🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <111@avsd.UUCP>, govett@avsd.UUCP (David Govett) writes:
> 
> > Does anyone have a reference showing that Japanese, either as a race
> > or as a culture "have a very bad problem with creativity"?   Come to that,
> > does anyone have a reference to Japanese acknowledging that?   Unless
> > they do, I am inclined to write this off as unthinking racism.   Everything
> > I have seen recently in science and engineering leads me to think that Japanese
> > have absolutely no problem with creativity, and I think that the onus is
> > on someone who thinks that they do to produce some evidence for it.
> > 
> 
> Many Japanese have commented on the rigidity of the Japanese educational
> system and the consequent lack of creativity.

	The Japanese are chronically self-deprecating.   It's a quality they
have in common with the British, and quite as deceptive.


> It's difficult to discuss creativity objectively because it's difficult 
> to define and quantify.

	Let me see if I understand this.    It is "difficult to discuss
creativity objectively" and therefore we are entitled to made objective
statements like "The Japanese have a very bad problem with creativity"?
Can that really be what you are saying?    If so, what it really boils 
down to is explaining away someone's objective success by appealing to 
some poorly quantified concept like 'creativity', asserting that objective 
statements cannot be made about it (so that you cannot be contradicted by
evidence) and finally asserting that Group X has this and that negative 
quality as a result.


> However, one can generalize in the area of science and technology.
> It's difficult to think of many scientific "breakthroughs" or 
> technologies that originated in Japan.

	So what?    That has more to do with how they spend their research
money than with any quality of the japanese themselves, or of their education
system.   Almost all of their R&D is funded by companies, and so it concentrates 
on issues of design and production rather than what we call 'basic' research.
For that reason, a growing number of US patents are actually filed by 
Japanese companies.   Are you now saying that an advance in manufacturing
technique is less 'creative' than an advance in micro-biology?   If so, I
would like to see some evidence that this is so, rather than a bald assertion.
On the face of it, spending R&D money and accumulating a more efficient and
reliable manufacturing process sounds just as creative as spending R&D
money and finishing up with SDI or yet another programming language.

	It sounds as though you have simply redefined 'creativity' so that
in addition to being hard to discuss, it also applies in only very narrow 
fields.   Fields we happen to specialise in, at that.


> Until that changes, Japan will remain subject to charges of freeloading 
> on the basic research of the U.S. and Europe.

	Which is exactly what Europeans said about the US before 1945.
Although the US economy became very large in the second half of the last
century US science was a minor force until well into this century.  Of 
course, that is a huge 'so-what', and any European that comforted 
themselves in their decline with the thought that America did little 
science was simply whistling in the dark.    No-one would seriously 
make conclusions about Americans' creativity based on  how they chose to 
spend their R&D money a century ago.   We think of people like Bell, 
Whitney and Henry Ford as being highly creative, even when they took 
existing science and created new products therefrom.   The idea that 
creativity must be in the area of basic scence, and not in product-
oriented areas is just made up for the occasion, I am afraid, and it 
invites the obvious rejoinder -

	"If Americans and Europeans are so all-fired creative, then
	how come we can't create an efficient manufacturing technology
	base?"

jon.