A knife-maker in Kyoto showed us a laser and a whetstone on the same bench. He uses both. He was very clear about which one decides, and it isn't the laser.
That's the whole question, really — not whether to use the new tool, but what you let it touch. The cities that stay themselves are the ones that answer it on purpose, blade by blade, instead of letting the answer arrive by default.
Kyoto has had a thousand years of practice at this. The rest of us are deciding the same thing much faster, with much less care. There's a lesson in the whetstone, if we slow down enough to hear it.
FIELD NOTES · TECHNICALLY CULTURED · AN IANNOVATIVE PERSPECTIVE
