I moved into my apartment in August 2008. My immediate observations were: there’s no oven, how can I cook without an oven?

There's a high concentration of mixing what you think is normal and what should be "high-tech" and what is normal in Japan. ovens are far from normal in Japan. People do not shove stuff in a hot oven and let it cook away for some hours. Food and cooking is rather different, so if you start off on a foot thinking it's just going to be America etc +1, then you're going to be surprised.

You're also going to be surprised if you expect to get all brand new stuff in some apartment without paying a premium.

A lot of the real "high-tech" feeling comes from how useful stuff is. I can go up to some vending machine. There's definitely at least one within 100m of me wherever I am and many let you just touch your suica or mobile phone whatever card against them to pay in an instant without having to search for anything in your wallet, and then get any hot/cold drink you like. Just deciding to go and get something to drink and being able to do that feels like the future imo. Of course the image of everyone's future's going to be different, and like everything, if you just measure it via simple numbers (specs in some cases for example), it may not come out on top, but then you have certain car navis (gps's), TVs, phone services (phones have been using email as standard for AGES now. It's a trillion times better than any SMS, plus since years and years ago they pretty much all allow you to watch TV on them anywhere you are (not via online, although online content has now exploded recently, but via a special signal for phones called one seg), all sorts of stuff you cannot experience unless you are here because those services do not really exist elsewhere, so even if you have the product, you're far from able to use it to its full extent, especially again only if you are looking at the numbers.

Another example: lots of Japanese phones use IR ports, even today. Sounds very outdated compared to what you may be used to, but god damn its extremely useful and has been so annoying lately with some people having foreign smart phones that do not have them. They are very useful, because they allow you to exchange contact details with someone you met in an instant. Now there's android beam and what not finally, but it's stuff like this and how it's used that sets the image of how Japan is. Just, how much easier/simpler/useful the boring things in life are. Order something online and don't pay for postage? get it the next day. Pay and get it the same day. This is also something that happens often. The standard of living in these aspects is just a bit higher I find. They care about the small things in life.

Another thing in that article:

There is no magnet strip so I have no idea how the machine reads your card and you can rarely use the card in an ATM that doesn’t belong to your bank. In my case, my ‘bank’ was a regional bank which only operates in the prefecture where I lived.

They say they have no idea how the machine reads it, so its sounds like magically advanced tech to me, but joking aside, again, this is all to do with comparing how Japan works to how your own country that you're used to works. What is written here is exactly correct, but what they managed to miss out is that you can use all your cards in ATMs in convenience stores, which again there are tons of. You can also pay for stuff using electronic money there too, like with the vending machines, and pay all sorts of bills there too.

In the end, it really is all down to how you perceive everything, and if you're seeing the whole picture or not. I'm from the UK too and I also had similar, strange feelings at first before I learnt and got used to how the real Japan works, and came to terms that it's just different to my own country.