Changing Japan

It has often been said that Japanese people are diligent and skillful with their hands. It was often the case in the past that Japanese competitors won many gold medals at the World Skills Competition, a technical version of the Olympic Games. And it was not particularly surprising for ordinary Japanese to see some Japanese firms, profiting from the natural skills of the nation, climbing the ladder of success as top world brands in the fields of automobile, camera and other manufacturing sectors.

Despite this, it is said nowadays that Japanese children are unable even to sharpen pencils with a knife or strike a match. This could be considered a natural consequence of modern technological progress, which has released people from such tasks in everyday life, where neither knives nor boxes of matches are automatically available at home.

Although the Japanese team won the gold medal at the World Skills Competition last year, this was only the first feat in ten years.

Such great changes may make people sigh, "I wonder just when the Japanese people stopped being what they used to be."

A recent move in the camera and film industry is a good example of how rapidly and greatly things are changing.

In January, Konica Minolta Holdings Inc. announced that it would withdraw from the camera and photograph businesses, and would accordingly, by the end of September 2007, reduce the group's workforce via early retirement by 3,700 employees out of 33,000 employees in the world group as a whole. The news came as a surprise, and made quite a few people wonder naively why a camera maker should stop producing cameras.

In January, Fuji Photo Film Co. also announced that, in line with a reform of its business structure, it would cut its workforce by approximately 5,000 employees in the "Imaging Solution section." The company proudly accounts for 70 percent of the domestic film market and 35 percent of the global one, but decided in the end to insert the surgical knife of reform in this section due to intensifying competition resulting from the drop in demand for color films and a slowdown in the growth of the digital camera market.

Digitalization of cameras has progressed so rapidly, outstripping the expectations of these world-leading companies, that we must face the simple fact that today's cutting-edge technology may be obsolete tomorrow.

The names of leading companies are generally associated with their best-known products. But now for the sake of their very survival some of these firms are obliged to withdraw from businesses in which they have been engaged since their establishment. Actually, today as always, groups of Japanese tourists with cameras around their necks are frequently seen in popular tourist sites around the world. Look at them more closely, however, and you will find that their cameras are digital, not film models.