Ryan Gander: The Idea of Japan

I'm Ryan Gander.

I work with ideas and concepts

and I try to reconvey them in a visual language.

Signs, symbols, meanings that aren't always obvious.

Conceptual art often divides people, but it's meant to make you think.

And there's one place in particular where people always seem to

try to understand what I do...

..and that's Japan.

The Japanese have a super-developed visual culture,

a highly sophisticated take on even simple imagery.

'I go there a lot and it's a constant source of inspiration.'

So this is it, we're in the eye of the storm.

My work is fuelled by visual references -

pointers that might one day become ideas for artworks -

and so many of them are Japanese.

Things that don't always mean what they seem,

much more than just what they are.

Japan is dense with imagery that speaks of order and novelty,

respect and innovation -

ideas from a deep past that look to the future.

The ancient icons of the geisha, samurai and even the cherry blossom

embody old ideas, but they have more to reveal.

So I want to explore what images like these mean to us

and to the Japanese themselves.

Every country has its defining imagery,

but ours doesn't change much -

the White Cliffs of Dover have always been the stiff upper lip

made of chalk. But in Japan, symbolism is so vibrant it mutates,

and I think it's because the Japanese have

a special relationship with time.

When I think about history and tradition

from a British perspective,

I think about Dad's Army, the Empire,

people moaning about how great it was in the good old days.

And when I come to Japan, I think about how it informs society,

how people use it as a sort of toolkit and learn from it

and use parts of their history to help them live their lives

in an optimistic and really functional, pragmatic way.

But that can leave you with a present tense

that's tricky to pin down -

a unique, elusive mix of past and future.

But it's up for reinvention.

This is the Shinto shrine at Dazaifu in southwestern Japan.

And this is Arata-chan,

a character that I designed

when I created a new spring holiday festival for the shrine's owners.

So, artworks don't always have to be physical objects -

they can be stories or they can be moments.

And every year for the last five years,

Dazaifu has celebrated a national holiday that's called New New Day.

New New Day was designed to encourage people

to clean up after themselves.

Famously, the architect Le Corbusier,

who was an infamous modernist,

had a saying that was "by law, all buildings should be white".

So Arata-chan is based on a sort of collision

of a Gander manga character and Le Corbusier.

He's got Le Corbusier's glasses.

Whoever's in here must be so warm!

Got Le Corbusier's glasses and he's got a white paintbrush

and a tin of white paint.

He makes things clean,

and not cleaning as in making things white and tidying up,

but it's to do with a bigger picture of cleanliness.

Arata-chan embodies symbolism.

Everything about him I've tried to think out as using visual language

to communicate a series of ideas.

And what's really interesting is that's my job,

it's sort of like my trade, but that doesn't happen a lot

in the UK in day-to-day culture,

but it happens all the time in this country.

A lot of these images have something in common and that's the fact that

we in the West probably read them differently to someone Japanese.

Take the famous Scramble Crossing in Shibuya, Tokyo.

In all media all over the world,

images from here symbolise the intensity of modern urban living.

Tokyo defines tightly packed.

In the centre itself, there's 13 million people,

and including all the outer boroughs,

it's now pushing 40 million.

No other country has a bigger city than Tokyo and,

because Tokyo is a First-World capital,

it seems to sound a warning to the world.

But the Japanese see it differently.

This is the quiet before...

..the storm. Now this is the storm.

It seems as if there's just chaos, confusion and mayhem here,

but if you peel back the layers a little bit

and you look under the surface,

it's all really harmonious and it all works as one entity together.

It's as if there's a sort of order that comes out of the chaos of it.

So this is it, we're in the eye of the storm,

surrounded by total confusion.

But still everyone's really tolerant.

There's no arguments,

there's a few collisions and a few people running backwards

from their point of no return,

but everyone's still very respectful.

The Japanese pretty much invented the image of the modern mega-city,

but there's an order in what looks like disorder.

Apparent chaos is actually industry.

BELL CHIMES

Civilised behaviour, not angry commuters,

and I've got a suspicion where this comes from.

