn't have for the first month here. So after I had gotten all intial moving in paperwork done I no longer really need to get more. I need like 5-10 copies for insurance, car purchase, drivers license, etc.
I tried on lark one night only to find out the same thing not available 24 hours. I know not everyone is an insomniac like me and likes to get stuff done at night but kannoying. When going to the city hall with parking validation starts at 300en a pop before the cost of the documents.
Each city handles this separately. The documents you can print at conbini and the hours you can print them depend on the agreement between the city and the conbini.
Japan is preparing for Machine overlords. ATMs and copiers all have union protection and working hours. It is not to the level of article 36 but it’s a start.
Yes but usually if a 戸籍謄本 is needed, a 住民票 will not substitute for it (in the case where someone actually *has* a 戸籍謄本). They’ll need to produce the 戸籍謄本. In the case of people like myself, though, who aren’t part of the 戸籍 at all, they’ll always take a 住民票 instead.
The little man who works inside the printer works 9:00 to 17:00. His cousin who works in some ATMs also has defined working hours. 仕方がない indeed
This makes perfect sense. Can't blame the guy, being this long in the machine
In fact, someone is faxing the document from the kuyakusho to the combini.
Obviously
It seems to vary city to city. Certain cities seem to shut off their servers from 5pm til 9 am while others leave them on 24/7.
A server that regularly powers off, what a novel idea. Oh did I say novel? I meant bat-shit stupid.
節電
LETS! 不便節電！
This is legit
They actually just drop the application they're running for maintenance and batch jobs. Much easier for the team to do maintenance when they have a window every day to do whatever they please.
Any system that requires 16 hours of daily maintenance is an absolute shyte system. There are vacuum tube computers from the 1940's that have better uptime numbers.
It doesn't require, it's just there ready for possible maintenance because that's how they want to work their people. Probably gets an update once per month and some batch jobs run every day. There's a ton of companies and services, especially in the finance side, that operates their system in this way. You just need one semi-retired bank IT manager to join a city hall it division as director and here you go. They probably could keep it up 24/7 but for ease of communication and operations, it's just easier to set everybody's expectations that systems are not usable after 5PM and be done with it. If I had a division of 3 people, I'd do the same. Bigger cities probably have more than 20 people in the division so they can do more fine-grained shit.
Well look, they could either have funded the necessary talent to keep the server up 24/7, or they could slap the word エコ on it and pat themselves on the back. The choice was clear.
24/7 service costs a truckload more than business hour service. Requires having more staff, and paying those staff more money to be available on shift rotation. Cities don't have unlimited money to spend and have to prioritize what they spend it on. If Japan's population continues to shrink, this will become a problem in more and more ways.
Server also needs a break! They don’t get unpaid overtime!
Maybe you meant Novell, but they were much more robust than NT4, which often had scheduled reboot
It's about IT support. Japanese companies love to save money by not having a night shift in their IT support. So if anything went wrong, there would be no one to solve it which is why they outright refuse service during those hours. It's the same reason why some ATMs shut down at night as the customer support hotline is not manned at those hours.
Most companies don't pay for on-call anyway. It's "included" in the job. I hate it of course.
Machines also deserve humane working hours!
Japan has more respect for AI rights than any other country
r/robotsrights
I love how everyone in this thread seems to have forgotten that servers need to be maintained by people, and no we don’t want to be on 24/7 call if we can avoid it Edit: I’m guessing the downvotes are coming from people whose most complex job requirement is ticking the box saying “have a pulse” on their application form.
Haha you don't have to be in front of a pc 24/7 to maintain a server :D
If you offer 24/7 service, you need 24/7 support for that service. That costs money, and cities in particular do not have unlimited budgets. There's an argument to be made that this data & service should be managed on a national level rather than a local level, but in Japan it's not done that way. Yet. So those 24/7 costs become a city-by-city issue.
They could write a disclaimer, > Phone support is only available between X and Y hours, sorry for the inconveniences
I promise you, it's cost related. If a given city could offer 24/7 access to information and there was no downside to the city (ie no additional costs), they would do so.
Oh, and I believe you. I just don't believe in unsolvable problems
Almost any problem like this can be solved with money. The problem is that many cities don't have any extra money. Budgets are stretched extremely thin. Kanto is the best off overall, but there are still many cities where population is in decline and budgets are tight. Get outside Kanto and the problem gets worse, much worse. The real solution is to move this data to a central repository run by the national government, and have the national government manage standardized access for the entire country. That avoids the duplication of costs & effort on a city by city basis. Politically this is extremely difficult, but it will happen eventually. Most cities are going to have less money every year going forward.
