I am watching the presentation of mobile carrier Softbank top Masayoshi Son on his views about the energy shift from nuclear to other sources. Here is the link. I hope this will be the opportunity to this company for a shift of slogan, scrap the current "SOFTBANK MOBILE will make mobile phones more fun and innovative". Innovative is OK. Usefull and life saving are keys, the essential factors, with "allowing people to meet". Kill the fun inside please.
Fun is lame, in the same league as "kawaii". No, it's even more than lame, it's emitic these days. Japan chocked on brainless fun a month ago. It's time to be adult. Leave the "if it's no fun then it's boring" to the kawaii throng. The opposite of fun is grown-up. In the early days of the crisis, some virtuous, sincerely and genuinely supportive French graphic artists piled up somewhere online a series of graphical expression of their sorrows and the will to help in some way. The outpouring of help from outside Japan that doesn't reach the ears of people here is staggering. It is a good thing. It is genuine. They have been raised from day one with manga and anime movies, exclusively from Japan. Japan is their Eldorado. They have monopolized as it started in the 19th century the descriptive discourse about Japan. Easy to do when your object of love is mostly voiceless, except in-house.
One of these illustrations I remember was showing one of this heavy, anti-aerodynamic parallelepiped robot with arms, legs and huge box like thoracic cage lifting a victim from some wrecked up place, or was it the roof of a building? Whatever, it was genuine, heart wrenching, and made me nauseous at the same time. There were no robots to save anyone in the core of "real life". The one that came into the picture in Fukushima are as "fun looking" as lawn mowers. They suck. Their articulated arms are not sexy. Their move hectic or seemingly clunky. Their scope of capacity limited. Their "drama factor" down to zero. But they deliver.
As Mr. Son says sometimes 10 minutes in the video, even elementary schoolers in Japan these day know what a "pressure vessel" is (atsuryokuyouki 圧力容器). The daily news and buzz is awash, nay, drowned onto cathartic volumes of technology speech, not limited to nuclear. Engineering is in, cool is dead.
Parallel to this, my single class of French for science and technologies was canceled due to the lack of students. There is irony in the fact that the very school where I am teaching a business interpretation class between Japanese and French is having this month a hoopla on "Earth Day". In the rich library of the school, you will find not a single magazine on science and technology, not a single book. Cheese, wine, fashion and gossip, what with the recent "soft philosophy" meek mix. Who cares? As the power to be explained recently, people are learning French for "recreational purpose". I for one am having recreational hell of a time and contentment reading the MIT Technology Review.
It is a shift toward more grown-up interest for technologies that is required, not a going back to the kawaii and hopeless Astroboys saviour of Planet Japan. Energy is in, but also logistics, food safety, radioactivity monitoring, decontamination, decommissioning to come. The list is unending. And this doesn't mean you can't love poetry and cooking at the same time, but why should this be argued? Technology talk massively happens in English, until you noticed that your German customers, as last year, start talking among them, in German, about their engineering issues. That is a big discovery, isn't it?All this to say that it is great time for grown-up interest in technology.
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