While avoid­ing writ­ing my next col­umn for Blue­print mag­a­zine, I found the piece I wrote last year about the same topic, Japan. There is no other rea­son to pub­lish it here and now except the fact that I have it right in front of me now, an unfor­mat­ted text file.

When Japan­ese prod­ucts first turned up in the West, they were cheap and gen­er­ally not very chal­leng­ing tech­ni­cally. Those were the days when Japan­ese com­pa­nies would hide their iden­tity behind Eng­lish or bet­ter still, American-sounding names like Bridge­stone, Pana­sonic, JVC, and NEC. A prod­uct from Japan was gen­er­ally a poor imi­ta­tion of the real thing and lacked orig­i­nal­ity. Price was the main fea­ture, brand loy­alty unlikely.

It was easy for the estab­lished brands to exploit wide­spread prej­u­dice against Asian prod­ucts and dis­miss them as infe­rior. How could a coun­try that nobody knew much about and that had been dev­as­tated by nuclear bombs pos­si­bly chal­lenge west­ern stan­dards? Didn’t they all still sleep on the floor in wooden houses, eat rice out of wooden bowls and com­mu­ni­cate with prim­i­tive brush strokes?

In the late Fifties, when they were first seen in the USA, Japan­ese cars looked like pocket-sized ver­sions of large Amer­i­can mod­els, fins and all. The first mod­els did very badly in the USA. Pocket-sized, how­ever, was the oper­a­tive word: while in the US big­ger was bet­ter, Japan­ese prod­ucts always had to deal with the fact that a pop­u­la­tion of 100m has to live on a nar­row coastal strip along a few rather small islands. Things made in Japan were small and kept get­ting smaller because a nor­mal house­hold there has as much space at its dis­posal as one car does in Amer­ica. Japan has no nat­ural resources, no room for land­fills and a cul­ture that doesn’t like osten­ta­tious dis­play of wealth. (The first facts may actu­ally be the rea­son for the third). The oppo­site of Texas, as it were. Mak­ing things well and as small as pos­si­ble seemed to be as nat­ural to a Japan­ese engi­neer as over-engineering was to his Ger­man col­league. Where else would you find a book describ­ing 101 ways to pack­age an egg? The pack­age itself was not seen as some­thing merely to guar­an­tee safe trans­porta­tion, to be dis­carded at the end of that jour­ney, but as serv­ing its own aes­thetic purpose.

It was in this spirit that in 1979 Sony intro­duced the first truly portable music player, the Walk­man. It didn’t need to look like a tra­di­tional tape-recorder, because its pur­pose was to pack­age music, not cas­settes. It was also the first device that iso­lated its users from the world around them by intro­duc­ing head­phones as the only out­put for sound. Any­body who has ever trav­elled on pub­lic trans­porta­tion in Tokyo will appre­ci­ate why that can be a bless­ing for both sides. With the Walk­man, Sony had become a major global brand and a qual­ity standard.

While Japan­ese prod­ucts stood for mass pro­duc­tion before, now they sym­bol­ized inno­va­tion. Sud­denly, hith­erto unpro­nounce­able brands like Yamaha, Mit­subishi, Hitachi or Toy­ota not only became house­hold names in the West, but also stood for pre­mium brands that didn’t need to be cheap to sell. Some of the biggest Japan­ese com­pa­nies still make prod­ucts under western-sounding pseu­do­nyms: Epson (Son of Elec­tric Printer, really!) print­ers are made by Seiko Epson Cor­po­ra­tion from Nagano, Roland syn­the­siz­ers by Rorando Kabushiki Kaisha from Shizuoka and Bridge­stone is still the trade name of Kabushiki-gaisha Buri­jisu­ton from Fukuoka. In other cases, the Japan­ese lan­guage pro­vides a nice consonant-vowel pat­tern, mak­ing names like Nikon, Canon, Honda, and Nis­san, sound pleas­ant and instantly famil­iar to west­ern ears.

It has, how­ever, taken Japan­ese brands a long time to be con­fi­dent about their her­itage. About 10 years ago, we worked with Lexus to repo­si­tion its brand in Europe. When we told the gen­tle­men who came to visit from Japan that it was a good idea if it owned up to being Japan­ese instead of pre­tend­ing to be a pseudo-Mercedes of unknown ori­gin, they thought we were quite mad. We showed them that Japan­ese qual­i­ties like mod­esty, pre­ci­sion and atten­tion to detail pro­duced cars that afforded the utmost lux­ury: the absence of stress. Lux­ury doesn’t have to mean osten­ta­tious dis­plays of gold chrome, but can also mean a Zen-like con­cen­tra­tion on the essen­tial. They never quite believed us, and it has taken Lexus another decade to arrive at the cur­rent posi­tion­ing which is self-confident and relaxed.

Japan­ese brands don’t have to prove any­thing any­more. They are now imi­tated by those they tried to emu­late 40 years ago. In a glob­al­ized world, only authen­tic brands will sur­vive, and her­itage has become a virtue, not some­thing to hide. Cheap prod­ucts now come from else­where. In a coun­try with­out oil, gas or min­er­als, the human brain has become the most pow­er­ful resource. The les­son we can learn here in Europe is that progress is not about mak­ing more, but better.