Technological things, that Germans and Japanese would get real excited about.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?
The Germans are clear about what they do - cars and machine tools; the Japanese are clear about what they do - electronics; the Chinese are clear about what they do - they're the workshop of the world.
Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.
In the Eighties, Japanese fashion designers brought a new type of creativity; they brought something Europe didn't have. There was a bit of a shock effect, but it probably helped the Europeans wake up to a new value.
Tokyo in the late 1960s seemed to be like one of the futures that science fiction presents. Here was the proto- super-technology of the future, electronically, robotically, blahblahblah, intercut with traditional Japanese cultural patterns, Shinto patterns.
We'll look at the japanese launch as a model and aspire to have things go as well as they did over there.
They ask questions like 'do you believe in aliens' and those types of things. They were really interested in aliens, and that was really something that the Japanese have an interest in, and they are also very big fans of romances.
Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.
With Germany conquered, the Kremlin checkmated, Japan converted, it became easier - safer - to peek around looking for someone to fear... and maybe do something about. Ideally, somebody far away, from a country about which almost nothing was known.