« […] what Japan has been through in this century is astonishing, a people that are unquestionably quieter and more given to contemplation than their neighbours – and more than we are in Europe – turning themselves into a modern industrial nation, with images as their chief industry. It’s hardly possible to buy a camera, whether a still camera or a video camera or shortly an electronic camera, that doesn’t come from Japan, they practically have a monopoly. And even if you buy a traditional German camera, you open it up, and what’s inside it is all Japenese made. At some stage, maybe in the 1950s, they got together and with incredible foresight worked out that the great industry of the twenty-first century was going to be images, and they set off deliberately in that direction. And when they did that, they really did put their history and traditions behind them. »