Buddhism came from China and overlaid pre-existing beliefs

known as Shinto, the way of the gods.

Most people go to shrines, but the emphasis is on practice, not faith,

doing physical things that show that they

observe the important distinctions that let them get on

with harmonious life as part of a group.

At the entrance to every Shinto shrine

is some variation on this symbol - the red torii gate.

It's a symbol you walk through,

a line between the sacred world and the secular,

between order and disorder,

and the shrine is a public space that's open to all.

Shinto's an animist faith, so things like rocks and trees and water,

mountains, landscapes, they all are part of this

very symbolic picture that makes up the Shinto way of life.

And those objects and those things, they have a kami inside them,

and kami is kind of an inner spirit of the object.

So the shrine itself is kind of like a symbolic spiritual power station.

Crowds of the faithful come to feel the force, to touch, to connect.

And Shinto prioritises cleanliness, both real and symbolic.

Here in the grounds of the shrine,

but before we enter the main shrine building, where you go to pray,

there's a sort of purification ceremony that takes place,

and it's a really important stage of the whole process of going to pray.

It prepares you...

..and sort of stills your mind

before you go into the main building.

Head priest Masako is ready to help me with a procedure

that looks complicated, especially the last part.

What's the significance of the part at the end,

where you tip this ladle and the water runs down the handle?

It seems to me that it wouldn't clean you much at all,

it's a very symbolic thing.

You do it to believe that you feel cleaner, would you say that's true?

Can you explain to me what kannagara is?

Cleanliness is godliness.

The concept of kannagara demands citizens take responsibility

for their space, which here is often shared.

Cleaning means belonging and it means membership,

so beautiful tools help the user find pleasure in chores.

As ever in Japan, there's symbolic hidden meaning everywhere.

These are called tenugui, and it's a sort of household cloth

that maybe in other countries would be disposable,

but here in Japan they're elevated to the status of art.

Each of these is a unique print.

They're screen printed and they're all incredibly beautiful

and there's thousands of different designs.

They're full of sort of a metaphor, symbolic meaning in the imagery,

but also there's a function to them, they're a utility thing,

which sort of embodies that design for Shinto living.

There's something about the economy of them,

of keeping them and caring for them.

Even though this thing is for cleaning other things,

you would clean the thing itself and re-use the thing itself.

So there's a nice sort of economy of recycling and an economy of re-use

which is really Japanese.

When you're here, it's easy to see how kannagara,

the way of the community-minded Shinto gods,

promotes a sense of wellbeing and of order.

In Britain, in London during the Olympics,

the British media were really intrigued to see Japanese spectators

at the end of all games in the stadiums coming together

and cleaning up after everybody else.

These primary school pupils aren't cleaning for the camera -

tidying is on the timetable, and we had just 20 minutes

to film it between lunch and the start of maths.

It seems like because this happens every day,

it's such an everyday occurrence, that there's no instruction.

All these little kids know exactly what to do.

There's a nice sort of sustainability,

sort of an ecosystem to it, as well.

All these kids are essentially just looking after themselves.

From the cradle, the Japanese learn to take care of their surroundings,

and Shinto helps them see themselves

as part of the natural environment...

..which demands care and attention in the here and now,

rather than waiting for reward in the afterlife.

Being here today and seeing all these kids working together

as one entity for one single cause, I've never seen anything like it.

It's really intriguing and it makes me think that we probably have a lot

that we could learn from this in the UK.

And I think when I get home and I see some fool in the car

in front of me throwing a chocolate wrapper out the window,

it's going to make that prospect even more infuriating.

It's been said that there's two kinds of society -

those where people jaywalk

and those where they wait for the green symbol,

even if there's no traffic.

Here, people respect the rules that oil society

and they're shocked by anyone who breaks them.

This mind-set makes Japan

one of the least crime-ridden societies on Earth...

..which is probably why not many thrillers

are set in Japanese police stations.

To the civically-minded Japanese, crime is anti-social,

and therefore is disgraceful, as well.

Most Japanese wouldn't think twice about informing on a criminal.

And for those that do try their luck,

supposedly there's a 99% detection rate.

