C-Net’s got an awkwardly-titled multi-day feature called, “Japan’s Sun Rises Again,” focusing on the reemergence of Japan’s consumer electronics business as they start learning to export their “culture of cool.” Or maybe it’s talking about China and they just stole Japan’s sun or something.
Anyway, it’s pretty high-level but interesting stuff, and while I don’t disagree with this idea that Japan’s best bet is to impress the rest of the world with their fancy gadgetry, I am just a little bit baffled by why this is a supposedly new phenomenon. Hasn’t Japan’s electronics been slicker and smaller for about the last 30 years or so? To me, if anything, it’s that ‘cool’ is a more important factor for any electronics company these days, in Japan, Korea, America, or wherever. And that’s mostly a good thing, especially if we hold all these companies to the standard that ‘cool’ also means ‘really simple, well-integrated design.’ That’s what cool means now, right?
