It may be part of the modern culture Clinton, but I should think that
Japanese culture has changed greatly to be so. Discarding
functioning goods would surely have been seen as dreadfully wasteful
50-100 years ago.
And the planet cannot afford such an attitude now, even if it ever could ...
Chris
At 15:54 -0500 28/09/02, clintonr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
This is so cultural -- it reminds me of a conversation I had a few years
back after Alex (from Camtronics, Atlanta) and I had lunch with the
then-National Service Manager in New York during training.
We were driving back to the office in Woodbury when Ichihashi-san said,
"Why do you still work on old cameras (OM-1's, -2's, et al)? They're
old and no good anymore!" I remembered an article I'd read about how in
Japan (at that time), after the New Year's bonus checks came in, you
could drive the streets, picking up perfectly good VCR's, TV's,
electronics and furniture of any description, left curbside as worthless
trash -- "last year's model" had been replaced with the newest, latest
thing, and there was no interest in "junk", so it was discarded. I
said, "Fixing broken things is part of who we are -- we don't like
waste!" He just shook his head. To him, I guess, new is good, old is
bad, I guess.
--
<|_:-)_|>
C M I Barker
Cambridgeshire, Great Britain.
?
+44 (0)7092 251126
mailto:imagopus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.threeshoes.co.uk
... a nascent photo library.
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