Of course, there is crime here.

It's a patriarchal society and domestic violence against women

often goes unreported.

But that isn't exclusive to Japan.

The elephant in the room is the yakuza,

and the yakuza are essentially Japanese gangsters.

It's an organised crime network.

And they're not a new thing, they've been around for a long, long time.

What's interesting to me about the yakuza is the way that they have

this sort of semi-legitimate status in society.

They've been known to take part in religious processions and help

save earthquake victims in the disasters and things like that.

They are part of the fabric and the make-up of society.

But I also think they're probably some sort of visual signifier

that's quite important for the law-abiding citizens to see.

They work like a visual scapegoat and, this being Japan,

they have a dense symbolism all of their own,

which is a celebration of their nonconformity.

The back the yakuza turn on society they cover in tattoos -

innocent images from history and folklore transformed in meaning

when they're inked onto the skin.

Playing with this idea a few years ago,

I designed a tattoo for a friend in Tokyo.

Cartoon stars, playful enough in the West,

inked into his back become something more illicit.

The moment the needle touched his skin,

my friend Daisuke went from respectable businessman

and art collector to outsider.

Well, at least when he didn't have his shirt on.

It feels very strange, being with a man who is taking his top off

in a twin room. LAUGHTER

-Can I touch it?

-Yeah.

You've got lots of tattoos. How many do you have?

-Five.

-And each one is by a different artist?

Yes. My tattoo collection is contemporary art.

Many of my friends are young artists.

Some of them are very upcoming.

This is not just a tattoo, it's like a commissioned work for me.

When I come to Japan, one of the things

that I look forward to the most is going to the hot spring,

and I know that you're not allowed to have a tattoo in the hot spring.

Does that mean you can't go to an onsen at all?

In Japan, it's very difficult to enjoy onsen, public baths,

sport gym, public beach too.

In Japan, the tattoo was illegal for a long time.

Conservative people, older generation, still misunderstand.

So the tattoo is a symbol of mafia.

-Yakuza, a very dirty part of Japan.

-Mm-hm.

As a salaryman in society,

-you're very much an insider and one of the collective.

-Mm.

But under your clothes you're kind of like an outsider,

-but it's a secret.

-Mm.

So you've had to give up quite a lot...

-Yeah.

-..from your life.

-There's things now that you can't do because of your collection.

-Yeah.

These aren't just tattoos, they're taboos,

and it's the medium that is the message.

Tattoos themselves signify transgression, whatever the image.

I don't get a message about criminality,

but then I'm not Japanese.

The studio of Yokohama's master tattooist Yoshihito Nakano,

known by the title Horiyoshi III.

He isn't a yakuza, though over his 50-year career

he must have inked a few.

NEEDLE BUZZES

Yoshi's client today isn't a gangster,

it's his son, Kazuyoshi, also a master needle artist.

Both men are happy to bare designs they can't display outdoors

in daylight because they're proud of their art

and they want to change public opinion.

The designs are dignified and the work is clearly skilled.

So why do they cause fear and loathing?

There's some kind of tradition that you follow.

That tradition must also be in the symbolism.

I think of you as a sort of bridge between the past and the future.

Do you have an empathy with that idea?

Horiyoshi has spent a lifetime waiting for his art to be accepted

and still can't see a future where it might be.

But all situations, good and bad, will eventually change,

according to Anicca, the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence,

represented by this circular symbol.

Japanese feelings about the yakuza may not be about to change

but maybe tattoos could become acceptable.

In Japan, signs and their meanings can shift over time.

That's exactly what's happened to

the most powerful Japanese symbol of all -

the geisha, a living embodiment of old Japan.

Today, it's Kyoto that's the main centre of geisha culture.

Two hours and 18 minutes exactly from Tokyo by bullet train.

Never more, never less.

These living relics are only normally seen

by the wealthy and powerful,

But once a year the public queue up just to be near them

and to be served tea.

The geisha tell their story to the people

and the people hang on every word.

To the Westerner, a geisha symbolises the past...

..enigmatic confidantes and maybe even courtesans.

