Love your comment but I'm not entirely convinced that it is necessarily a phenomena unique to Japan culture.
I mean, isn't it the same as the old saying "if it ain't broke..."?
Using your example and this is just a guess, at the time Japan implemented those automated machines there was probably a big push to make the switch as manual handling of change had become a source of stress.
The rest of the world didn't make that jump until cards were a thing, product of a similar experience.
But by that time in Japan, where the problem was already "solved", switching to cards was no longer that big of a jump and so there was no incentive (or at least not enough) to worth the effort in changing technologies.