1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
4 Japanese Design in the 1950s
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The question of Zen's origin and its relationship to Buddhism has been taken up by many authorities and given different answers, depending upon the author's background and point of view. Yet everyone agrees that Zen--to use Alan Watts's expression--has a peculiar flavor and is unlike anything found in India. As Sir Charles Eliot says, "Zen, as far as our knowledge of its history goes, is a Far Eastern religion, and it is not easy to say anything definite about its connection with India. Even if the Lankâvatâra-sûtra expresses its main doctrines, it expresses them in a thoroughly Indian way, and the idea of not depending on books and letters is not at all Indian." No doubt there are parallels between certain aspects of Indian thought and Zen, but, interestingly enough, these are found not so much in Buddhist scriptures as in the Upanishads, with their strong mystic tone. As other authors, such as Professor Arthur Wright, have observed, Zen may be looked upon as "the reaction of a powerful tradition of Chinese thought against the verbosity, the scholasticism, the tedious logical demonstrations, of the Indian Buddhist texts." Since the Chinese tradition was a humanistic one which emphasized common sense rather than abstract philosophical speculation, Ch'an, with its directness, its simplicity, and its distrust of intellectual analysis, was very much in keeping with Chinese thought. In fact, during the Late Chou and Han periods, long before Dhyani Buddhism was introduced from India, the Chinese had already developed their own form of mysticism in Taoism. Christmas Humphreys, the president of the Buddhist Society of London, puts it aptly when he says that although Zen was not a Mahayana doctrine, Mahayana was a prelude to Zen's birth, "for it was the Chinese genius working on the raw material of Indian thought which, with contributions from Confucian and Taoist sources, produced, with Bodhidharma as midwife, the essentially Chinese School of Ch'an, or as the Japanese later called it, Zen Buddhism."
Among the new countries to embrace the concept of design in the 1950s was Japan.
Inevitably, due to the presence of American troops on Japanese soil at that tirne, the model of design it adopted originated in the United States. Thus many of the new technological goods among thern radios, tape-recorders, hi-fi equipment and cameras - that poured off Japanese assembly lines in these years bore the traces of the "Detroit" styling familiar to American markets.
Although styling was apparent in the new goods that Japan began to produce in these years it was not yet as important as the technological wizardry and low pricing which marked out Japanese products from their competitors'.
For the most part companies such as Sharp, National Panasonic, Canon, Pentax, Toyota and others considered "design" as an afterthought rather than an essential component of the manufacturing and marketing processes. However, the Sony Corporation saw the benefits of "good design", and engaged an in-house design team which worked closely with its engineers on the forms of its products tape·recorders, transistor radios, and television sets among them. From the start, though, the Japanese industrial designer was seen as an anonymous team member rathert han the "super-star" that he had become in America.
In the area of automotive production the Honda company stood out as a firm which laid emphasis upon the role of design. Towards the end of the decade it launched its "Super-Cub" motorbike, a small specimen of two-wheeled transport intended to penetrate the American market-place and exist as a shopper alongside the larger bikes associated with film idols such as Marlon Brando.
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