Click the cover to find this book in Tim Easley’s online store.
Sam2 gave me this book last Christmas and it’s been a source of endless delight ever since. At 8.5 x 12.0 inches and beautifully produced, it may seem like a coffee table book, but it is much more. I have read it several times in full, but I also love just opening it at random, studying every detail of the superb images by award-wining designer and photographer Tim Easley, and savouring his captions. I feel that the amazing diversity of the (sometimes outsize) vending machines shown, and their background settings, can tell me something about Japan if only I can ‘read’ them properly. I am still ‘reading’ them.
The shadows on this one, the little overhanging branch, the soft wood on the right, and the Perspex background oddly reminiscent of bamboo, suggest the lingering presence of an older, ‘poetic’ Japan. The box’s proportions and its entirely unnecessary curved red roof are positively classical. Every item on the face of this machine has been positioned with care to achieve an intriguing interaction with empty space (is this effect perhaps what Japanese aesthetics call mo, which has been translated as ‘dreaming space’?), and the tiles for the consumables themselves seem almost secondary. Other machines in the book are more in your face, even brutal, garish and occasionally distressed with graffiti and stickers.
As Easley discovered on his first visit to Japan, vending machines are a way of life there. (5.5 million of them, or one to every 23 people in the country, he tells us in his useful section ‘Factoids’.) They sell everything from ice cream, T-shirts, cigarettes and souvenirs to every hot and cold drink imaginable. I conclude that the Japanese believe in convenience. In Japan he found
Vending machines that actually worked. Anywhere you went, whether it was up a mountain or in a train, you could buy a cold drink, they were reasonably priced, and they were always fully stocked.
But he also discovered their infinite variety. He may call them ‘robots’, ‘guys’, ‘a gang’, ‘lonely machines’, ‘magnificent metal beasts’, but he knows that they are more than the latest word in Japanese technology. With their whimsical cartoon figures, floating Japanese characters, weird English, ‘mix of American and pastels’, sheer wit and clean design, they amount to ‘pieces of art’ — a modern, original, Japanese art.
Tim Easley can be found on Twitter at @TimEasley, and his books/work including Vend can be purchased from his site.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Patrick: fascinating stuff on Japanese vending machines, today (what, I reflect, will your universal curiosity not get you to write about?). I have always been suspicious of these things since losing sixpence in one when I was small. (It wasn’t an Irish sixpence, either). But one aspect of Tim Easley’s enthusiastic account leaves me unsatisfied. He reports, ‘they were always fully stocked’. But one needs to know how, by whom, and when? It is the unhappy experience of anyone using such machines in the UK that just when you want one, it is undergoing the equivalent of open heart surgery.
Can it be that in Japan, there are some oblique descendants of the Samurai — a cut above Deliveroo — who are bred to this vocation, venturing out in the very waste and middle of the night to replenish the machines? Or is there a super-machine, of a robotic development unknown to us, and a solicitude rarely encountered, which serves these sub-machines with the same regularity, though with the reverse function, as the milking of a cow? Or is the simple solution that they are actually replenished by aliens?
With my own curiosity now fully engaged, I also wonder about the optimum, or maximum, size of articles to be vended (or vented) by the machine. One can get a chicken sandwich, but can one get a chicken? Can one get a LIVE chicken? Bottles we count on (normally small, 25/30 cl); but can one get a real 75cl? A magnum? A jeroboam? It seems to me, from a safe distance, that the technology of the vending machine still has a long way to go.
Damian, your Comment is both ludic and carnivalian (thank you), but like all such artistic prose it has a serious centre… I have been unable to find out how many million people are employed in restocking the machines, but they are certainly an army that toils day and night. It’s a full-time job and according to Easley each ‘vending machine worker’ (suggesting that they are actually special bees or ants) restocks/services about 40 machines, including clearing away litter and graffiti. Chicken they can do, but the line is drawn at selling live butterflies, apparently. I hope that helps? Patrick
Well, Patrick: the last detail certainly does help. Since the butterfly has long been associated with metamorphosis, transformation and the soul, one understands why a metal vending machine cannot pretend to own one: or to make one commercially available. Does the same condition apply to the members of the restocking army? Or may they keep their souls in the stocking they may hang, hopefully, on the bedpost?