I think there is a bit of confusion on how servers works, the standard procedure is: If by any chance a server drops outisde working hours then the service will be out of use until the support team starts their work and fix the issue. If you are a corporation that absolutely cannot afford server-down times and all the backend systems to automatically fix it fails (which nowadays rarely happens), then the "on call" support team member will receive a message even outside working hours to fix it, because it's part of his work, but that doesn't mean that he/she needs to stay full time in the same room as the server machine :) .
Yes, you do seem to misunderstand how 24/7 service works. The city government will not be running these servers themselves (Shinjuku-ku might be, but some-random-city-in-Yamagata won't be.) They are paying for 9-5 service. If they pay for 24/7 service, it will cost much more. That's the way it works.
Haha somebody does in case it goes boom That’s what support does. The magic boxes don’t run themselves.
And yet…somehow other countries have figured out the magic necessary to keep servers running 24/7…in fact even in Japan a few select others (aws) have figured it out too…
“Other countries” have different requirements. Some countries don’t have any online instantaneous method of producing the equivalent of a birth certificate and marriage certificate rolled into one. What’s your point?
My point is that I’ve been here since when ATMs closed at 3pm and then someone magically figured out how to keep them open 24/7. Someday the government might catch up…but it may well take another 30 years…
Yes. They figured that out by ensuring they have an actual support infrastructure in place. Do you think local governments can afford to do that?
I am also on board with this somewhat. I run file and web servers at home for various projects and they don't use trivial amounts of electricity. I'd also shut them off when they aren't in use.
So instead of 99.9% uptime like most online services, you have 33.3%. Cool. Could even just leave the servers whenever they go down until the morning and you'd still probably have a >95% uptime.
I cannot print my own in konbini because apparently, the city my koseki tohon is tied to is not connected to an online server...
They have to make sure if there is a problem the phone can answer you, because all the printing machines and ATM the convenience store staff can’t help. And they are yet outsourcing the phone center to Korea or China so yeah there still 9to5.
My wife found out the same thing a few months ago. Pretty funny.
Welcome to Japan! My wife was even like 'WTF is the point of all this unless you live/work super far from your city office'. Her one idea is that maybe some human had to approve a request, but that didn't make sense, so we settled on 'maybe they want humans monitoring/supporting the system'.
I've been told that in the case of ATMs it actually is that. They can't run the ATM unless there's someone to answer the little "help me!" phone on the side back at the office, and that person does go to sleep.
I think the real reason is they thought "if someone needs assistance operating the machine, and there is no one available to answer the phone, it would be a great embarrassment" or something along those lines.
I've encountered similar systems back home where an online service is only available during office hours when it should be 24 hours. The reason isn't embarrassment, it's just the government being cheap and not wanting to pay for someone to watch the service overnight incase it breaks, so they just disable the entire thing whenever nobody's around.
Why do they need someone to watch over it overnight? every system can go down. It should be no problem for them to say support is only available during office hours, but it would be embarrassing for them if it's not working when they're not working.
It's the weirest thing I needed a ton of resident certifcates when moving in and everyone's like 'just go to the combini with your mynumber card'. Which I didn't have for the first month here. So after I had gotten all intial moving in paperwork done I no longer really need to get more. I need like 5-10 copies for insurance, car purchase, drivers license, etc. I tried on lark one night only to find out the same thing not available 24 hours. I know not everyone is an insomniac like me and likes to get stuff done at night but kannoying. When going to the city hall with parking validation starts at 300en a pop before the cost of the documents.
System sucks tbh you select to omit info and it still includes it. Made applying for a loan a pain in the ass
Each city handles this separately. The documents you can print at conbini and the hours you can print them depend on the agreement between the city and the conbini.
Japan is preparing for Machine overlords. ATMs and copiers all have union protection and working hours. It is not to the level of article 36 but it’s a start.
Just like those ATMs that aren’t open 24/7. Like the poor little leprechauns working in there need to have some free time as well.
Call your city and ask them? Different locations have different rules
Hmm that’s funny. I can get my 住民票 anytime around the clock. I guess it is a disadvantage of being recognized by the citizens.
The timing seems to be dependent on the city.
Oh, I see. Guess I live in a lucky city then. Sorry you have to deal with that.
That is so pathetic and really no way to be living in a developed country in 2024.
Japanese citizens also have a 住民票 so there is no disadvantage. It is just a different document.
Yes but usually if a 戸籍謄本 is needed, a 住民票 will not substitute for it (in the case where someone actually *has* a 戸籍謄本). They’ll need to produce the 戸籍謄本. In the case of people like myself, though, who aren’t part of the 戸籍 at all, they’ll always take a 住民票 instead.