But what are they now to the Japanese?

Where do they fit into modern life?

Nasuzu is a geiko, as geisha in Kyoto are known.

What's the differences between the work that you would have done

in ancient times and the work you do now?

What is it the men who employ you are looking for

that they can't find at home or at work in offices or in a boardroom?

Are you a sort of ancient Japanese agony aunt?

It's really interesting when you have an idea about a symbol

or an object and signifying what you think it will mean

and then you're confronted with it in reality

and the everyday reality of it is not what you expect at all.

For me, the geisha feels a bit like a living lucky object in the present

but in the place where the future's being written -

the boardroom and the business meeting.

Hypermodern Japan still needs people who are expert in traditional forms

of social interaction, and it's not just men who want someone to laugh

at their jokes and pour their drinks.

We're in a bar in Tokyo and over there there's something

that's a sort of confirmation of something that I've always thought

that was totally fascinating about Japan,

and that's the way the ancient lives on and sort of dictates life

in the everyday in this really futuristic society.

I think the young man talking to my producer, Georgie,

neatly fills the geisha role.

In lounges like this,

it's now the monied young women who will pay to escape for a while

to be entertained by unthreatening, gentle men.

Ryu Ikiru has been a host boy for 11 years.

So, what type of women come here to this bar?

So I can't help but draw comparisons between you and the geisha.

In bars like this,

old-world charm is provided by the entrepreneurial young.

The past informs the future of hospitality.

The romanticism of the geisha has almost evaporated, but that sort of

tranquil force that she has still remains.

And the host boy brings something new to the role of the geisha,

but he still has that sort of traditional sympathetic ear.

Now, you'd think that in Japan

the weight of the history would make it a really difficult place

to innovate, but that's simply not true and I think that's because

this is a society that is transfixed with novelty,

and that can be seen really clearly in the street fashions of Harajuku.

This Tokyo district is at the leading edge of newness.

So, we're here in Harajuku, which is...

It's an area where all the teenagers and fashionistas

come and congregate and show off their bonkers-looking outfits.

It's a bit like what the King's Road would be 30 years ago.

In Britain, new street fashions take a little time to bed in.

But in Harajuku,

styles come and go like bullet trains.

It's a gathering point and a meeting point but also

it's a bit like a place where everyone

opens their peacock feathers and shows off.

For someone who lives in the countryside,

I find it a little bit stressful. Just the extremeness -

I don't know which way to look cos there's so much happening.

It's like an overload to the senses.

People are dressed like you've never seen before.

That inventiveness, that writing an identity for yourself...

..it's part of a social make-up.

The innovation and the quirkiness in what people are wearing here,

this is a real demonstration of people not thinking the same,

not this collective consciousness,

not this collective ideal of society but of individuality.

This is Japanese exuberance,

and for every cliched salary worker in a blue suit

there's a fashionista here starting a new trend.

As editor of FRUiTS magazine,

Shoichi Aoki has watched them come go for 20 years.

This is soft punk, we called.

-Soft punk?

-Yeah.

-So is there hard punk as well?

-Yeah.

What would this be?

This looks a little bit '60s, '70s, hippy inspired.

I think so.

In the West, new styles soon go high street and international,

but most of these seem to stay in Tokyo or even just in this district.

Take the Lolita look.

19th-century Gothic European references.

A classic example of the magpie tendency in Japan,

which is both sexes thinking outside the clothes box.

It's a fusion of different hierarchies and cultures and classes

as well as a mixture of time.

Do a lot of the fashions here in Harajuku do that,

take something from the ancient and fuse it with the modern?

In 20 years, you must have seen so many young people

with so many different styles and so many categories

and subcategories of styles that you've exhausted it.

Maybe there's nothing left that's new for you.

Gender fluidity is a hot topic all over the world right now

and Usuke Devil is a celebrity exponent of the next big thing...

..genderless fashion.

All over the world there's a lot of chat about gender fluidity

as a kind of movement or a new genre.

Can you tell me a little bit about this genderless fashion?

So, what was your style before this style?

