It is 2026 and I am watching a colleague print out an email so that he can stamp it with a small wooden seal and scan it back into the exact PDF it started life as. This is the paperless office. This is what they call it on the laminated poster by the lift, GREEN WORKPLACE, PAPER REDUCTION INITIATIVE, next to a recycling bin nobody has ever once used. There are three monitors on his desk. Three. He is using none of them. He is using a fucking biro and a fucking inkpad.

Let me set the bloody scene, because the scene is the whole crime. Open-plan floor, the air conditioning set to a temperature designed for a man wearing four layers in August. Every desk has a triple-monitor array that could run air traffic control for Haneda. There is a Slack channel. There is a SharePoint nobody can find. There is, in the corner, glowing with the quiet menace of a thing that should be in a museum, a fax machine. And into this temple of glass and RGB walks a document, born digital, conceived in Outlook, which must now be dragged out into the physical world, killed on an A4 sheet, branded with a personal seal, and resurrected as a slightly worse copy of itself.

The seal is the bit that breaks me. The hanko. A little carved cylinder of contempt that means "I, a senior person, have looked at this." Except he hasn't looked at it. He's stamped it. Stamping is not looking. A stamp is what you do instead of looking, which is the entire fucking point of it, and everyone in this building has silently agreed to pretend otherwise.

The ringi chain, or how to spend three weeks deciding nothing

Now multiply that by eleven. Because this isn't one stamp, you sweet summer child. This is a ringi, the approval document that must circulate through the org chart collecting seals like a demented Pokémon hunt. Eleven stamps. Eleven desks. Eleven people who will each hold the thing for two days, not because they're reading it, but because returning it too quickly would imply they didn't take it seriously, and god forbid anyone here be caught doing their actual job at a reasonable pace.

Three weeks. Three fucking weeks for a decision that, in any office in London, would have been a bloke leaning over and going "yeah, fine, send it." Here it requires a paper relay race conducted at the speed of continental drift, and the genius of it, the absolute bollocks-deep genius, is that the digital tools to do this instantly are sitting right there. They have the software. They bought the software. The software is mocking them from monitor two while monitor three displays a screensaver of Mount Fuji.

And the seals must be applied at a slight angle. Did you know this? The junior is meant to lean his hanko towards his boss's, a little bow rendered in red ink, because even the stamp must perform deference. We have managed to invent a workflow in which the punctuation is hierarchical. Truly the work of a sovereign nation's finest minds, this. Edo-period theatre with a USB port.

Performed modernity, genuine medieval

What enrages me is not that it's old. Old is fine. I like old. What enrages me is the costume. The whole place is dressed up as the future. Glass walls, hot-desking nobody hot-desks, a wellness app, a man whose entire job title is "Digital Transformation Lead" and who, I promise you, owns three hanko. The aesthetic of competence performed at full volume over a process a Tokugawa-era rice clerk would find a bit slow.

The email gets printed. The print gets stamped. The stamp gets scanned. The scan gets emailed back to the person who sent the original, who now has two identical PDFs and one of them has a smudge of red ink on it, and that's the official one, the worse one, the one that took a fortnight and a tree.

For fuck's sake. They put a man on the bullet train at 320kph and then made him fax the receipt.