Japan beckons from across the vast Pacific. For many Americans, myself included, Japan is irresistible. In my case, it seemed to come to me. In the post-World War II era, Japan’s technological advancements greatly influenced America in many ways.
It’s an ancient dynamic. The culture of the conquered becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, the culture of the conqueror. It’s always a two-way exchange. Rome conquered Greece, but the culture Rome spread throughout the Western world was largely Greek.
In the postwar world, Japan’s technological prowess and innovation in manufacturing set the standards for the world. In the ‘50s U.S. companies were invested in vacuum tube technology, so they didn’t explore transistors. But Japanese companies did. They brought transistor radios to America. And they were not only a raging market success, transistors were the kind of innovation that would change the way people live. Transistor radios made it possible to take your radio to the beach, or anywhere else. And that was just the beginning.
Japan similarly shook up the auto industry. The American car manufacturers were taking car design to new levels, with wild baroque fins, extravagant clumps of chrome and vast swaths of sheet metal. Then the Japanese offered a different vision of car design, and Americans flocked to it. American car manufacturers had to retool their whole concept of what they were doing.
Sony invented the Walkman that lets you take your private soundtrack wherever you go. Toshiba produced the first mass-produced laptops. JVC gave us the VHS recorder. These products all brought new ways of living, and a design sensibility that was brilliant and irresistible.
We could talk about sushi and sake, and the rest of Japanese cuisine. It was radically different from what Americans were used to, but it has become one of America’s favorite cuisines. And there’s the haiku, those amazingly succinct, tightly structured little poems.
The list could be endless, but there is something that all these works of genius have in common, something at the core. That was what I was seeking in going to Japan. The common element that connects all these things, though un-nameable, is omnipresent in Japan. Whether or not you can define it, or understand it, you can experience it. You can be at the core from which that very special consciousness radiates.
And that is probably the most appropriate way to approach it, not to…
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