When I first visited China, I found it a little unsettling to find bathrooms that combined hole-in-the-ground toilets with motion-sensor faucets and hand-dryers. When I started working in the bay area not so many years later, the company was grappling with a similar fact: Large swaths of the world now have access to the internet via smartphones, even though they’ve never owned (and perhaps never will own) a desktop or laptop computer.

The more general phenomenon has been called leapfrogging. Technology chugs ahead one step at a time, but countries are in no way required to adopt successive technologies one at a time in order. If a country is ahead of the curve, they might end up laying out a large investment into the latest-and-greatest at one particular snapshot in time, which they then keep for decades before they need to invest in upgrades and replacements (e.g., NYC subway). And developing countries have every incentive to skip steps where possible–why lay down landlines when you can go straight to building a cellphone network (e.g., Kenya)? This results in locales whose appearance and technological composition is determined in part by the time at which they most recently made a very large infrastructure investment.

Japan is no exception to this rule. Organizations will often only accept documents by fax. Until sometime in the last five years, most people owned “feature phones”, i.e., pre-smartphone internet-connected phones with a variety of features uncommon outside of Japan (e.g., infrared data-transfer technology for exchanging contact information and telephone-number-linked email addresses instead of SMS). The subway system(s) are amazing, but they look nowhere near as shiny as Beijing’s (which received a huge investment leading up to the 2008 Olympics).

But most striking are the neon lights. At some point not so long ago, people figured out ways to do late-night signage that were either cheaper or more flexible: fluorescent lights in custom plastic signs, regular billboards with ginormous lights pointed at them, and jumbotron-style LED billboards. But before that, there were beautiful, custom-built neon signs. And let me tell you, Japan has a ton of them. Walk around Ginza in Tokyo. Walk around Dōtonbori in Osaka. Enjoy your stroll through the future of a recently forgotten past.