Creation! Invention! Certainly More Than Mere Imitation
By Adrian Waller, Staff Writer
The Japan Times Weekly
February 23, 1991

Graphic by Minoru Kiso

Is Japan's reputation as imitator partially the result of Western perception?
Some people think so.

Back in 1942, just a few months after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor to begin the great War in the Pacific, an American writer named Willard Price visited the Tokyo University of Engineering, and was amazed by what he saw. Until then, the Japanese had been content merely to snatch parts of Asia. Now, they viewed the entire world and wanted it - not so much by gaining territory, but by mustering economic strength, too.

"This is a really curious place," Price wrote of the university. "Believe it or not, its chief purpose is not so much to teach, but to invent."

In a pool of water in one of the science laboratories, for example, he watched a new buoy being demonstrated. It far surpassed those already in use. Instead of being lit at night by oil or gas, it emitted a light that pierced the fog from neon tubes. How could a neon light be produced far out at sea? By the motion of waves, which generated an electrical current. This, in turn, activated the mercury in the tubes - and there was light, and lots of it. 

In other departments, other inventions were being developed. A re- searcher was working on synthetic rubber. Another was making a paint that did not peel, another cement that would not crack. Yet another scientist was working on an electric organ that could be played without touching it - merely by passing a hand through the air above it. Then there was a storeroom rather like a refrigerator, in which the temperature was 40 degrees below zero. An adjacent room was hot and steaming with a humidity of 85 percent and a temperature of 85 degrees. Both were used to test medicines, food, clothing, and building materials for use in the bitterly cold Manchurian winter or the hot tropical summer.

In a dark, mysterious room where nothing to ordinary senses was happening, Dr. Hiroshi Kinoshita, then the university's director of research said, "There are sounds here. But you can't hear them." And of Japan's sudden foray into technological development and invention,” he added, "We have learned much from the West."

Japan had, and its technology - and the invention behind it -was not only taking root but commanding attention with a vengeance at a time when the country needed it most. No other nation, after all, had so avidly acquired so much knowledge of the world in so short a period of time as Japan, as she tried to make up for nearly three centuries of almost total seclusion - "like a frog in a well," as the Japanese themselves have put it.

A proverb said, "The frog at the bottom of the well thinks the well a fine stretch of water." But another declared, "The frog in the well knows not the great ocean."

At first, Japan's prewar inventions were, indeed, merely imitations of Western ways, but they seemed harmless enough, and Westerners were flattered. The Japanese, meanwhile, secretly meant business; though many Western countries may have been slow to recognize it. Says the author of the book "Created in Japan: From Imitators to World-Class Innovators" - an American named Sheridan Tatsuno - "Most of us believe that the Japanese are incapable of creativity for a variety of social or cultural reasons, but I don't believe that history is destiny. Frankly, I believe that many Westerners suffer from self-serving pride. They often don't bother to look to Asia for new ideas.'' And he adds, "The problem is that Americans, for example, always look at their own inventions, then look to see if the Japanese are copying. We usually overlook areas where we are weak - and where the Japanese are the inventors or the creators."

 Today, of course, Japan is no longer the frog in the well. Far from it. She now sees the whole world more clearly than ever, and wants it economically. Hence, once indeed content to merely copy Western ways, she is striking out on her own even more. And this may explain why, last year alone, 20 percent of all U .S. patents were filed by Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi and Sony.

Predictably, things were better at home. In recent times, Japanese creations have included such diverse items as bioceramic teeth (false teeth layered with protein over ceramic), such medical electronic equipment as pacemakers, biosensors, and electronic toilets that can perform swift and accurate urinalysis for more than 20 chemicals.

Remarkably, these can be linked by telephone lines to hospitals and clinics worldwide, to provide patients with instant monitoring and diagnosis.

 "The Japanese are prolific inventors indeed," says Tatsuno, who is also president of a California-based company called NeoConcepts, "but the sad truth is that most foreigners are unaware of their ideas."

To some degree this is understandable. One problem is being able to actually identify significant Japanese patents. For one, the Japanese are reputed to patent virtually "everything in sight," Tatsuno adds. For two, almost all are registered in the Japanese language, which few people can read. For three, most inventors copy from each other anyway - right across the world - and in the vast outpouring of products they create, it is difficult to ascertain what belongs to whom.

Added to these are those cultural differences and deep historical traits that were deemed to somehow impair Japan's ability to create anything new. The West had always been entertained by the mysterious ways of what it called "the funny little people" who slept on the floor and ate raw fish, and never took them seriously. It was bemused by the importance it placed on tradition, politeness, and first appearances.

