A Mixed Economy Japanese Style: Commerce (Part Two)

Contents so far

A Mixed Economy Japanese Style: Housing

A Mixed Economy Japanese Style: Commerce (Part One)

So far we have seen a brief look at housing and a glimpse at commerce with a focus on the cement factory and environmental matters. All of this has been within a very specific geographic area defined by my own short walk from the HMiL residence to Daia Department Store, a timeline of not more than twenty minutes.





The maps above mark my walk in the blue line. The top map is the beginning of my journey and where the blue line ends in the third map is Daia Department Store. Lets put this all in context with the satellite shot of Tokyo Prefecture as a whole:

What you are looking at in the satellite shot, in the context of this article, is the world's largest metropolitan economy with a GDP of US$1.479 trillion (as of 2008). The photograph is also showing you the world's most populous metropolitan area with a population measuring up to 39 million people (the UK in total has 56 million people). In order to keep all of this going in a polite and civilised manner with the traffic flowing, pollution under control, crime very low and the streets extremely clean there has to be proper management of the system both as a built environment structure and as a social organism.


The Tokyo Metropolitan government administers the twenty-three special wards of Tokyo, each governed as a city, that cover the area that was the city of Tokyo as well as 39 municipalities in the western part of the prefecture and the two outlying island chains.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo

All waste disposal is recycled, the pragmatic Japanese would consider anything else as a reckless waste of resources. There are regular domestic and commercial collections with days designated for the collection of metals, plastics, combustable general rubbish, paper and anything that does not fit those categories. Every home and business is issued with a chart which provides the cycle of collection and everyone knows the designated collection point for your waste. A net is provided at the collection point to keep the crows (Tokyo's version of the London fox problem) from spreading the rubbish about.

People, generally, simply wouldn't think of not sorting their rubbish and putting it out in the right order on the right day. That would be to deny the efficiency of the recycling system and be a negative influence on the economy, besides, polite Japanese families don't behave like that anyway.


Does it all work? Well the picture above is of a main arterial road, a rough equivalent of the notorious Holloway Road, and can you see the difference?


Here is a junction on the same arterial road and do click on either of these pictures, look at them in the larger format and then imagine what a metropolitan area with up to 39 million people would look like in the U.K. under our sort of management!

This is some of the structural background which lies behind all I have been showing you in this small series of articles on the Japanese mixed economy. The walk and all it contains is possible because the macro management is in place and that management is delivered to a community which sees both the sense and the benefit in following the "plan". Why would a Japanese father or a Japanese mother want to bring their children up in filth and squalor?

Perhaps now you know why when I sit on a train in my own country and look at the discarded fast food containers, dirty floors and ripped seats whilst hearing people shouting down their phones, I feel utterly ashamed on seeing a Japanese person sitting quietly opposite me. They are far too polite to comment and besides, they are in a foreign country where the people simply are not Japanese! What do you expect?


So as I walk back from Daia I find in amongst the housing all sorts of commercial activities taking place. The photo above is of a small textile design factory I think. Now that I have really laboured the point about rubbish and cleanliness you should immediately see this photograph in that context.


A quick peek through the entrance of the factory shows the worker's shoes lined up neatly where they have taken them off and put on their working shoes. This is such a simple picture but when you begin to consider the implications of the image you can see the detail that is being followed through at every level.


At the side of the factory is what is probably a storage area. the entrance to this is made from three old doors hinged together; a pragmatic and cost efficient recycling of materials. This is where recycling, commerce and art meet, this could well be an installation in the Tate! Diagonally across the road from this textile factory is an older style operation, something to do with carpentry I think.


This is just a large warehouse structure and you can see a block of flats off to the left of the image. Indeed, there are residential homes all the way up this short street in between the businesses, or, there are businesses in between the residential homes! This mixed economy is seamless.


The photographs I have been showing you in this small series on the mixed economy are all in sequence of my actual journey. I didn't see the need to alter the order (hey, perhaps I am becoming Japanese!!!) and so in reality the "distance" between each photo ranges between a few seconds to a couple of minutes at most. The image above shows a sign writer, perhaps a less industrial and more artisan element in the make up but once more I am trying to illustrate how the "mix" is actually borderless at all levels.

You will immediately observe that the frontage is in English. This is because the use of English in signs and slogans is seen to be very cosmopolitan and reflects a cultural value. Obviously therefore, you need a sign-writer who has mastery of script and font in this form.


Almost opposite this artisan trade we have the entrance lobby of a rather plush set of appartments. You will note that the tree carries a notice informing people of various important bits of information including where along the road it is appropriate to smoke!

Obviously, in such places there is good provision for the smoker. You do not get a hopelessly inadequate tin tacked onto a wall for cigarette buts, no, you have a proper stand, usually with an awing of some sort and a large sized purpose designed bin, regularly cleaned, for the smoker.

Yes it is better to organise smoking in specific places but that doesn't mean that you treat the smoker disrespectfully as some sort of 21st century leper.


Just a little further I found a house, a very traditional house with an immaculate traditional garden. Once again the image tells us a lot more than would appear on first glance. A connoisseur of detail would pick this up but he would have to be good, very good, to read it from a photograph. However the point is really important in terms of understanding something about the Japanese psyche that is radically different to our own. As ever, pragmatism is the key!


As you can see the garden takes the traditional use of stone and plant, it is open and spacious, this is not the home of a working class family. This is the place where the aesthetic plays a part in Japanese life. This Japanese sense of the aesthetic is extremely powerful as I hope to illustrate in my forthcoming article on the Japanese department store and why it is possible to pay up to £300 for a melon. However that will come later!

