– Do you like Japan?
[It’s difficult to say if I like it or hate it, but I think it’s an unusual country. For example, kanji and hiragana and katakana (1). We have three kinds of characters. Even for simple magazines. We can start either from the left or from the right, and in newspapers we even have it top-down. I think we should standardize it, already. I want to make things simple. Simplify, simplify. Besides, in the West it’s always from the left, and anything in Arabic characters reads from the right. But in Japanese, you can write things top-down and still start from the left (2). I wouldn’t get it, if I was a foreigner. I want to make it simpler, much simpler. Both the characters and the sentences.]

– But, with hiragana and katakana and kanji, many subtle nuances can be brought out, don’t you agree?
[Nah, I don’t go for that sort of thing. I’d like a simple global standard. For magazines, too, I think the western style, opening on the right, is based on human engineering. There are more right-handed people, so they’d open things on the right and flip through them that way. Reading words horizontally is less tiring, too; I think it’s the proper path for the eye. Originally, Japanese went top-down but these days, it’d be good to standardize the horizontal system, wouldn’t it? And open on the right. And then, our cars drive on the left. Here too, if you apply human engineering, there are overwhelmingly more right-handers, so it should be better to do the gear changing with the right hand. It doesn’t matter so much with automatics, but in a manual one, it’s better to use your dominant hand. This is how I think : Make everything simpler. Global standards and universal designs. Standardize the world standards. I mean, standardize to either centimetres or inches. Inch sizes and centimetre sizes might seem like a subtle distinction, but it really is a different size. I think there should be a world standard for voltage, too.]

– Doing so would certainly be logical, and probably much more convenient.
[So anyway, I think Japan’s a terribly unique country. Even on a worldwide scale. Like how we’ve got all these foreign military bases here, but everyone thinks that’s normal. However you look at it, the Self-Defence Force(3) is an army, but it isn’t recognized as an army. I think it would be okay to call it an army, since it is one. Oh, and we don’t have many patriotic people, do we?]

– tetsu-san, are you patriotic yourself?
[Me? I’m not (laughs). I don’t think of it as a problem. To put it bluntly, I don’t think anyone does. Not loving your own country. Even during the soccer world cup, there were incredibly many cheers for Korea. I don’t think Japan should go that far. I think that’s the reason Japan’s representatives couldn’t win against Korea.]

– It could perhaps be that we have a gentle national character. We have a deep rooted reverence for modesty. Something like gracefully accepting poverty.
[Hmm. Are those ideas the natural state of the Japanese? Is that Bushidou(4)? Is it really? I think that all that modesty was planted later into education about the Second World War. And so the nature of the Japanese probably isn’t much to scream about. The people who are getting old now, they grew up in an era where they had nothing, they learned to treasure what they had by enduring that era, but are we mistaking that way of thinking for a Japanese tradition, I wonder? Am I wrong?]

– Then, you don’t identify with a mentality like the one I mentioned?
[I just saw “The Last Samurai” and I couldn’t identify with it at all. I thought that my way of thinking was nothing like the typical Japanese. From the beginning, when I saw the TV advertisements that said something like “He was touched by Bushidou, he wept,” it occurred to me that we can only know as much about the ancient samurai as we were taught. Besides, during that era, most of the Japanese were peasants.]

– So, can you describe a time when you felt glad to be Japanese?
[Whenever I eat Japanese food. After all, food from other countries has such strong flavour, doesn’t it? And in America, they overcook their meat, too. The Japanese have a delicate palate, they say, and so I think that means we have a highly developed sense of taste. And so, we get to eat all kinds of delicious food. You know, since I do this kind of work, I get to travel to all sorts of areas and sample the local delicacies, but in the end I think Tokyo’s food is the tastiest. Of course, in rural areas, the ingredients might be fresher, but I think that when it comes to the skill of the cook, the more skillful people are found in Tokyo. The rural people take it easy. Just cause they’ve got the freshest materials, right? It’s the same sort of thing, say, with Thai cuisine made in Japan. When you go to Thailand, Thai food doesn’t taste as good (laughs). The Thai food you can get in Tokyo is the best. It’s made to suit Japanese tastes, too.]

– That’s certainly true. You could argue that it isn’t really Thai food anymore.
[Right. It’s like how curry originally comes from India, but Japanese-style curry tastes better because it’s been adapted for Japanese taste. Since I’m Japanese, I prefer ours.]

– Listening to you speak so far, I thought you needed to take a little bit more pride in being Japanese, since you pointed out how much you’re apart from your countrymen, but you mentioned universal designs and global standards, which brings to mind an image of a borderless nation. This might be something you’re opposed to discussing, but tetsu-san, do you keep yourself highly aware of how this nation is going?
[Eh, opposed? Well, in the end, I want this to become a country I can love. How can I come to love it? That’s hard to answer. A presidential system would be better, wouldn’t it? Where the people decide in a presidential election. So, we’d have many more chances to pass judgement on how the president is doing, and that would be good, wouldn’t it?(5)]

– Interviewer : Kikuchi Keisuke
Translated by Natalie Arnold

1. These are the three different kinds of characters used in written Japanese. You have to know all three to be fluent. There are 48 base hiragana and 48 base katakana, which are phonetic symbols, and several thousand kanji, which are ideograms adapted from written Chinese. Go back.

2. Traditionally, Japanese was written top-down with the first column on the right side of the page, and reading would progress toward the left. Also, I think it is worth mentioning that this entire book is printed western style, with text written horizontally and reading from left to right. It is, of course, still written in Japanese.Go back.

3. After the end of World War II, one of the sanctions on Japan was that it may not maintain a military force. However, the Self-Defence Force was established as a basic defence unit, strictly to preserve the country’s independence and safety. It is truly minuscule compared to the military found in other countries.Go back.

4. Bushidou, usually translated as the way of the samurai, was the unwritten code of honour by which the samurai were supposed to abide. It included the idea that the warrior should be utterly devoted to his lord, even to the point of committing suicide if his lord was killed. Go back.

5. While Japan has had a democratic system with elected representatives since the post-war period, it functions quite differently than Western democracies. In Japan, the people can elect representatives for their local prefecture, affiliated to a political party. It is then these representatives who elect the Prime Minister. There is still an Emperor, but he is now a symbol rather than an important political figure. So, the national leader is not directly decided by the people. Also, it is worth noting that the same political party has been in power since 1958.Go back.