Mottainai!

Driving home last night, dazzled by all the bright lights, I was reminded of something Alex Kerr mentioned in his excellent book ‘Dogs & Demons’, which I’m just going to have to paraphrase - he mentioned that in Shanghai only the Japanese companies have blazing neon signs on their office buildings. Everyone else thinks its in poor taste, while in Japan, it shows how successful your company is.

I also thought about the power consumption this must take, and this led me to the fact that vending machines run all night most of the time with their lights a-flashing.

I mused on how the Japanese Government might one day end up turning off electricity in whole areas that went unoccupied at night, just to cut down on the wasteful use of all these whiz bang light displays.

Then I read in the New York Times today that I’m wrong in my observations -

“Energy conservation is almost an obsession here among government, companies, regular citizens, everyone.” (…said Hitoshi Ikuma, a specialist in energy issues at the Japan Research Institute.)

What gets more disturbing - as that last blip was just the meeting of two contradictory opinions, mine and Mr.Ikuma’s - is this :

Japan is the most energy-efficient developed country on earth, according to most specialists, who say it is much better prepared than the United States to prosper in an era of higher global energy prices… Japan tops most global comparisons of energy efficiency in wealthy nations. Its population and economy are each about 40 percent as large as that of the United States, yet in 2004 it consumed less than a quarter as much energy as America did, according to the International Energy Agency, which is based in Paris.

Woah. Just think how much better that would be without those a-cursed vendies…

Mottainnai….. indeed.

Monday, January 8th, 2007 Japan, Japanese Culture, Japanese News Trackback URL for this entry