Japan’s reverence for the Sony Walkman is a deadweight
The burden is onerous when demographics suggest its days of disruptive verve are over
Nobody does nostalgia, geekiness and the worship of manufactured gadgetry quite like Japan. But even by those standards, installing a huge statue of a yellow Sony Walkman in the heart of Tokyo’s Ginza district is a triumph.
Its presence — pitched somewhere between trumpet-tooting jubilance and sombre consecration — marks the 40th anniversary of Sony’s revolutionary music player. An accompanying exhibition, curated with sniper-like accuracy to appeal to tech-sentimentalists like me, tracks the Walkman’s many iterations through the 1980s and 90s as it transformed the way the world thought about gadgets, music and Japanese industry.
The displays and their poetic legends are exquisitely evocative of an era before cassettes and mini-discs faded into obsolescence. They transport anyone above a certain age back to that first moment of sliding lightweight stereo headphones on to one’s head and suddenly gaining the power to soundtrack everyday life.
The whole thing, starting with that Walkman statue, is lovely but pernicious. For many reasons, Sony — and Japan in general — has a right to celebrate the Walkman and the 400m devices sold under that name.
When it first appeared in 1979, it wasn’t just a new gizmo, but an impudent encashment of two big ideas: that electronic entertainment could be portable and personalised and that Japan’s reputation for relentless manufacturing refinement would define global consumer markets.
At the time of the Walkman’s birth, industrialists already knew that Japanese cars, components, chemicals and speciality steels (to name a small selection of its manufactured goods) were shaping up to be formidable competitors in the global market. The Walkman, handily clipped over the waistband and marketed as a thrilling bite of the future, helped the general public grasp that fact.
But there is a problem with all the Walkman-worship. Nostalgia is a deadweight anywhere, but the burden is especially onerous in a society that is ageing as quickly as Japan’s, whose demographics suggest rather too convincingly that its days of disruptive verve are in the past.
The problem is that for both Japanese and outsiders, the Walkman represents the perfect encapsulation of a bygone halcyon era. It is a readily accessible metaphor for both Japanese industry’s greatest qualities, and for the various aspects of its competitive decline. Despite the product’s palpable absence from daily life in 2019, the Walkman statue sits there anchoring two views about Japan, which the 40th anniversary has only reanimated.
The first of these — and one that a particular type of investor repeats as a mantra — is the idea that the Walkman tells you all you need to know about Japan’s shortcomings. The brand’s reign, as the exhibition painfully reminds us, ended with the arrival of the iPod, digital music players, and the many brutal questions they raised. Why was Japan suddenly losing a technology battle? Why had it misread the market? And why was Sony — after all that painstaking overseas mergers and acquisition work to turn itself into a music company — suddenly watching Apple eat its lunch? The general theory here works on the flawed principle that if something is true for a product as iconic as the Walkman, it must be true for the rest of corporate Japan.
The second, no less flawed, view is that the Walkman is a kind of magnetic north in the quest for Japan’s lost pre-eminence — evidence that the nation, having once cracked the secret of global success in technology, would be bound to crack it again.
Seen through this prism, the issue is not that the nature of technology and the treasure chests of hardware manufacturing have fundamentally moved, but that Japan’s engineers just need to keep toiling away until they hit upon another classic.
Both of these interpretations remain seductive even though, with the most gentle of prodding, they quickly fall apart. The Walkman’s 40th birthday marks the perfect moment to refute them once and for all — and to declare this remarkable machine’s irrelevance as a means of understanding either the future of tech engineering or the world’s third-biggest economy.