I can see how people think this, but once you live here you see the reality. There are sectors though where Japan is still pretty damn advanced, but you don't necessarily notice it in daily life. A great example is precision manufacturing - they are awesome at it.

As I understand it, a lot of the early foundation Japanese PCs werr delayed by the need to support kanji for all but the most dedicated hacker. So higher resolution screens, initially lots of ROM to store the glyphs, and of course input methods to easily convert kana to kanji.

Or you could just hand print messages and send them by fax....