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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 236 из 270This is how it was with Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834-1901), the father of modern education, and with OzawaSeiji in the 1960s, who moved to America after Japan's leading orchestra, sponsored by the national broadcasting company NHK, went on strike against him and refused to play. Ozawa Seiji is one of a number of prominent artists to base themselves abroad. Others include the musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, the composer of the score for the film The Last Emperor; Ishioka Eiko, who won an Academy Award for her costume design in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula; and Senju Hiroshi, the painter whose Waterfall installation won a prize for the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. All of these artists live in New York.
The trend continues. Son Masayoshi, often called Japan's Bill Gates, was born the son of Korean immigrants, a minority group that suffers social ostracism, much of it officially sanctioned. «Being of Korean background, I thought as a child that things might be pretty hard,» Son says. So while still in school he moved to the United States. By the time he went to the University of California at Berkeley, he was already a successful young entrepreneur; he made a million dollars in his early twenties when he sold a pocket-translator invention to the Sharp Corporation. «In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds,» Son says. «And they're all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.»
In the early 1980s, Son returned to Japan and founded Softbank, which in one decade grew into Japan's largest software distributor and publisher of computer-related magazines. Winning the right to use his Korean last name took longer (naturalized citizens cannot use their foreign names but must choose from a list of officially accepted Japanese names), but he achieved that feat in 1993, after an extended struggle with the immigration authorities. Today, Son is the golden boy of Japanese information technology and is frequently in the news as he buys up software and information businesses around the world.
While the phenomenon of escapees from Japan is an old one, there is a significant difference between the situation in the late Edo-Meiji period and conditions today. Japan at the turn of the century was a poor, backward nation struggling to throw off centuries of feudal stagnation. It was not free politically, and few Japanese spoke a foreign language or had much experience of the outside world. For educated people, the only way to acquire necessary skills was by going abroad, and it was only natural for farmers and manual laborers to try to escape poverty by immigrating to Hawaii or Brazil.
The trend continues. Son Masayoshi, often called Japan's Bill Gates, was born the son of Korean immigrants, a minority group that suffers social ostracism, much of it officially sanctioned. «Being of Korean background, I thought as a child that things might be pretty hard,» Son says. So while still in school he moved to the United States. By the time he went to the University of California at Berkeley, he was already a successful young entrepreneur; he made a million dollars in his early twenties when he sold a pocket-translator invention to the Sharp Corporation. «In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds,» Son says. «And they're all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.»
In the early 1980s, Son returned to Japan and founded Softbank, which in one decade grew into Japan's largest software distributor and publisher of computer-related magazines. Winning the right to use his Korean last name took longer (naturalized citizens cannot use their foreign names but must choose from a list of officially accepted Japanese names), but he achieved that feat in 1993, after an extended struggle with the immigration authorities. Today, Son is the golden boy of Japanese information technology and is frequently in the news as he buys up software and information businesses around the world.
While the phenomenon of escapees from Japan is an old one, there is a significant difference between the situation in the late Edo-Meiji period and conditions today. Japan at the turn of the century was a poor, backward nation struggling to throw off centuries of feudal stagnation. It was not free politically, and few Japanese spoke a foreign language or had much experience of the outside world. For educated people, the only way to acquire necessary skills was by going abroad, and it was only natural for farmers and manual laborers to try to escape poverty by immigrating to Hawaii or Brazil.