NYTimes: Japan Was Just a Warm-up

Hammer-Man, a gift from Aaron Cho Kum

NYTimes has an article today comparing US-Japan relations in the 1980s to US-China.   As an International Relations major at Carleton College ('84), I remember studying under Roy Grow, who was new to the department.  His specialty was China, and in our courses he was making the case that the Japan stuff was just a precursor to what was going to happen in China.

We studied Japan post-WWII history and the rise from repair to knock-offs to good-enough products to well engineered electronics and cars.  Norm Vig, Hartley Clark, Michael Zuckert, and other Carleton Poli-Sci professors discussed how things between the USA and Japan had gotten to this competitive point, on the heels of Japanese tinkerers who worked on Radios.

We studied Alexis de Tocqueville, my favorite international relations philosopher.  I try to observe world development as he studied Democracy in America (as a "Political Thinker"  - Man, what a great job title!). 

Observing how Japan became an economic rival, and China's path, there are other past observations to remember.  Singapore tinkerers worked on aircraft engines and electronics.   Taiwan tinkerers worked on printed circuit boards.   China worked on display devices, which most Americans fail to appreciate are the biggest cost component of a computer for most people in the world.  I hadn't yet heard of the "resource-curse", but could see it, and Japan was a model for its opposite, "the blessing of repair and reuse".

Let it be.

After getting my degree, I joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Cameroun, Africa, after language training in Zaire (now Congo), in the city of Bukavu.  We traveled out of there through Rwanda and Burundi.  Cameroon was in better shape than Zaire, but no one predicted what Bukavu, Rwanda and Burundi would turn into in the next decade.

In Cameroon, as I've frequently written, I was attracted to tinkerers.  The most middle-class Cameroonian I met, Aaron Cho Kum, started a business refurbishing the parts of coffee bean hulling machines which wear out... instead of ordering replacements from France for $65, Aaron refurbished them with scrap.  He wasn't conspicuously wealthy, but he was able to put his younger brother Christopher through university of Yaounde, and he owned a Mercedes.   He also gifted me the Hammer-Man statue featured behind me in the photo.

Anyway, the New York Times article comparing today's China-fever press with the 1980s Japan-fever press is central to who I became after those experiences.   I am passionate about fair trade, not just as a way to make used computers more affordable for the poor, and not just as a way to make recycling more affordable for the rich, and not just because of the avoided mining and rain forest sustainability which recycling means.  I see this as a way forward for Africa and the Middle East, a way forward which will bring peace through trade, which was the big under-story of the USA and Japan.  Two mortal enemies were joined by trade.   USA immigrants made billions selling "scraps to japs", and Japan's knock-off autos would one day be building factories in Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi.

I love my job !  The part of Vermont's e-waste that I trade overseas is a very small part of our business.  By far, most of the old computer, television and CRT units are recycled back into plastic, metal, and glass.  But that small portion, the one-in-five units which are wanted and needed by a Technician of Color, are the path to teach that Technician how to properly recycle the old "e-waste" in his/her own country.

Anyone who has bothered to read this far would probably really enjoy Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) which is one of my favorite movies and favorite soundtracks.  Thumbs up.  This music plays in my head all day at work, it is the quintessential "ewaste" recycling music.