What is it about Harajuku specifically

where there's this need for speed and for innovation and invention?

The youth of Harajuku face a dilemma.

If novelty becomes a convention that everybody chases,

that becomes conformity,

which is surely what their parents are all about.

I reckon the Japanese love of novelty has a start date,

a 19th-century Big Bang in what was then the capital, Kyoto.

On 3rd March 1868, a sudden coup took place here in Kyoto

and the shogun that had ruled Japan for 700 years or more

and restricted relations with the outside world

were overthrown by the young Emperor Meiji.

When North America and Europe demanded free trade,

Meiji really turned on the tap, and it was at that moment

when lots of new technologies and exciting new things came into Japan

and started to change the culture.

And for me, I think it's at that very time that the futuristic Japan

that we think of today was really born.

But even before Emperor Meiji, Japan was no backwater.

The shoguns had traded widely within East Asia,

and over centuries of peace

the people became extremely sophisticated,

super literate and consumer-orientated.

So now Western merchants raced to service this new market.

The new emperor made Tokyo his capital and started shopping.

Within a few years,

Japan had the start of a world-class railway system,

gaslight, factories and telegraphy.

It was industrial revolution at breakneck speed.

Japan shifted tense in an instant from past to future,

and the past wasn't disrespected in this process,

it was used as a tool to inform the future.

Among the new ideas to arrive from the West was photography,

and Japanese views like these helped create the first real ideas

and cliches of Japan abroad.

Meanwhile, the Japanese fell in love with the camera itself.

The new technology spoke to something deep in a people

who understood layered meaning.

It was an instant, time stopped, sentiment crystallised.

It was science in the service of magic,

delivering the art of the past.

This wasn't just about taking pictures, it was business.

The camera, of course, also represents Japanese electronics,

but there's a bigger meaning here that I'm interested in

and that's the Japanese ability to spot the potential in existing

emerging technology to refine it and to sell it back to the world.

Within the century, the Japanese dominated the camera industry.

They didn't invent the chemical film business but they created

the digital technology that made it obsolete

and sold us the new cameras to use it.

They won the technological game, but being Japanese,

there's some old-fashioned grit in their futuristic oyster.

There's a sort of divine super leap here.

From the nation that brought us the digital revolution

and the digital sensor,

we are now seeing an increased popularity in film cameras.

What's really interesting is this brand that makes incredible lenses

and optics is German, not Japanese,

but it's probably the most popular brand

for photo specialists in Japan.

We're in a country that holds very dear to notions of the future

but we're seeing obsolete technology fetishized,

and I think that has a lot to do with the pace of life

and the speed of things.

Analogue cameras are slow technology, just like a record,

and there's a love for the analogue world at the moment

because the pace in which we live,

maybe we feel like we don't experience things in the depth

that we used to.

What's interesting about these is that for a select few,

a group that are in the know,

these cameras signal a sort of value of consideration

or a shared skill set.

These cameras, they're really, like, for making photographs,

not for taking pictures. They're incredibly hard to use.

I've had this one for a number of years and I still, when I pick it up

after using my digital one, it's a real pain.

'But for many Japanese, loss for the future is freighted

'with a longing for the past,

'creating a present tense that puts

'a modern obsessive premium on the vintage.

'Dr Angus Lockyer lectures in Japanese history.

'I find the present tense hard to spot, but does he?'

I see it differently.

I see a place which is very intensely focused

on the present, on the now.

They do have a kind of easiness in...

..going back into the past and bringing it forward,

and using it now.

There's an openness to the new.

Japan was a very effective consumer society

way before we got into shopping.

Certainly an interesting novelty in having something

that's slightly different from everybody else.

You know, the ease with which Japan embraces things like robots.

Robots aren't scary in Japan.

Turns out some old people would prefer a robot

to take care of intimate needs than a human being in front of whom

they might need to face shame.

Can you tell me a little bit about what Shinto has handed down

to today's modern reality of Japan?

Shinto is much more about cycles.

You know, they knock down one of the most important shrines in Japan

every 20 years and rebuild it cos you don't need the original,

you don't need to hold on to the past.

