Where is India’s Wakon Yosai?

There is nothing wrong in copying a good product, service or an idea. Agriculture is the result of copying of eight original inventors of…

There is nothing wrong in copying a good product, service or an idea. Agriculture is the result of copying of eight original inventors of agriculture. Every crop we eat today comes from the eight agri-biodiversity hotspots.

Japanese embraced western technology, and developed faster than any other non-western nation. Japan didn’t copy blindly, as it practiced wakon yōsai. It means Japanese spirit and Western techniques. Japanese inventor Ikkansai Kunitomo applied the technique of Dutch airguns to build ‘the never-ending lamp’. Japanese didn’t just use Western style mechanical clocks. Instead, they built a new watch by equally dividing daytime and night-time as per seasons.

Ishida and Furukawa write in Nature Technology, “Through the dynamic curiosity and inventiveness of the Japanese advanced technologies imported from abroad were, one after another, transformed into items of practical use to people in their everyday lives. Technology was not the possession of a limited group of experts, but was brought to life in the everyday.”

Darshinis of Bengaluru are equivalent of Japanese ‘wakon yōsai’. They adopted the western techniques of a ‘quick service restaurant’ and applied to the Indian restaurant. Unless startups do not follow the same spirit, even the best technologies won’t help.