If anybody won the second world war it was the Japanese. Following a tactical surrender when we dropped the bomb on them, they turned their little island into a giant machine, producing goods for export so successfully that the President of the United States has to fly half-way there to beg them to sendspend some of our money back. But like all the other countries involved in that war they have had a hollow victory, an economic victory at the price of a culture. They have sacrificed themselves to survive and in the process they have created a world of inexpensive technology that has a great deal to do with the media-division in this country, a division between the old, whose sense of cultural reality was irreparably damaged by the war and the young who have discovered in themselves the potential for a world they see reflected in pre-war films.

The Japanese contributed to this media-division by making possible the media-saturation that preceded it. Starting with cheap transistor radios they crept into our homes, offering us whatever we wanted in terms of communication equipment at terms we could afford. With a delicate sense of design, an amazing ability at miniaturizing, and the belief in the economic principle: invent whatever they want and sell it to them, they have patched us all together, no matter how poor we are. And they have shown-up the myth of American craftmanship in the process. Of course, theirs is a corporate pig empire, very similar to our own, based on a gluttonous greed. But there is a promise in what they have done, a promise that every person can have access to total information, a promise that will in the long-run have a great deal to do with how our society changes-progresses during the next twenty years.