The Lotus and the Robot

"This book was written at a time when there was a sense of malaise in Europe – people felt that Western civilisation was on its last legs and didn’t have much to contribute any more. There was a lot of fear of nuclear war and it was also the time when people began to say that the Orient had a certain wisdom to impart. We’d reached the limits of rationalisation and the Enlightenment, and the spiritual traditions of Asia had something special to teach. So he went to India and to Japan to test this idea, and he clearly liked Japan better than he did India, even though he was critical of many aspects of it. For example, he had a rationalist’s distaste for a lot of the mumbo jumbo about Zen archers hitting the target with their eyes closed, and so on and so forth. Again, it’s like Barthes, in that he didn’t know much about Japan. He went there, he stayed there longer than Barthes did, let things sink in, and he reflected on them and came up with interesting insights. He wrote at the end of the book that it made him feel more at home with the figure perched on the back of the bull, Europa. But he also said that if he had to choose any other place to live in the world, if it couldn’t be Europe, he would choose Japan. Quite why he said that he doesn’t really explain…"