Trends in Japan is featuring interviews with notable foreign personalities in Japan. Our current interviewee is Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit, who serves as principal conductor and music director of the NHK Symphony Orchestra. In addition, he is the artistic director of the Pacific Music Festival, held every summer in Sapporo.

"I'm a great admirer of Japanese culture, and I like so many things about Japanese behavior, the manners, the elegance. It's a visual society; eating is more visual, and everything has to be beautiful. A bunch of flowers - everything is aesthetic. And all that, I like. But it is very clear that every country is going to have a hard time keeping such a marvelous [cultural] background and adjusting to the world." Charles Dutoit, the Swiss-born maestro who is arguably one of the most-traveled conductors in the world, brings a global and historical perspective to Japan, a country he has come to know intimately over the past three decades.

Dutoit first visited Japan in 1970, the year of the Osaka World Expo. "People didn't speak any [foreign] language here, and they were not at all interested in the rest of the world. They were traumatized by the activity of the [military] expansion of the country. So it took an event like the World Expo for the country to become a little more relaxed and open to the rest of the world."

The Japanese at the time were still insular and inward looking, Dutoit says. "We felt very isolated, very interested but very isolated," he recalls. "Now I see that the younger generation, little by little, is becoming more interested in the world and becoming citizens of the world. But it wasn't the case before. It was probably part of the Japanese way of thinking, of not committing anything to the rest of the world. People were like this - cramped. So I'm very happy to see that things are changing, little by little."

Changing with the Times
While praising its culture and hoping Japan will maintain its aesthetic values, Dutoit also feels a need for change in its society. "There is a certain stiffness in Japanese traditions," he says. "Japan is hardly a country for entrepreneurship, as opposed to America or other countries. Here, a company has meetings all the time; many people talk, and then the result of all this talk will eventually become a decision." Such prolonged consensus building can slow things down, including the economy, says Dutoit. "The [social] apparatus is so heavy there's no flexibility."

That rigid group mentality dates back to the authoritarian educational system of the Meiji era, says Dutoit, drawing on an extensive knowledge of history gained through his desire to understand how Japan - in a mere 60 years - became involved in wars against China and Russia, followed by World Wars I and II.

The indirect manner of Japanese communication poses another obstacle in adapting to a changing world, he says. "If you have a problem with someone, it's hard to express this problem face to face because that's not the way [things work]. You must go around and make people try to understand - it's an indirect way of doing things. And then you never know whether it's been understood or decided. The Chinese and Koreans don't have that problem. They are much more direct in their contact. It's not that one is better than the other, but we are talking about the differences between all these things, and I think in a way it's easier for them to cope with the West and the rest of the world than it is for the Japanese."

English as Lingua Franca
One enormous change in the world today is the rise of English as the lingua franca. "You have to adjust. And the ones who don't speak English today are lost; they cannot travel, their children go on the Internet and they don’t understand 98% of the content," says Dutoit, adding that even the linguistically sensitive French have taken to publishing important scientific papers in English.

Dutoit, who has visited "127 countries so far," has a keen interest in the languages of the world. "There are about 6,000 languages spoken in the world. But every day, one or two are dying because there are fewer and fewer people speaking these languages. And it's a tragedy. Is it good or not? I don't know. It's a shame, but the world is what it is. What can we do? It's the influence of television, of computerized society, or information. Information today is more important than culture," he says regretfully.

"There is an enormous gap between culture and information. 'Culture' is a way of thinking. It's a frame of mind - a way of thinking, a way of concentrating on certain problems. 'Information' is CNN Headline News. Many people know a lot, but in fact they know less and less because they don't think. And I'm fighting to keep these values [alive] in younger people. It's not enough to know a little bit of everything. It's important to know more about a few things."

Information Versus Culture
"There are so many great young musicians - but talk to them, they know so little. It's amazing," says Dutoit, who faults teachers for driving their students to practice instead of broadening the minds of young talent. "I think education has lost a certain richness, a certain trunk, a certain root, a certain wealth."

And in broadening one's horizon, there is much to be gained from first-hand experience. Dutoit fondly recounts his first trip to South America, which took 18 days by ship each way. "That year, for 36 days we were on a boat - that's 10 percent of the year on this boat, discovering the distance between Europe and South America when you go from one country to the next in Africa. You leave Senegal, and for six days you cross the South Atlantic. And on the morning of the seventh day you see the palm trees, and this is the coast of Brazil. I tell you, I'm still trembling of emotion just remembering when I saw that and I discovered South America.

"That's what I call information versus culture. It's all in the process and the approach, and it's impossible to change that. You say that television is a dangerous thing - it is true. This is a fantastic tool, but you have to know how to use it. But you can't be against it. So it's up to us - our choices and what we want to do with our kids, with the young people - to give them the fruit of our experience and try to guide them and to help them, at least to interest them in a different way than just going with 500 channels of television."

Charles Dutoit
Born in Lausanne, Switzerland. Studied conducting in Switzerland, Italy, and the United States. Has conducted orchestras in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Became principal conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra in 1996 and music director in 1998. Began work in 2000 as the artistic director of the Pacific Music Festival, an annual gathering in Sapporo aimed at fostering young musicians.