"Scye is an exceptional clothing line, but Hidaka and Miyahara’s strategy of pursuing quality and craft over trend and flash is not unique amongst young Japanese brands. Miyahara explains, “I believe the Japanese people have a basic artisanal disposition. There is a word in Japanese — kodawari — meaning being obsessed with the details, and it guides almost everything here.”

While some of this so-called quality obsession may be a response to discerning consumers, Miyahara sees craftsmanship in Japan prospering from the creators’ own self-demands:

Some part of kodawari is the designers’ own self-satisfaction of creating really nice things, even if consumers don’t notice the details. When we started the brand, we thought about how to do things from the perspective of those who actually make the clothing, and we wanted to produce clothes that people would still wear after a long time — both in terms of quality and style."

"When it comes to profit and satisfaction, craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy. Many of the manufacturers who are thriving in the United States (they exist, I swear!) have done so by avoiding direct competition with low-cost commodity producers in low-wage nations. Instead, they have scrutinized the market and created customized products for less price-sensitive customers. Facebook and Apple, Starbucks and the Boston Beer Company (which makes Sam Adams lager) show that people who identify and meet untapped needs can create thousands of jobs and billions in wealth. As our economy recovers, there will be nearly infinite ways to meet custom needs at premium prices."

[See also in Japan: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204542404577157290201608630.html?mod=WSJ_Magazine_LEFTSecondStories ]

"For decades, Japan simply imported the wares of foreign cultures, but recession has led to invention. The country has begun creating the finest American denim, French cuisine and Italian espresso in the world. Now is the time to visit."

"During the robust economy of the '80s, Japan's exports ruled, and the country would import the best that money could buy from the rest of the globe, including Italian chefs and French sommeliers. Which made Japan an haute bourgeoisie heaven where luxury manufacturers from the West expected skyrocketing sales forever.

But now 20-plus years of recession have killed that dream. Louis Vuitton sales are plummeting, and magnums of Dom Pérignon are no longer being uncorked at a furious pace. That doesn't mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They've just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards…"

[See also Stateside: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/adam-davidson-craft-business.html ]

"…giving you the ability to label your photo as being taken solidly 800+ years before anything most of us would describe as the invention of photography…a little silly. But I do love this photo of the Blue grotto…taken in 1890…

Fundamentally this split btwn system activity time, & human editable creation date models a world where the people who use your software do something other then use your software. You have to decide how you feel about admitting that possibility…

…if you visited that Blue Grotto photo you’ll notice date is listed as “This photo was taken some time in 1890.” That’s date granularity. Flickr taken dates come in 4 levels of granularity, exact, year-month, year, & circa.

…Circa is a flourish…sort of feature you only get when you care about craftsmanship…

Computers demand exactitudes by default, but it’s a laziness of which we are collectively guiltily that we’ve traded a few programmer & compute cycles for a rich & nuanced societal understanding of time."

"This is not to say that super-specialization is not a super-smart strat­egy! Being extremely good—the best in the world—at a par­tic­u­lar thing is actu­ally one of the best strate­gies for sur­vival and sat­is­fac­tion. But I just don’t think it nec­es­sar­ily leads any­where other than… super-specialization. It seems to me, look­ing around, that the peo­ple in charge of cities, pub­lic spaces, orga­ni­za­tions, and Spider-Man 4 are the peo­ple who have gone straight at those more macro lev­els like an arrow."

"Sure, I still do wireframes every now and then, but never a ‘complete set’ and often with no where near the detail I used to include. Why?...three reasons...tend to work on more of a strategic level...where there is no time...closer to production tea

"I may never finish the game. In a city this vibrant, it's hard to stop getting distracted. At one point, I finished a mission on top floor of decrepit apartment...started to head back downstairs to my car, then wondered: "Hey, what's up on the roof?"

"James Fallow...noticed two different approaches to refueling the same small plane.In Japan...Note the uniform, safety outfits, and cushion to protect the plane's wing. In, China, they just do what has to be done, in any way they can."

"As a child, I used to get stuck in feedback loops thinking about what i was thinking about, setting up my pechant for introspective books about acts of seeing and reading."