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Japan to Discourage Sale of Old Electronics
devphaeton writes to tell us Engadget is reporting that after April 1st (no this is not an April fools joke) the sale of old electronics in Japan could become much harder. From the article: "It seems that Japan's government revised its "Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law" back in April 2001, and added a stipulation that items authorized under the country's old law (the "Electrical Appliance and Material Control Law") couldn't be sold anymore, but granted those products a five-year grace period. Well, if you check your convenient wall calendar, you'll see that the five-year period is about to end, which means that as of April 1, pretty much any electronic gear sold before April 1, 2001 can't be legally resold in Japan." The article also mentions that sellers can continue to sell old gear providing they get certification that the items conform to modern safety standards.
Ah, it would seem that in truth, it's only for electrical safety guidelines, kind of like when the UL requires a recall for faulty/dangerous components...
This is only retail sales, not individuals. And it isn't a ban, it merely requires the retailer to take responsibility that the device is safe according to the new standard. And it involves only the safety of high-voltage (mains-powered) equipment, not electronics.
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Here's a link discussing it: http://www.mutantfrog.com/2006/02/22/2nd-hand-ele
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> for an economy struggling against a weak Yen.
The Japanese economy is struggling against their own demographics; there are fewer and fewer young people to support more and more older folks. Hard to say how that's going to sort itself out... but seems like a vacuum is opening there that will be filled by someone.
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Like Japan, this may effect the resale of used goods, although there will be a patchwork of mildly inconsistent laws throughout the EU. As I see it, these initiatives will have enormous impact on the used technology market AND on small manufacturers, as another level of paperwork and expense is added to the process. The result could be fewer garage startups like Apple and H-P.
As has been pointed out, this only applies to old electronics that connect to MAINS circuits (e.g. wall outlets, which are 100 VAC RMS in Japan IIRC).
Category II circuit, such as MAINS, as defined by IEC and (in the US) Underwriter's Laboratories, must be designed to tolerate overvoltage conditions such as those caused by transformer shorts or relatively distant lightning strikes. From UL 3121-1, a circuit designed with a working voltage of 100 V DC or AC RMS must tolerate a peak impulse voltage of 1360 V for a few microseconds (from table D.10). This doesn't necessarily mean that the product still has to work after such an impulse; it just means that the product must remain safe to the operator for such an impulse. Fuses can blow, chips can be damaged, but no voltage greater than 60 V DC / 42.4 V AC pk can be exposed to the user.
I assume that Japan's old standard, before 2001, was weaker than this. Thus, older electronics can't be sold because they could theoretically kill the users.
This only applies to products that carried MAINS voltages. (Products with wall-warts limit the high voltage to the wall, and are completely unaffected.) Even then, the old products might have been designed above the standard, and therefore could still be sold anyway.
(Disclaimer: I design high voltage hardware products.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
There must be a serious plague of exploding N64s and MP3 players in Japan.
Well, in all seriousness though, this is a problem.
Lots of early consumer electronics devices won't even remotely approach modern safety standards. Consider early radios and TV sets which often used a "hot chassis" (where the steel chassis was directly connected to one side of the power line as part of a system avoiding the use of an expensive power transformer), like those using the traditional "All American Five" tube lineup (50B5 or 50C5, 35W4, 12AV6, 12BE6, 12BA6), or the flip-leaf toasters of the 1920s. These items constitute only a very small risk because they will mostly be in very casual use by informed collectors and restorers, and short of mounting them in fireproof plexiglass boxes with isolation transformers, they will never even approach modern safety standards. (Note that a hot chassis wasn't as big a risk before they became surrounded by modern grounded electrical equipment - in their designed surroundings, you were unlikely to touch a grounded object at the same time as the radio. Also note that *many* post-war Japanese radios used the All-American Five design!)
Such a rule would effectively eliminate the collectable marketplace and probably result in the loss of many of the early products of companies which later became leaders in their fields. The first Sony transistor radio is historically significant, as is the first JVC VHS VCR, as is...
Japan is also noted among automotive enthusiasts for similarly draconian rules surrounding old cars - I cannot corroborate this, but I have heard that the *entire* braking system must be replaced in all cars over a certain number of years of age.
The grisly irony, of course, is that this is from a culture which reveres aged people... but they're apparently happy to destroy the remaining artifacts those people built.
(By the way, good rule of thumb: *never* leave any piece of electronic equipment made before about 1980 running unattended, inspect them for possible dangers like rotten insulation, and *always* assume that any exposed metal pieces are connected to one side of the power line.)
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