American Influence on Japanese Industrial Design

Before the Second World War, Japanese industrial design was rooted in the national tradition of craftsmanship, and was heavily influenced by European schools of design. In the years after the war, however, it was American culture that exerted the greatest pull on the Japanese imagination. American styles, ways of living, production methods, and designs of all kinds were rapidly absorbed by an eager Japanese audience. In the half century that followed the war, Japanese culture took in, and transformed, many American influences. In the area of industrial design, this transformation produced a hybrid that is distinctively Japanese. Examples of this progressive japanization of American influence can be found in such products as consumer electronics and automobiles. These were two of the many areas in which Japanese production, planning, and design made the nation one of the principal economic powers in the world.

Japan has a long history of taking in elements from other cultures and making them its own. This did not mean that the old was merely replaced by the new. For example, when Buddhism was imported from China, "it left room for Shintoism," the existing religion, and the two coexist today" (Sparke 10). This pattern was repeated many times, as imported ideas passed through periods of "enthusiastic imitation," followed by creative "acceptance and rejection, adaptation and innovation," and ended by meshing the new with the traditional culture (Pekarik 79). Thus, th

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's bid for a national identity in world markets" (Sparke 43). MITI, in defining good design for Japanese industry, called for unique interactions between form and function, and designs that "enhanced the natural qualities of the material [and were] in touch with human nature" (qtd. in Pekarik 80). Encouraged to design new products with an individual stamp, designers became important participants in the industrial boom. Since the 1970s, consumers have been "setting their own criteria for acquiring products," (Hirano 61). Because this increasing discrimination was accompanied by an increase in purchasing power, Japanese design flourished. In the period from 1960 through 1980, Japanese design in home electronics equipment and automobiles acquired their distinctively Japanese qualities, and set world standards at the same time. Japanese industry made the decision to seize on the combination of advances in technology and relatively small-sized products that were easily exported. Cameras, watches, and electrical appliances were, therefore, central to the Japanese economic recovery. These products exhibited their increasing technological sophistication and, thereby, exerted greater appeal for consumers, with their growing portab

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