Josh blog 3

I have found a fair number of interesting things and discovered some technologies I did not know existed since my last post. I have again travelled to Akihabara among other places and made yet new discoveries. For example, an arcade piano rhythm game that can sense how far your hand is from the keyboard in order to accommodate an extra dimension of movement into the game. This is interesting to me because, in the past I solely believed and found that Japan pursued the advancement of technology as a side effect of their collectivism in that it helped the greater good. A game like this however, while very fun and interesting, is not helping the greater good in any way and would be quite the costly feat of engineering to accomplish. Why then does such a game exist? The answer is in profits, particularly among hikikomori or NEETs as they are more commonly known as. Any arcade I have gone to in the Tokyo area and particularly in the more otaku type places like Akihabara have been filled with people who are extraordinarily good at these games and will play them for hours leveling up their characters and spending hundreds of dollars on them. Thus, I am revising my original point in that the advancement of technology in Japan is split into 2 categories. The first is that collectivism drives the advancement of everyday technology such as phones and accessibility devices because it will benefit the greater good even if it does not benefit the actual creator. The second category is the advancement of gaming technology for the purpose of profit in order to target the growing NEET population and force them to venture outside of their houses in order to get and play these exciting new games.

Another rather interesting piece of low-tech technology that I found out about during my homestay is children’s backpacks in Japan. In western society, children’s backpacks are meant to look cute and not last very long. The companies will say this is to keep costs down because the backpacks are cheap for the consumers and then can size up as the children reach higher grades in school. In reality, it is just another form of planned obsolescence meant to keep parents spending unnecessary money so that artificial demand is created. In Japan however, the backpacks are purely functional. They are blocky and sturdy meant to last and are actually quite heavy (about 20lbs) which helps the children be able to carry heavier backpacks when they get to higher grades and have to carry heavy textbooks. In summary, there is a lot more thought that goes into every type of Japanese technology and usually the technology is built to last rather than being designed to fail.