Just a quick heads up that I’m in the BBC4 audio documentary The Failure of the Future. Conceived and directed by the writer-photographer Johny Pitts, the series focuses on the Western world’s fever-dreams of Japan in the Eighties. You can listen to the episode, “The Economic Dreamland,” right on the BBC website.
The Eighties was a time when Japan felt “futurologically sexy,” in the words of William Gibson. That all came crashing to a halt with the popping of the nation’s economic bubble in 1990, an eerie harbinger of the economic crisis that would ensnare Western societies almost two decades hence. As Japan sank into the first of two decades of stagnation, most foreign pundits wrote the country off as a failed utopia. But as Johny and I discuss, this is precisely where things started getting interesting.
Strange things were afoot in the shadows of its cities. Young folk navigated the darkness of a post-industrial society by fashioning new tools out of tech the grownups had abandoned – or never fully understood in the first place. Unwitting innovators, their experiments paved the way for the plugged-in, socially-mediated lives we all live today. It seems Japan really did get to the future first, in ways both enviable and not – and might just have some answers for all of us navigating similarly apocalyptic-seeming societies today.
The whole episode, which also features my Japanology Plus senpai Peter Barakan, Leslie Downer, and Jon Gertner, is great. But if you want to jump to my bit, it starts at 21:45 in. And if you enjoy this, you’re going to absolutely love the book I wrote on this very same topic. Perhaps you’ve heard of it!
Congratulations. Looking forward to listening. The name Peter Barakan takes me back. I had the great pleasure of working with him in the mid 1990s.