years, but with the high-tech versions.” But he did add a caution: “A building is something that will last fifty or a hundred years. Some things might work the first year. But what happens if it doesn’t work down the line? It’s a big risk if you try something new and it doesn’t work out.”14
A factor that can have decisive impact on how buildings use energy is mind-set, the attitudes of people who use buildings. Some sense of what mind-set can do can be found in Japan, where conservation is embedded in policy and in everyday life.
MOTTAINAI: “TOO PRECIOUS TO WASTE”
Japan is the global pace-setter for optimizing energy use, and it has been such since the 1970s.
The crises of those years deeply shook Japan, which suddenly found its path of high-speed growth disrupted. The shocks also reminded the Japanese of their vulnerability as a nation in terms of energy. The resulting crises unified the nation. “Everybody worked together,” Naohiro Amaya, a vice minister of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, had remembered some years later. “The Japanese are accustomed to crises like earthquakes and typhoons. Even though the energy shock was a great shock, we were prepared to adjust.” Amaya added: “Instead of using the resources in the ground, we would use the resources in our head.”15
Thus was launched Japan’s drive for energy efficiency. The Japanese would focus a good part of their considerable engineering and technical talents on energy ingenuity, on getting more value out of every unit of energy. Not every idea worked, to be sure. In the mid-1970s, in an effort to reduce the need for air-conditioning in the summertime, a new look in men’s fashion was promoted for office workers. It was business suits whose jackets were short-sleeved. Despite its being modeled by the prime minister himself, the shoene rukku—or “energy conservation look”—somehow just never took off.
What did work was putting resources into increasing the efficiency of the energy operations and processes across Japanese society. This was not as hard as it might be for other societies. For it was really a reconnection with a cultural tradition of thrift and care that was deeply embedded in a historical experience shaped by limited land and stringency in resources. This orientation contrasts with America’s historical experience, which is based on ample land and abundant resources and a vaster and more confident geography.
Yoriko Kawaguchi was Japan’s minister of the environment and then its foreign minister. Today Kawaguchi sits in the upper house of Japan’s parliament but still remembers her reaction when she came to the United States the first time, as a high school exchange student. “At Christmastime, my American family unwrapped presents and then threw the wrapping paper away. I was very surprised because in Japan we would carefully fold up the wrapping paper to use it again. It’s what we would call mottainai.”
Mottainai, she explained, is a difficult word to translate into English. Indeed, it is so difficult that at one point a meeting was convened within the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to thrash it out. The conclusion was that the best translation was “too precious to waste.”
“Mottainai is the spirit in which we have approached things over a thousand years because we never really had anything in abundance,” Kawaguchi continued. “So we’ve had to be wise about resources. I was taught at home, every child was taught at home, that you don’t leave a grain of rice on your plate. That’s mottainai. Too precious to waste.”16
This sense of mottainai has underpinned Japan’s approach to energy efficiency, which was codified in the Energy Conservation Law of 1979. The law was expanded in 1998 with the introduction of the Top Runner program. It takes the most efficient appliance or motorcar in a particular class—the “top runner”—and then sets a requirement that all appliances and cars must, within a certain number of years, exceed the efficiency of the top runner. This creates a permanent race to keep upping the ante on efficiency. The results are striking: the average efficiency of videocassette recorders increased 74 percent between 1997 and 2003. Even television sets improved by 26 percent between 1997 and 2003. Further amendments to the law mandate improvements by factories and buildings, and require them to adopt efficiency plans.17
The government has used a wide range of tax credits to facilitate new investments. It also imposes direct fines to penalize for efficiency targets not achieved. Such fines are something unlikely to be accepted in the American system. But values,