What you need is to make sure that the past

helps you to cope with the present.

Acceptance of the fact that you are on a planet that's unstable,

that this moment will vanish.

In Shinto, it's not us versus nature, it's, now we're...

We're part of the environment which we are affecting.

This is Hokusai's Wave.

The title of the artwork is The Great Wave

and it's one of my favourite artworks,

it's a wood block print from the 1830s.

But I've not picked it because I like it so much,

I've picked it because it's a good signifier of a new beginning.

A lot of historians say that this wave was in fact a tsunami,

but that's debatable.

One thing we do know is that it was a destructive wave

and with destruction comes a new beginning...

..something Buddhism says we should all be prepared for.

The Japanese live in the moment because they understand

there might not be another one.

After all, they've survived the most symbolic full stop of all.

This is by far the most significant symbolic object

that I've come across in Japan.

It's a small pocket watch that was carried by a pedestrian

in the city of Hiroshima in August 1945,

the day that the uranium bomb was exploded above the city

by the Americans on behalf of all the Allied Forces.

And that bomb killed 140,000 people.

Now in March of the same year, a series of incendiary devices

had been exploded over Tokyo and the death count of those bombings

killed a much greater number of civilians,

but what was key about this bomb is that it was new technology.

The atom bomb was as much of a massive symbol of defeat

as the Industrial Revolution was a symbol of success.

But the Japanese had spotted the potential in nuclear energy

and within ten years they'd began to invest heavily in nuclear reactors.

They leapt at the chance of a hi-tech future

and the opportunity to lay the recent past to rest.

But buried in the Japanese subconscious

was a new kind of monster,

a prehistoric and the terrifyingly modern...Godzilla.

In 1954, the B-movie monster mutant

stomped on to the screens.

Spawned from an atomic disaster and with his signature weapon,

his nuclear breath,

he was by all accounts quite a vengeful creature,

but he was also an agent of change.

Godzilla was a Shinto-saurus,

innately understood by Japanese moviegoers

rebuilding their world in a hurry,

a reminder of their inability to control events -

for nuclear survivors mindful of their good fortune every new day

and well aware of its fragility.

Luck, especially the good variety, is a very Japanese preoccupation.

This is also a Japanese symbol,

but often we mistake it as being a Chinese one cos you might find

this character next to the menus at your local takeaway.

He is in fact the Japanese lucky cat.

And also, often, we decode him wrong -

we think that he's waving but he isn't.

What he's doing is he's beckoning,

he's saying, "Come inside and get lucky."

The Japanese believe in mysterious forces

as much a space-age technology.

I didn't see that coming when I installed a sculpture

at this Shinto shrine.

It was commissioned in 2011,

a modern work for an ancient site full of symbolic objects.

The sculpture that's inside this big, ornate, ancient kind of shed

is called Really Shiny Stuff That Doesn't Mean Anything,

and it's a ball made of stainless steel magnetic objects,

and they've all collided together and made one big sort of mess.

But I guess it's based in this culture of the magpie,

and anything that's shiny feels like it should be hi-tech

and it should do something, right?

It looks alien so it's come from another place

and then it's landed here in this old-school old world.

What I really like is the collision between this thing

that looks hyper-tech and the ancient.

Because it's magnetic, when we were installing it

everyone here at the shrine was super scared of it.

They would leave their phones and their credit cards at the entrance

to this small island that's surrounded by a moat

and they'd go up to it and approach it with trepidation

and then worry about headaches because of the energy

that this thing would give off.

And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't the magnetic energy

that it was giving off, but it was kind of the metaphorical,

cultural, symbolic energy.

But if my silver sphere was giving off bad energy,

visitors didn't have to go far for an antidote.

Good luck is big business in Japan and every shrine stocks talismen

designed to see off ill fortune.

So, this is an omamori stand.

Tell me a little bit about what they cover.

-Yakuyoke is keeping away evil spirits.

-OK.

This is called negaigoto and these are for studying.

This is for the safe driving.

At home, I keep getting speeding tickets on a bridge

called the Orwell Bridge on a road called the A12 by my house.

