That's interesting. I didn't know any other country in East Asia that showed this level of restrictive policy that sets up a cascade of problematic tooling and technologies.

Japanese Internet was pretty bad in the 2010s, but this was all self-inflicted done by the private sector. The government had very little do with it. And even then, ActiveX controls were very rare. My main pain point with online banking was ugly sites, back buttons that don't work and passwords limited to 8 or 12 characters "for security reasons". But those problems are not specific to Japanese or Asian banking sites. The only Japan-specific woes I can think of are frequent maintenance windows where most banking functionality is done (mostly eliminated on my bank) and weird 2FA methods like Security Cards (just a paper card with a table of codes for challenges, also completely gone now).