All the great gadgetry is often developed and adopted first in Japan. Why is this? What about their culture makes them so future-philic?
Just a WAG, but i believe the average japanese spends a greater percentage of his/her income on gadgets than the average north american. I suppose it’s culture, Americans seem to be content with their (relatively) low tech devices., so there’s not much of a market for them.
Also, for things like cellular phones, greater population density means mass wireless networks can be set up more efficiently and cheaply. Also true in other asian countries and europe.
Actually, I’d always heard that Asian companies almost never invent new technology. What they do so spectacularly well is manufacture existing technologies (especially mature ones) at price points that nobody else can match.
For instance, they difn’t invent thin-screen technology, but almost all of that equipment is now manufactured over there. They didn’t invent any of the current memory technologies, but almost all of today’s memory is manufactured over there.
They’re no so much “future-philic” as efficient.
I seen references to the fact that very few Japanese households have PCs, and this contributes to their spending on other technology. The reasoning is that they use other gadgets (handhelds, etc.) to accomplish what most Americans would do with their PC. I don’t have a cite for this, but I’ve seen it mentioned as a rationale for why Internet-enabled devices like 3G phones have much better sales in Japan than America or Europe. Even if it is true, I don’t know why it would be true; it seems strange to me that PCs wouldn’t sell well in Japan.
Here is the story of the Japanese getting the transistor, which was invented by Bell Laboratories. I couldn’t find a link, but I’ve heard that the reason we let this happen was that some company (I believe Philco), had just built a state of the art facility to manufacturer vacuum tubes.
When I was a kid the Japanese were our enemies. Then they were known for making nicknacks and junk. Then they became famous for copying from us. Then they were making all our TV’s and small cars. Then they were buying up land, buildings and the Peeble Beach Golf course. By then we thought they were going to take over the world. That was 15 years ago and now it is China that has us wondering.
It surprises me as well. I attribute it to a perception that PCs are unnecessary luxury items. I’ve had a number of Japanese remark to me about how expensive computers are, which doesn’t make much sense given the ease with which they seem to spend money.
That having been said, the number of PCs seems to be increasing fairly rapidly now. Sorry, no raw numbers. I’ve just noticed that the number of my Japanese co-workers with personal laptops now is much higher than it was when I arrived 3 years ago.
Also, I think it bears saying that the image that many foreigners have of Japan as a technological wonderland has little basis in reality. In some ways it’s amazing, in some way it’s appalling.
my total WAG is that I don’t think japanese people use their house as much as their “base of opperations” like we tend to. (you know, being in your house is the default if your not doing anything), they tend to just go home for sleep and eatting and not hang around and watch tv. not that they never hang around, just not in there home. and such moblity leads to more wish for portable things.
To provide a sort of broader answer to the OP,
You need to time-zip yourself back to the late 40s, early 50s in Japan. To say that the country was in crisis is an understatement. The dream that many had believed in (or had been force-fed) that Japan was going to rule over Asia and the Pacific had been destroyed. Most of the country had been rased, millions had died in the previous years and a foreign army was running the show. There was a mass rejection of everything that had led to this situation, most importantly the sort of conservative traditionalism heralded by the militarists. As a result, a lot of people turned to the future for escapism. People traded their beliefs in traditional values for faith in technology. In that period of history, technology was perceived as a tremendously positive force. The ultimate example of this is the status enjoyed by Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu. From the 1950s on, robots were cool. Kids didn’t dream about being famous samurai, they dreamt of robots and spaceships.
This faith in technology pervaded almost all levels of society, and industries started producing more and more technological goods. In part because most business men honestly believed new techs were “it”, and in part to answer the growing local demand for such goods by people who wanted a life a bit closer to their dream.
This very positive view of new tech never really died out, and robots are still cool; witness Aibo, Asimo and Qrio.
So, the short answer is that technological gadgets are big here because there is a demand for them. Nothing is more un-cool than old stuff. (unless you’re really cool, then the un-cool is cool and you insist on using you five-year-old cell phone because it’s so un-cool it’s cool.) There is a significant portion of the population willing to change their cell phones every six months because the new model has a colour screen, or can take pictures, or has a GPS device, or can film videos, or has a built-in television tuner.
Actually, I would start with the era of the Meiji Emperor and the Meiji Restoration (1860s).
Within a few decades, Japan was radically transformed. It went from pre-industrial to world power in no time flat. A lot of Western tech, know-how and inevitably culture was brought in. Everyday Japanese saw huge improvements in their society within a short span of time.
Not everybody was happy with this, which contributed a lot to one-half of WWII. But overall this aura of “Western stuff is good for us” has been going strong for over a century. Each generation outdoes the next in trying to “shock” their parents in behaving more “modern.”
Note that their still is a really weird dichotomy about Japanese and the West. There’s still a lot of that “ganji” xenophobia. Western people are looked down upon. But Western things are cool. America is neat, not because of Americans, but because of the things we possess. (As if they were magically invented.)