If you go back to the first picture then the lesson in spotting detail is always to look for either what is an anomaly or to look for what is not there. The second skill is obviously the harder but our challenge in the first picture is spotting what is present and that means correctly identifying it.

The first give away is the colour differential. This is anomalous. What we have is a yellow fence and closer inspection by the skilled eye will conclude that it is in fact a plastic sheet replicating bamboo fencing. This is important because it demonstrates that the Japanese aesthetic is much more flexible in respect of materials, there is not a prejudice against plastic or the 'modern'. What we are considering here is the different construction of mix which allows for a different understanding of what works in context.

In terms of our look at the mixed economy we can see that the placing of commercial, industrial and residential in the same space does not effect the understanding of the aesthetic or conflict in terms of context. This is a very Japanese quality of psyche.


As we continue down the road a bit we come to a junction and there on the corner is the aesthetic of the traditional Japanese cake shop. Look at the space, consider the design, we are five minutes walk from the cement factory and in between is all that I have been describing.


A side view into the cake shop reveals this aesthetic in all of its glory. This is a commercial space in a city where space is at a premium. Imagine for a moment that this was an American sales oriented selling space. An American entrepreneur would look at this and think the shop was just being fitted out:

"My god there is hardly any product on view, no point of sales materials, no promotional or marketing going on, there are empty spaces everywhere. This is a commercial disaster zone!"

What we clearly have here is the minimalism Japanese art has been famous for; the zen appreciation of the moment, the grace and beauty of the small movement. This is a Japanese high quality cake shop and I can assure you that what you are looking at is the complete lack of willingness or ability to compromise on those Japanese standards. When the American style business entrepreneur looks at this selling space they see lost opportunity, when the Japanese look at this selling space they see traditional quality.


In the photo above we see the view down the street taken from next to the side view of the cake shop. As you can see, there are residential houses and appartments all along. If we just glance to the right from this position we see the Jeweler.

This small high quality jeweler is almost opposite the side window view of the cake shop. The building he is in is mostly residential appartments. In this image we can see the minimialism of the cake shop design reflected in this shop front, the surface of the building and the street furniture. But just down the way from this very high quality jeweler and high quality cake shop, in fact just after the point where I am standing in the street view above, wait for it, yes, we have the meat packing factory!


Not more than forty yards down from the cake shop, just past a few houses there is a meat packing factory which takes truck loads of animal flesh and turns it into all sorts of packaged and processed products.


Everything is clean, neat and very, very tidy. The dust cart with the broom probably comes twice a day to deal with the rubbish. And inconvenience to local people is kept to an absolute minimum if any at all.



Amazingly considering the occupation, the staff unloading the lorries are resplendent in a full array of white protective clothing that seems impervious to blood stains (when I first saw this place I thought it might be a secret biological weapon research plant!). Once more I would ask the reader to picture the image of a British worker in a similar occupation. The comparison defines the Japanese demands for hygiene.

And even if you live next door to the meat packing factory, just down the way from the cake shop and a short walk to the cement factory, you still grow your sharon fruit tree through your front porch so you can enjoy its tasty bounty during your lunch break at the light engineering plant around the corner.


And so now we are almost home, just cross the road and wander down yet another short street where houses are crowbarred into spaces we wouldn't think possible and our journey ends.

What you have seen is really just the faintest scratch of the surface, the experience here on the ground is one of wonder and amazement. The implications in terms of planing, building construction, social management, service provision and everything else that goes into not just building a city but creating a social model leave me ever more saddened about the opportunities we miss in our culture.

Is there any less health and safety regulation here than there? Absolutely not, in fact there is probably more here. Is there any less bureaucracy here than there is there? Most certainly not, bureaucracy here is enormous and ever present. So what is the difference then? Well I would suggest it is all about attitude and how that attitude is shared across the community. In Japan getting the job done is seen as the obligation, being polite and efficient is seen as the duty and being Japanese is seen as the shared value.

This year we delivered in London a very large project involving three London councils, 19 primary schools, one art gallery, two libraries and over 600 cardboard DOGS. The brief for the Tower Hamlets Borough events team was to collect two lots of crated DOG sculptures and store them safely for six weeks. Then they had to deliver these crated DOGS to the event site. A very simple logistical exercise.

We wasted four full working days of our time (there are two of us so that is 64 man hours lost) because of their collection, storage and delivery of these items. Because in the first collection they were patently incompetent beyond belief we abandoned the second collection and consequently had to reduce the size of the event. On delivery to the site the DOG sculptures were so extensively damaged the artist had to spend two full working days repairing them.

This is only a very short description of the managerial incompetence I put before the events team manger in a meeting one month ago. An apology? No. Any sense that they had done anything wrong? No. Any sense that things would change or there would be managerial lessons learnt? No, the manager said, "I think we shall just keep this in-house".

Imagine these clowns trying to run Tokyo!


Footnote:
In 1990 the police identified over 2.2 million Penal Code violations. Two types of violations—larceny (65.1 percent of total violations) and negligent homicide or injury as a result of accidents (26.2%)—accounted for over 90 percent of criminal offenses in Japan.

In 1989 Japan experienced 1.3 robberies per 100,000 population, compared with 48.6 for West Germany, 65.8 for Great Britain, and 233.0 for the United States; and it experienced 1.1 murder per 100,000 population, compared with 3.9 for West Germany, 1.03 for England and Wales, and 8.7 for the United States that same year.

Japanese authorities also solve a high percentage of robbery cases (75.9%, compared with 43.8% for West Germany, 26.5% for Britain, and 26.0% for the United States) and homicide cases (95.9% , compared with 94.4% for Germany, 78.0% for Britain, and 68.3% for the United States)

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Japan