Leo Lewis decries the huge statue of a yellow Sony Walkman in the heart of Tokyo’s Ginza district as nostalgia for a bygone era (“Japan’s reverence for the Sony Walkman is a deadweight”, Tokyo Notebook, July 31). Surely the Japanese are right to celebrate the contribution of their engineers, craftsmen and assembly line workers to this once ubiquitous device.
A giant Walkman is no different to the magnificent forging press erected outside Terni Railway Station in Umbria, or the more prosaic stationary steam engines exhibited under glass beside Hull Marina in East Yorkshire and in Bolton town centre in Lancashire. They are reminders of past technical efforts and triumphs.
