A different way forward.
I’ve got a thermal flask at home. I’ve had it for a good decade now and, frankly, you wouldn’t grace it with a second glance. It’s a stainless steel painted dull brown, with a screw-top and a spring-loaded latch covering a plastic spout.
As I said, nothing fancy. It’s a cherished present, sure, but you wouldn’t know that. What makes it remarkable, to the point that I’ve never felt the need of changing it, is that it’s capable of defeating the laws of thermodynamics.
Sceptical? Here’s an example. It was the winter of 2015 and the temperature in Astana, Kazakhstan, was a cool -25 C. My trusty flask, filled with coffee by a kind cabin crew on my flight there, was laying in my rucksack all day, exposed to those awful temperatures. When, at the end of the day, I opened it to take a swig of coffee, the liquid inside was still hot enough to scold my lips.
No, I’m not branching into consumer reviews, you’ll be happy to know. The flask is but an example of a point I’m about to make and, to do that, I could’ve employed the pen I used to sketch this post, or the notebook on which I wrote these words.
You see, all those products hail from Japan. The flask is made by Zojirushi. The pen is a Magic Roshon 300, and the Midori prints the MD Notebook in A6 format that I love writing on. Simple, reliable, long-lived and great quality: all perfect examples of why, and here is my point, Japan could be offering us a way out of the senseless economic trajectory we are stuck on.
There are a couple of concepts, in the Japanese work culture, that explain why my Zojirushi flask is so great insulating, my Roshon pen such a joy to write with, or why Midori just mops the floor with anything from Moleskin or Leuchtturm. Please welcome shokunin and monozukuri.
Shokunin defines the essence of a skilled artisan. The dedication to mastery, a lifelong commitment to a craft, whatever it might be. Whether it is about notebooks or pens, a real shokunin will pour everything into every unit he or she makes.
Monozukuri translates to “thing-making”, and it was a concept that I learned in school when studying Toyota’s approach to producing cars. While most Western makers were happy to churn out slapdash vehicles, Toyota poured its essence into its cars, blending art, science and craft into a product that, they believed, was the best it could be. In the concept of monozukuri one can find the attention to detail, care for quality, respect for those involved in the production and of the community existing around them.
In a world where the only imperatives seem to be to be doing more, faster, cheaper and with higher margins, these concepts offer a departure from the rapacity of today’s economy. Japan might be famous for fast trains and the ever-changing skyline of Tokyo, but it’s also a country that has independent, family-run stores on every corner. Stationery shops are still ubiquitous, and restaurants will only specialise in one offering, and they’ll do it to perfection.
Must we really buy a new phone every year? Is it really necessary to overhaul our wardrobe every six months? Why is it that we expect every restaurant to become a franchise and every coffee brand to start selling drinks in supermarkets? How much longer can we expect our economies to expand, our factories to churn more stuff and ourselves to be buying not only more, but also more frequently?
Japan, I feel, offers an alternative. Quality over quantity, care over speed, repair and reuse over buying anew. That, I know, flies in the face of the imperative of growth that is how we govern our economies and, indeed, learned ones will point at Japan’s stagnation as a cautionary tale. Back in the 1990s, the per-capita GDP of the archipelago was comparable to that of the United States, once you accounted for purchasing power differences; today, instead, is about 30 percentage points behind.
But… have you ever seen, in Japan, the same level of abject poverty and social malaise that blights so many cities in America? I, personally, haven’t. Japan also has a murder rate that is 25 times lower than America’s, and the average Japanese lives five years longer than the typical American. As it often happens, it’s not all about GDP.
This is nothing but a half-baked idea nurtured during a long flight with not much to do, but if there’s a thought I always have when coming back from Japan, as I’m doing now, is that we’re on the wrong track, us lot. I’m sorry to disappoint Mr Musk and his dreams of interplanetary colonisation, but – right now – there’s only one planet. How can a finite planet sustain endless economic growth? At some point the numbers will stop adding up, and we’ll need to find an alternative way.
Japan, with its focus on long-term, of doing things right, on shokunin and monozukuri, might be offering precisely that.