In 1853 and 1854, for example, when Commodore Matthew Perry was sent by America to try to encourage Japan to open its doors to outsiders, he dealt with the shogun. When he addressed him as the emperor, no one corrected him. Not only that, an ordinary policeman passed himself off as the vice-governor of Uraga. And at a glittering reception, two petty officials pretended to be princes and pompously received the letter Perry had brought with him from the U .S. President. The regal-looking chair upon which Perry sat during this audience, by the way, had been hauled in from a nearby funeral parlor.

Not much had changed when, in 1872, Japan's first railway line was opened between Shimbashi, Tokyo, and the port of Yokohama. As though somehow unprepared for this new mode of transportation, the Japanese left their shoes on the platform when they boarded their first train - because they had been taught never to step under a roof with them on.

They then broke the trains’ windows by thrusting out their heads, not thinking that anything else could possibly cover a window but rice paper. It was soon necessary to paint a white bar across each pane in order to convince them that a transparent substance could, in fact, be hard. Shortly afterwards, when large stores began appearing, mostly in Ginza and Otemachi, their windows bore big labels: "This is glass."

 Toward the end of the 19th century, when communications began, the Japanese actually "watched" the first telegraph wires, trying to "see" messages as they traveled along them. Some of these same people said that the wires must have been hollow. Others were convinced that they moved. Country folk were emphatic that telegraphy was all "Christian deviltry" anyway, and mobs tore down the equipment.

 Nonetheless, the first telephones were installed in factories around 1912. Everything was fine until they were accused of spreading cholera from the caller to the listener. And during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which leveled huge areas of Tokyo and Yokohama, killing more than 100,000 people, a lot of foreigners weren't rescued because, it was believed, the disaster had been caused by those gods who had been angered by the influx of foreigners into Japan.

 To the Westerner, the Japanese always donned their clothes incorrectly, appeared in underwear without bothering about trousers, or affected a frock coat with straw hat and breeches. And when the Japanese first tried to copy Western machines, they blundered badly.

Their first steamers, for instance, toppled over. Or the boilers blew up. Or the captain forgot how to stop his vessel and kept it going until it struck a mud bank. "We got the impression," said Willard Price, "that the Japanese were becoming a reflection, and only a very pale reflection, of ourselves. They were only trailers, followers, stumbling along the path we made. Of course, we would always be ahead of them." 

Westerners weren't, though. Japan's blunders were short-lived.  Modern history has told us that.  Consider what happened to the British cotton industry.  Manufacturers from Manchester, England, then the cotton capital, taught the Japanese how to spin yarn, and sold them looms. That was back in the 1930s. Soon Japan was able to make cotton shirts, send them halfway around the world, and actually sell them in Manchester stores for less than the shirts that had been made there.

But that wasn't all. A Japanese man named Sakichi Toyoda invented a better loom which could do more, but with less attention. In a Manchester mill, a woman could tend eight machines at a time. fu a Japanese mill, however, she could tend as many as 60!

Manchester stubbornly refused to believe what had happened. Not until all world markets were flooded with Japanese cottons at prices from a third to a tenth of those in Manchester, and the cotton capital had moved to Japan, did the men of Manchester bother to find out what had gone wrong. When they did, they dashed off to Japan to study the cotton industry they had pioneered. This time, they took no looms. Instead, after they had inspected the Japanese mills, they paid ¥1 million for the license rights to use the Toyoda loom back in their hometown. 

By the time they did so, however, Japanese engineers had begun to make their own loom more efficient. Their success is indicated by this amazing fact: Before World War II stopped trade, Japan could buy the raw cotton in India, pay the freight on it to Japan, process it, pay the freight charges back to India, pay an import duty, and sell goods in India for less than the price of cottons made there. To beat Manchester, where manufacturing costs were high, was one thing. To beat India, where costs were even less than in Japan, was another. And it gave a sober warning to the textile industry worldwide.

Japan was long first in silk, a distinction more recently given over to China and Thailand. At one time, she produced more than 70 percent of the world's supply. This was not because the silkworm would not do its job in any other country or climate, but because Japan had scientifically bred better silkworms, distributed silkworm eggs adapted to each district, and always equipped her mills with the latest machinery.

The West, meanwhile, searched for a way to circumvent her and developed "artificial silk," later calling it rayon. Seeing the silk industry threatened, Japan promptly stole a march on Western competitors by becoming her own competitor. She built rayon plants and was soon exporting more rayon than any other country in the world.

The familiar comment then, that the Japanese copy everything and invent nothing, is only half true. The Japanese always have copied everything. But they have invented as well: Back in the 1940s, the Imperial Patent Bureau employed 800 skilled examiners to handle 100,000 applications that poured in each year. Then, about 20,000 inventions were allowed patents annually, and industrialists in both Europe and America watched Japanese inventions with an astute eye - and acquired many of them for themselves.