Do you have something that can control the speed cameras?

I don't think so.

-This is for wishes?

-Yes.

And I can write "art prizes" and all sorts of things on that,

-whatever I want?

-Yeah.

And what's in these small bags?

I shouldn't open them, so I've never seen it inside.

So no-one ever opens these, otherwise the good luck is gone?

Yeah, that's what I believe.

Is there anything that would ward against cyber attack

or e-mail spam?

Amulet against calamities?

So would that cover natural disasters?

I believe so.

I'm going to have to get one for every eventuality.

Every New Year you renew your omamori.

-So I have to buy them all again?

-Yeah.

-I'm going to have to get another credit card!

-Yeah.

However modern your problem, Shinto luck is always worth a try.

All these cars, when the boot opens, you can smell the new carpet -

they're all brand-new.

So I have this feeling that he's blessing them because they are new.

He's almost trying to make sure they don't get into accidents.

It feels a little bit like a...

faith-based kind of insurance policy.

This is evidence of the Shinto in their everyday reality of life.

I mean, he's just blessed a Toyota Corolla.

Each of the owners have kids, so it's also like a metaphorical,

spiritual "baby on board" sticker, somehow.

Shinto and Buddhism emphasise our insignificance in the grand scheme.

The only sure thing is that time will pass

and the seasons will change, and nothing sums that up more than this.

Japan is renowned for its blossom,

and the beauty of it almost means that

it becomes a sort of cliche.

Now, the Japanese climate means that there's a real stark contrast

between the seasons, and that wealth of white blossom

against the stark blue sky is a message

that no-one could really mistake.

Regeneration and regrowth are big in Japan.

Every spring, special trains make excursions

to get the people to the trees.

This is blossom fever.

Everywhere you look there are citizens taking the same photographs

they took the year before, and the year before that.

These aren't just blooms and it's not just a love of nature...

..it's a photographic ritual of spring.

A few days of certainty in every year of increasing unpredictability.

The culture that celebrates change and regeneration is just as well

in a country facing demographic disaster.

The economy has struggled for years,

and while the salaryman always symbolised a uniquely Japanese ideal

of dedication to the company, a new word - karoshi.

It literally means overwork death.

Those who can drag themselves home from work aren't making babies.

The birth rate is in a steady decline.

To make matters worse,

Japan has the world's highest population of old people per capita,

and they're not the only things that are living longer.

30 years ago, this would have been a symbol of Japanese modernity

and industry, but me here, looking at it today,

it seems like an antiquated relic of technology, which it essentially is.

Now, what's really interesting about the fax machine is,

although they've been thrown in skips all around the world

they're still used in Japan,

and that's because an ageing population

refuse to do business by e-mail.

So you can imagine reels and reels of curly sheets of paper

being stored away - undigitised information.

It's interesting cos in futuristic Japan,

it's really the old people that are calling the shots.

The old always represented continuity from past to future...

..but that stopped when the Japanese economy collapsed in the '90s.

The office routine, a defining ritual for millions of workers,

was suddenly unavailable to a generation

that were waiting to start work.

So an estimated million of them hide in the bedrooms

of their family homes, consumed with guilt.

They're known as the hikikomori.

Journalist Masaki Ikegami writes about this very Japanese problem.

But for the lost generation,

the samurai might just perhaps provide a role model -

obedient followers living a life of principle that sustained them

without fear or doubt.

Like his relatives, the geisha and the ninja,

the samurai's an icon that's so powerful

that his message really can't be mistaken.

He's a warrior from back in the shogun days,

a sort of incarnation of a Japanese cowboy

cos he's a hero but he's also a loner,

and he lives and dies by an ethical code of principles.

Now, physically he is no more, but metaphorically he is everywhere.

It's almost like he's hiding in plain sight.

The samurai conveys Japanese ideas of honour, morality, tradition.

But he's here too in the wide-eyed,

candy-coloured modern world of gaming and animation.

This guy's called Gundam.

So, any Japanese teenager would know what this is.

