Books in Brief: Smaller Is Better

Smaller Is Better: Japan’s Mastery of the Miniature, by O-Young Lee (Kodansha, 192 pp., $16.95)

Despite the (deliberate) similarity in titles, this book has nothing in common with E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful of a few years back. Rather, it is a study of the Japanese culture which tries to show that making small things smaller and better (cars, microchips, etc.) is not just a recent phenomenon: Smallness, rather, is as inherent in Japanese culture as “bigness” is in American, and the creating of smaller (and better) electronics comes naturally to a society that for generations has been doing the same thing with poetry, boxes, fans, art, gardens, and trees. Of course, attempts to pigeonhole any culture are suspect, and the author (a Korean with no great love for the Japanese) omits things that don’t fit his tidy paradigm (Japan, for example, built the largest battleships ever made, and sumo wrestlers are scarcely dwarfs). But, in general, the point is well taken, and the book is seasoned with a number of perceptive insights, such as the difference between Western and Japanese approaches to nature. When Westerners lay out a formal garden, for example, it is to “show how a human, rational order is imposed on irrational, disorderly nature.” By contrast, “The Japanese approach to controlling nature is not to make it into something different, but to leave it the way it is, only make it smaller. . . . Westerngarden nature is man-made, while Japanese-garden nature is made for man.” The dichotomy also holds for ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging: “The Western bouquet seeks to express the size of the world by the addition of ever more flowers. Ikebana cuts away at the flowers, the branches, the leaves, and makes empty spaces in order to capture the universe.” For anyone interested in Japan (or poetry, or gardening), Smaller Is Better is well worth reading—even if you feel compelled to take some of the author’s conclusions with a miniature grain of salt.

JK

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Jack D. Kirwan

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Smaller Is Better: Japan’s Mastery of the Miniature, by O-Young Lee (Kodansha, 192 pp., $16.95)

Despite the (deliberate) similarity in titles, this book has nothing in common with E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful of a few years back. Rather, it is a study of the Japanese culture which tries to show that making small things smaller and better (cars, microchips, etc.) is not just a recent phenomenon: Smallness, rather, is as inherent in Japanese culture as “bigness” is in American, and the creating of smaller (and better) electronics comes naturally to a society that for generations has been doing the same thing with poetry, boxes, fans, art, gardens, and trees. Of course, attempts to pigeonhole any culture are suspect, and the author (a Korean with no great love for the Japanese) omits things that don’t fit his tidy paradigm (Japan, for example, built the largest battleships ever made, and sumo wrestlers are scarcely dwarfs). But, in general, the point is well taken, and the book is seasoned with a number of perceptive insights, such as the difference between Western and Japanese approaches to nature. When Westerners lay out a formal garden, for example, it is to “show how a human, rational order is imposed on irrational, disorderly nature.” By contrast, “The Japanese approach to controlling nature is not to make it into something different, but to leave it the way it is, only make it smaller. . . . Westerngarden nature is man-made, while Japanese-garden nature is made for man.” The dichotomy also holds for ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging: “The Western bouquet seeks to express the size of the world by the addition of ever more flowers. Ikebana cuts away at the flowers, the branches, the leaves, and makes empty spaces in order to capture the universe.” For anyone interested in Japan (or poetry, or gardening), Smaller Is Better is well worth reading—even if you feel compelled to take some of the author’s conclusions with a miniature grain of salt.