 

A magnetized steel spindle that revolutionized certain electrical instruments the world over was invented by a Japanese. The rights to manufacture this in Germany were bought by the Bosch Magneto Company for $300,000. The inventor of a new electric battery did better, though. He sold the American patent rights for $1 million.

Then there was the typewriter which turned a Western alphabet of 26 letters into words - a miracle unto itself. The Japanese invented a typewriter which, even to this day, carries a combination of keys for thousands of characters.

At an Invention Exposition in Tokyo in 1941, there were other devices exhibited: a talking motion-picture projector for home use, for instance, a home television outfit, a non-dazzling electric light bulb, automobile headlights that could be turned in various directions, a gadget that told whether an egg was bad or not without the need to crack its shell, a building material made of waste rice hulls, and a movie camera capable of making 60,000 exposures a second - fast enough to photograph the movement of sound waves.

World War II stimulated invention in Japan like nothing else before it. Lacking metals, the Japanese made radio sets, hinges and door handles from waste fiber. Lacking felt, they made a substitute out of seaweed and peanut shells. Lacking leather, they processed fish skins. Lacking wool, they made something like it from soybeans. Lacking enough steel to make phonographic needles, they made them out of bamboo. Lacking enough rice to make sake, they brewed It from acorns. Lacking iron for bicycles, they made them from fiber or cardboard. Lacking gasoline, they made a combustion engine that ran on charcoal.

One of the most amazing ingenuities of the Japanese, however, was the cultured pearl. This was, in every sense, a real, genuine pearl, and it was planned, not accidental. And because of this planning, its cost was only the merest fraction of what an accidental one would be.

Ordinarily, only one oyster in many thousands develops a pearl. It is much easier to find a needle in a haystack than a pearl in an oyster bed. Therefore, when one is found, it is worth a lot of money. But then, if every oyster contained a pearl, the price would drop dramatically.

All this flooded the mind of a young noodle maker named Kokichi Mikimoto who often left his wife in charge of the shop so he could spend hours alone on the seashore. There, he discovered that if a grain of sand entered an oyster's shell, it would annoy the oyster so much that it would proceed to coat the irritating particle with a secretion. When this hardened, it formed a pearl!

If only Mikimoto could put a grain of sand into every shell. Well, he did. At least, as many as he could, then went into business. He went bankrupt three times before he made his process work. When finally it did, his pearls covered the world and he became a millionaire many times over.

More recently, Sony's Walkman and a deluge of other miniaturized electronic equipment like home video cameras and pocket radio sets, have been somewhat overshadowed by inventions on an earth-shattering scale: computerized fish farming, for example. Oita Prefecture's Marinopolis project, in the port town of Saiki, has developed breeding systems that use automatic feeding machines powered by Sharp solar panels. The experiments are now over, but fishery cooperatives in Oita are planning to use the new invention very soon.

And Japan, whose silks and rayons are still world famous, are not, by any means out of the textile business. Three-dimension fabrics, or structural materials made of carbon, aramid, and silicone fibers woven in three directions to create advanced composite fabrics have been developed by the Research Institute for Polymers and Textiles, a branch of MITI's Agency for Industrial Science & Technology, in Tsukuba. A company called Arisawa Manufacturing received rights to the basic patent in 1984 and began mass-production two years later. 

So, since the 16th century, Japan has been in what Sheridan Tatsuno calls "a catch-up mode" and, has, therefore, tended to copy Western technologies by rote. But "the pupil always imitates the master exactly in Japan," Tatsuno adds, "then gradually develops his or her own twist to a skill or art. "

Now the urge to create is becoming especially strong – especially - among Japan's leading artists, scientists, and technologists. "I believe in the future," says Tatsuno, "that the Japanese will gradually seek their own cultural roots -ideas, habits, customs, traditions, folk arts, and technologies - and mix them with foreign ideas to develop creative new products."

One example of this is the use of folding partitions and panels (from the fusuma and sensu) to develop collapsible kitchen furniture.

Where will Japanese creativity emerge first? Tatsuno submits his bets: Japanese women entrepreneurs, and housewives who are fed up with the male chauvinism of the corporate and political worlds, will emerge as software programmers, artists, musicians, and fashion designers. They will also enter such fields as interior decoration. Young Japanese dropouts from the system, who reject the salaryman's lifestyle and who want to enjoy life, will enter the video game industry. Nintendo and Sega, and other video game makers, often seek dropouts because they consider them to have more vivid an imagination. Watch out for video game makers to develop stunning two- and three- dimensional animation and simulation software. Aging Japanese, especially housewives and former salarymen who want to do something with their hands, will be looking to market new inventions in a variety of fields. Those Japanese who have returned from overseas, and who cannot easily re-enter the system, are likely to develop both new products and services compatible with new lifestyles.

In short, says Tatsuno, we must look to see what the West, particularly the Americans, are not doing because, in these areas, Japan is ahead.