All those robots that we see, like Transformers,

this is the real DNA of that stuff, this is where it all started.

He's a legendary 1970s Japanese invention.

The styling of him is really based in this tradition of the samurai.

There's all these samurai swords and samurai knives,

and even the body armouring that you would expect to see

from the bamboo strips that you find on samurais.

For me, it's reminiscent of a lot of things in Japanese culture,

this compounding of the past tense and the future tense

together in a para-possible present,

a multiple universe or a multi-verse, if you like.

Here's the samurai Gundam aesthetic for road warriors.

I can see his unblinking eye at the heart of the Japanese car industry,

gifting to carbon-age technology his ancient martial artiness.

'The head of design at Nissan is an American

'who had to learn a new culture and iconography on arrival.

'It's Alfonso Albaisa's job to know which Japanese messages

'whisper the loudest.'

The styling of this in particular,

it reminds me of the Gundam figures, the future we've not yet reached.

Obviously, in Japan, we have...

It's a very long history.

Famously, the samurais and all of this kind of culture, which then...

..in modern day, with anime, has transformed itself,

so the Gundam and this kind of iconography is part of the fabric,

and especially the fabric of my design team.

The blade coming off the rear wheel, a samurai sword lunges forward,

surging, cutting through.

Tension in the line, emotional geometry.

And then these forms that come off of that structure

mixed with a warmth of muscle of a warrior figure.

A bit of a monster.

Somewhere between a Gundam and Godzilla,

its attitude is beyond itself.

Complexity but harmony.

-This is all Japan DNA.

-Yeah.

So, how long did it take you to adjust your eye

to Japanese aesthetics?

Cos the look of everything is very different to

what you were used to in California.

Almost every day I wake up, I live in Tokyo, and...

there is some new inspiration and a new thing

that I didn't know about or I hadn't felt its nuance,

and the nuance became apparent.

The collection of everything is obvious,

but each thing is important and has great meaning,

so you have to kind of learn each one of those as a designer.

Even in complexity, the Japanese are seeking harmony.

There is also a sense of humbleness, trust.

The Japanese consider their actions on other people

as a priority, so when they make an object like this,

that's a huge responsibility for my Japanese team.

The taxis and many parts of Japanese society are comfortably traditional.

They're not ageing, they don't look...

there's no patina, they're immaculate.

But on the other hand,

the culture and the country is known for progress and change

and the future, and they live together, these two things.

A polite society that is so respectful...

..that actually it's working every day to break paradigms

and to bring the future, a new future.

Usually, a society that's bent on creating the new

has a sense of revolution in every part of its fabric.

Japan, no.

A very old country with deep culture,

but is dreaming constantly.

They're dreaming of the future, and here it is.

In the West we worry about robots,

but here they say dozo - come on in.

There's a pinch of the samurai in this robotic DNA,

and that's because they're just here to serve, nothing more.

When they want to impress the Japanese public

with 21st-century thinking, tech turns to the symbolic helpmate

to embody promises of shiny times to come.

-ROBOT:

-Let's shake hands to remember your visit.

Ryan, I hear that you are a conceptual artist.

That is interesting.

What's really obvious about Asimo here

is that he's incredibly strong

and he could probably take me out with one swipe.

The other thing that was really interesting, when he shook my hand,

is the attention to detail in the design.

The texture of his hand is really like skin and it's warm.

I really felt like I was shaking hands with a person.

You know why they've made him that size?

So he's not intimidating.

He's a good scale for me as a little friend

cos I can get eye-level contact with him.

But what's apparent also is he's been pre-programmed with

really old-fashioned values and ethics and morals.

There's a lot of civility and dignity in him,

and he's a really gentle kind of creature.

There's a sort of deference to his ancestors,

which is essentially me and you.

HE CHUCKLES

Can I pour you a cold drink?

Yes, please.

Asimo is an internet star.

He carries an easily understood message about the future, and Japan,

to the outside world.

Thank you.

Cheers.

At home, he says a lot more.

Another symbol with multiple meanings to people here.

Telling them who they are, who they were and who they will be.

A kit of parts for an idea of Japan.