I predict your latest Wired column will cause another riot, but while that doesn't happen I'd like to point out a couple of vocabulary mistakes you made: ganbaranai, not ganabaranai; furiitaa or freeter comes free and arbeiter/arubaito as far as I'm concerned, not free time.

Oops, thanks, I don't know how ganbaranai became ganabaranai, slip of the finger I guess. And of course you're right about "free arbeiter" as the original of the phrase, although reading it as "free time" suggests that leisure rather than work is the purpose of this temping, and that gets to the nub of things quicker than having to insert a long explanation of how "arbeiter" is the German for work, etc.

But I'll get onto Wired and try and get those fixed.

The Freeters, so celebrated in your article, are contemptible for their selfish "take, but don't give anything back" attitude. Their line is doomed to last no more than a single generation. A country must be composed primarily of working people in order to prop up the parasitic class. If the entire population of Japan adopts the principles of the slow life, then the luxuries of excessive wealth--glossy magazines about fashion and imaginative architecture--will disappear.

There are no trendy art magazines coming out of the Third World. The people of the Republic of Gambia are too busy worrying about when the next military coup is gonna happen.

I'm not knocking the idea of 'stopping to smell the roses' or the occasional epicurean indulgence, but let's be real about the sustainability of this system and what it really is--like socialism, a sort of fantasy concept for people with a fear of responsibility.

Fun in Japan...

Well, at least somebody's having it.

Sob, sob

i'm all for this slow life business. I just thought I was a lazy guardian reading, fernley whittingstall-loving hippie. you make it seem so much better.

On a serious note though--and this is something I've been thinking over and over about--how do computers mess up this slow life way of living? For me, it's only because of the connectivity offered by the internet, that I even contemplate living in the middle of nowhere. But it's becoming an increasingly strong ambition. I want to live a life I believe in, but is it doomed to be compromised by the very thing that makes it possible?

I think it's important to say that Slow Life is not Ludditism. In other words, it's not a move "back" to any previous state of technology, or an abandonment of technology. It's more like a considered balance (on the individual and the social level) between technology and the environment. And it's using technology as the ultimate labour-saving device, freeing up humans to concentrate on doing things only humans can do, or just appreciating being alive. But who knows, it may be the beginning of the "post-human" era the Krokers talk about.

I have an excellent question, Momus. In the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week, I read about the hikikomori, the "lost generation" of young, Japanese men and (a minority of) women who have decided to withdraw themselves from society, most of the cases showing that they could not deal with the 'excessive efficiency' that you quoted Ryuichi Sakamoto talking about in your column, that are in society currently. Are these people accidently perpetuating the slow life lifestyle, or am I just being an ignorant American looking from the outside in and misinterpreting what I am seeing?

It's such an excellent question that someone else asked it the other day, and a little discussion developed.

Interesting about how phenomena in Japan are related in that way, as you noted. I'm glad to know I wasn't too far off with my guess.

And yes, I'm afraid that a NYT Sunday Magazine aritcle about pointless shopping sprees isn't going to happen, when you have a portfolio of Ralph Fiennes, actor from the film The Constant Gardener, wearing a $195 Calvin Klein shirt in the magazine already.

Nice to see that the book is coming out quite soon. Especially since the amount of photobloggers rised skyhigh last year and will probably rise even more this year.

I saw on the "culturenews" about blogging in China and the boss of the chinese company that hosts a large amount of blogs in China thought that the amount of bloggers would be 60 millions(or billions?) by this years end.

Might happen the same to the all-popular swedish photolog/photoblog site bilddagboken.

Misspelling in your article. "Ganabaranai!" should be "Ganbaranai"...

Regarding your 'Wired' piece, many would argue that a declining and aging population is an environmental catastrophe. Phillip Longman's lecture in the excellent Long Now series makes a good case.

All the money here just goes upwards.

In the good old days when there were such college grants and dole money, that money went straight back into local economies.

British industry grew fat on the Kinks, The Who and The Beatles spending their college grants on Vox AC30s.

I think these little networks that people create on the internet and elsewhere should print their own money, start their own economies.

One puzzler - since the fifties there has been speculation about a forthcoming ‘leisure age’ – people were trying to imagine what we would actually do while technology did everything for us. Why, a half century later, are we still working? Why did the age of retirement for women actually go up? Any Slow Movement should involve Easy Spreading to spread work evenly and thinly.

It's this relative lack of Luddite spririt that has me dubious about the efficacy of Slow Life. I noted the racks of magazines and books on a recent visit, as well as an increased number of restaurants that would inform you from where and whom they'd sourced their ingredients (photos of smiling tomato growers and the like), but much as I like this as a culinary development, it also seemed like just as much a valuable marketing opportunity.

I'd agree, as you say in the Wired article, that the movement represents a shift in focus from money to quality of life, but for many only in as far as you swap magazine subscriptions and favoured designers. Are these followers of Slow Life just turning into their imaginary/projected grandparents? It feels rather like Fresh and Wild, a chain of organic supermarkets here in London, where the local middle classes throng to buy vastly overpriced produce in the belief that this will stave off environmental catastrophe and/or their own physical demise. The comforts of the Sunday colour supplements.

There's an echo of sorts in the Japanese millenarian spirits of the 19th century (the world renewal of yonaoshi ikki), which may have lacked coherency as a political movement, but had something of a sans-culotte attitude. If I compare that sort of dreaming to Slow Life, I'm not sure whether contemporary Japan isn't losing it teeth along with maybe growing that long white beard. Is Slow Life just an interim urban comfort for the ageing Shibuya-kei generation before death?

How about going out and about when you return to Osaka and interviewing some of the homeless there? They seem to be one group who are maybe actually living something of this low-impact recyclable lifestyle and I am sure there are some interesting stories there amidst the cardboard and tarpaulin.

How about going out and about when you return to Osaka and interviewing some of the homeless there?

What, again?

Ha! Not much success there then!

There's an article on being homeless in Osaka and the author somehow managed to be on the streets with one of them. Unfortunately, it's in German:

stupid me

man i can't wait for this book to be released in the US! my photographs are published in this book too a bunch of times… and i think the design is just fabulous! can't wait to read your texts

Hi, Andrew here. It looks quite nice doesn't it? I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.
Thank you so much for everything.
I hope to get a chance to meet you in NY this winter/spring. Either at the Whitney or an April book party, which I think is in the planning stages.

All best,
Andrew