Chemins Alternates Horkheimer and Adorno go to Japan

Some time ago, before I moved to Japan for three years, I saw a picture that stuck in my mind and stayed with me through my travels, and has since grown, for me, to encapsulate modern Japanese culture and the direction of globalising technological change and identity consumption. The image was of a bulldozer, busy at work in Tokyo Bay with seagulls everywhere, crushing a seemingly endless mountain of electronic goods: TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens and stereos ripped apart and crushed in a violent creation of the new Tokyo waterfront. It was a powerful image of nature and land, torn apart and reassembled as consumer goods, mecha-nised-electronic products, consumed and disposed of, to be reconstituted as new industrial nature, building on the cities that spawned them. In a country with less than 20 % flat land, sustaining over 120 million people and the world's second most productive economy, the need for more space seemed obvious, and the picture confirmed the image I had of Japan as a hyper-modern, technologically advanced country of sophisti-cated electronic goods and computer gadgets. Though somewhat twisted, it seemed paradoxically, to affirm the other image of Japan in the popular consciousness, of a sustainable, holistic society. Even manu-factured electronic goods were recycled, turned back into nature and made to serve the ongoing progression of social invention and life. The picture provided a snapshot of a hyper-consumptive Japanese society, hard to accurately convey or imagine in spite of our own wildly unsustainable consumptive habits; and in so doing, offered a heightened, amplified look at the emerging patterns of global consumption. It spoke of a culture celebrated with images of natural harmony and simplicity, of delicate flower arrangements and bonsai trees, bamboo groves and ver-milion gates, given way to computerized toilets that automatically test blood-sugar levels and nutritional balance, communicating with th