Yes, but I would make a distinction between the amazing push for industrialisation of the Meiji era, and the futurisation of the post WWII era. Of course, the Meiji-Taisho modernisation created the infrastructure (social and material) necessary to make the later mass-production of technology possible. The difference is that between big industry at the service of a strong empire, and technological gadgetery answering common people’s dream for a SF society.
Also note that futuristic modern stuff isn’t perceived as werstern. Robots are an integral part of Japanese culture, as are cell phones now, or even talking escalators. Sure, there’s plenty of Western-worship here, but it’s not the cause for new stuff being cool.
Also, (hijack) I believe the word you meant is “gaijin”, and while xenophobia is real my opinion is that a) it is much less specific to Japan than most people believe and b) is a product of Japanese history rather than culture.
I agree with Jovan, although my knowledge of Japan is limited (I lived there for a year). I found that the Japanese people I knew didn’t see high tech gadgets as western influenced, but as entirely Japanese in nature. The general feeling was that with respect to these types of products Japan was the one influencing the US.
I disagree with sevenwood 's assertion that
I read several technical journals, and just to mention articles I’ve read recently, Japanese engineers have made incredible progress in the automotive industry (materials, hybridization, etc.), MEMS (microtechnology in measuring devices, etc.), and yes even digital cameras (many patents on CCD sensor, etc.). I have the impression lion’s share of cell phone technology is driven by Japanese engineers. In fact, some technologies are dominated by Japanese research with nearly all documents written in Japanese and needing translation into other languages.
Of course engineers worldwide share technology and improve on designs from elsewhere. But it is not fair to say that Japanese companies basically manufacture technology developed elsewhere.
I think it is true that fewer households in Japan have PCs than in the US. The commonly cited reason (which I believe) is that Americans have been exposed to typewriters for a couple of generations, so it was a natural transition to computers. There is no such thing as a mechanical Japanese typewriter, and Japanese electronic word processors did not become a household item until 15 or 20 years ago. My mother is a college professor (humanities) and she didn’t start using word processors until less than 10 years ago. She still accepts handwritten papers and essays from her students.
I’m not sure about the “fewer PCs = more of other gadgets” theory though. I do know a couple of people who only do e-mail on cell phones, but that’s the only example I can think of.
Yeah, although it is a tempting hypothesis that fewer household PCs = more disposable income for electronic gadgets, I don’t think it holds because new tech gizmos have been popular here since way before personal computers became common in North America.
And also, yeah, the common platitude that Asians (and Japanese in particular) aren’t creative is, well, not true. At all.
might it be because it’d be a pain to use a keyboard? I believe Cecil has an article about this.
Ok just looked it up, it’s actually a Chinese keyboard question, but I think the same shortfalls apply.
Like Cecil said, the Chinese love the computer and the Japanese do too. It’s really not that hard to use and you can type much faster than you can write Japanese by longhand. It’s so popular that the Japanese have a word for those who use the computer so much that they’ve forgotten how write longhand: wapurobaka (word processor fool).
But, to type in Japanese (or Chinese) you need a good IME (input method editor) to take the syllables you’ve typed and bring up the possible words. I think it’s only been in the last 10 years or so that IME’s have gotten really easy to use which would explain the relatively late adoption of the pasokon (personal computer).
Did you miss this part?
Also the article is out of date. On a modern Japanese computer you can type an entire sentence using Roman (English) characters and let the program convert it into the appropriate combination of Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. The program uses context, sentence structure and past history (i.e. it remembers which words you commonly use) to choose the correct characters. It works amazingly well.
Actually, typing in Japanese on a computer keyboard isn’t terribly difficult and it’s only marginally slower than typing in English. So that’s definitely not a factor either.
I looked for actual numbers relative to PC ownership and I found from an Excel document on this page that the percentages of Japanese households that had computers were:
1996: 22.3%
1997: 28.8%
1998: 32.6%
1999: 37.7%
2000: 50.5%
2001: 58.0%
2002: 71.7%
Compare this with America: (warning, PDF!)
1993: 22.8%
1997: 36.6%
1998: 42.1%
2000: 51.0%
If I read this site correctly, the portion of households in America that own computers in 2002 is 67.2%.
So while it seems that Japanese ownership of PCs was lower in the mid-90s, rates are now somewhat higher here.
Just to clarify the theory I was parroting, it was not an issue of disposable income but one of feature acceptability.
For example, Internet-enabled phones have not taken off in America for several reasons. Price is one of them, but another large issue is that people who are used to using browsers and email on desktops PCs are less accepting of the limitations of a handheld solution than a new user might be. It may not be rationale to expect your handheld to function exactly like your desktop (at least in first generation) but a lot of people do and they get frustrated with handheld solutions because they don’t work “like they’re supposed to”. On the other hand, if you have a population that isn’t already trained in the PC interface, they’re more accepting of alternative paradigms.
It may not be rational either.
BTW, I’m not espousing this theory, just repeating something I’ve heard many times. It’s typically used to justify the slow rollout of 3G phone services in the US by claiming that US consumers don’t want them and can’t be compared to Japanese consumers who do. The stats posted by jovan indicate it may be nonsense anyway.