Japanese Manuals

POSTED BY DANNY CHOO On Wed 2007/09/19 10:47 JST in Japan

I've always felt the same about Japanese manuals that come with products over here.

Theres just too much info in them - I only end up reading the quick start manuals and the rest just sits there until I find time to look for the PDF version online so that I can throw the paper version away.

In case you are wondering - I rarely sell my unwanted gadgets and always end up giving them away so never bother to keep the manuals.

If you feel the same about manuals taking up space at home, many product manufacturers have the PDF version that you can download. Some include it on the CD that comes with the the product too.

This manual is for my Xacti - have only read about 3 pages from this. Going to look for the manual online and bin it.

This is the manual for my car navigation - came with 3 thick manuals - only read a few pages.

The thing with many of these Japanese manuals is that they contain useless information that you have to wade through.
Take this manual for example which came with our bathroom - the mirror is marked "mirror", bath tub marked "bath tub", mirror marked "mirror" - you get the picture.

When we bought our house, we were given a telephone book-thick folder full of manuals for bits n pieces around the house.
This is an manual on how to use a tap!

How to use the kitchen tap.

How to use a kitchen.

And I'm expected to read all this before I can take a poo. Granted that the washlets here have a lot of knobs and buttons on them but people usually guess what the "stop" button does.

We got ourselves a British made Dyson vacuum cleaner (pictured in this post) which came with a simple manual that you could flick through within a couple of minutes. I'm curious to know what manuals are like in your region. How about when you buy Japanese products - are the manuals localized down to a few pages? Do you keep your manuals?

How about the Wii manual in your region - does it ask you not to pour liquid over it?