With Japan on the crest of the economic miracle, the president of Sony Akio Morita and the Japanese Transport Minister Shintaro Ishihara they launched a manifesto, a sort of prophecy. The document, eventually made public in 1989, had something in it that would worry CIA officials. What it was?
At the time, the authors of this document noted, the American and Soviet superpowers had become “dependent on the initiative of the Japanese people in the development of new technologies.” An example above all: the production (in which the country of the Land of the Rising Sun excelled) of semiconductor chips. For Morita and Ishihara, this would mark “the end of Caucasian-developed modernity” and the emergence of “an era of new genesis” driven by Japanese technological supremacy. They weren't wrong at the time. Ok, but what does the fax have to do with it? Now I tell you.
Let's go fast.
2021: Japan's high-tech image is falling apart a bit. It's a country that still debates robots, yes: but to make the elderly work beyond retirement age. “Japan needs a software update,” even says the New York Times. THE 80-YEAR-OLD IT Minister of the country, Naokazu Takemoto, was mocked for his inability to keep a functioning website. Japan, it seems, is lagging behind in the global rush to digitize, despite being home to Panasonic and Mitsubishi, bullet trains and neon-lit urban life.
“In Japan, as in other Confucian countries, there is no contrast between modernity and antiquity,” says the iamatologist and communication specialist John DePalma. “This is why, alongside cutting-edge technology, it is easy to find approaches that we would consider antiquated, such as resistance to the reduction of use of cash, or the Hanko, a personal stamp needed to validate documents or open bank accounts. On the other hand, if an eighty-year-old holds the role of Minister of Technology it is because, even if it seems absurd to us, in Japan many positions are held not on merit, but on seniority. In a world that runs very fast, this gap inevitably leads to problems for businesses and the state machine."
Nowhere in the world is this “decadence” better represented by a love story: that of the Japanese with the fax. The fax, guys: that thing full of dust that we keep thrown away in the study room. Some people here born after 2000 don't even know what a fax is. Yet this XNUMXth-century technology is still a fixture in many Japanese offices, where the insistence on paper documents with personal seals persists.
The fax. Why do they find it so surprising? No: because I find it so surprising.
We might wonder together why Japanese companies have stood patiently by their whirring fax machines. But maybe it's not the right question to ask ourselves. Maybe we should really ask ourselves: why do we find this so surprising? That is: why does the equation “Japan equals high technology” persist so tenaciously, despite evidence to the contrary?
An obvious culprit is “techno-orientalism”.
Orientalism, the romanticization of the East in the eyes of the West. The East as a place of exoticism and mystical wisdom. Something like this happened. Japan's thriving microelectronics industry opened up a new avenue for orientalist imagination: techno-Orientalism, or the idea that the East could represent an exotic, technoscientific future. Think about how glittering neon-lit Tokyo helped inspire the aesthetic of Blade Runner.
There is a deeper history, intertwined with modern imperialism, that fuels our idea of contemporary Japan. The fantasy of advanced technological development has long been central to defining Japanese national identity as “modern,” relative to both its Asian neighbors and the West.
The “new” Japanese identity: Oitsuke oikose
It was no coincidence that when Akio and Shintarō spoke in 1989 about the rise of Japan, they framed it as “the end of modernity developed by Caucasians.” Japan entered the modern international order by looking (literally) at the cannons mounted on American steamships. In post-war negotiations, Western imperial powers imprinted their overwhelming mechanical might on Japan, buttressed by a “technology-based ideology of domination.”
In response, technological development has become the top item on Japan's national agenda. In one slogan, “Oitsuke oikose” (recover and overcome) there was this whole project. The goal was to create native industries, infrastructure, and military capabilities that would ultimately offer Japan parity or even superiority over the West.
Technology was an old thing, though. Like the fax in 1936.
This “techno-nationalism”, however, also served as a fundamental reason for Japan's imperial expansion. In the late 30s, Japanese engineers referred to their work in the puppet state of Manchuria as “gijutsu hōkoku,” or “service to the country through technology.” One of Japan's first and most significant investments in faxing took place in 1936, on the occasion of the Berlin Olympics that year. A telephoto network was established between Tokyo and Berlin to transmit not only images of the event, but also an illustrated photo letter from Hitler to Nippon Electric.
Shortly thereafter, in 1941, the Japanese Planning Agency outlined its vision of how Japanese engineering combined with raw materials would liberate Japan from the dominance of Western technologies.
A hard-to-die dream
This national fantasy, a projection of what Japan could or should become at the level of state and industry, persisted throughout Japan's technological rise of the 80s. Just as the fax was enjoying its heyday. But the exuberant, very long post-war bubble would burst.
During the “lost decade” of the 90s, the Japanese economy entered a recession.
Fax is a symptom
The aging population and marked gender and income disparities have become the topic of daily headlines. Loneliness more and more widespread and rampant it transforms society for the worse. From this point of view, "slow" digitalisation is just one of the symptoms of a general malaise that has gripped the country since the end of its economic miracle. Yet even now, as the gap between fantasy and reality has widened, Japan's high-tech image has remained an integral part of the popular imagination.
The persistence of this image is obvious: after all, technological prowess has been a fundamental part of Japanese national identity for over a century.
