So, 50 years in Japan, the majority of it in broadcasting-through your ever-deepening understanding of Japan, what changes have you seen in the minds of the Japanese people over the years? On the contrary, what elements remain the same?
You know, society changes so gradually that looking back over, it’s going to be 48 years this year, it’s sometimes hard to remember what changed and when.
Japan was much more Adia when I first came here in 1974. And things changed actually quite a lot right around 1980. I remember industrial design suddenly seemed to go through a big change. This which had been…I can remember when I first came here. Televisions tended to be red or white plastic. And vacuum cleaners tended to be red or white plastic, and a lot of things were kind of either red or white plastic.
And suddenly around 1979, you’ve got a lot of very cool-looking, modernistic, gray-toned either TVs or, you know, other electrical appliances. Things started to look cool. There was a whole new kind of Japanese aesthetic and fashion as well. You’ve got a lot of the now-iconic fashion designers starting to become talked about a lot.
And then, of course, the music scene changed a lot in the 1980s as well, for better and for worse, from my point of view, but things did change. I think Japan got a lot more cosmopolitan, perhaps. People’s attitudes opened up quite a lot more. Of course, now, there’s an exponentially larger number of non-Japanese in the country compared with what it was like in the 70s. I would go sometimes a couple of weeks working in Kanda without seeing another foreigner or without seeing another non-East Asian face, anyway. So those things have changed.
The Japanese mentality, in a lot of ways, hasn’t changed that much, I think. And that’s partly because the education system hasn’t changed. And I guess there’s a political element to that, which I probably shouldn’t get into too much.
But I do find Japan is still, despite being probably the most democratic Asian country, still very conservative in a lot of ways.
