New York Times assumes that Japanese inventions spring from a “collective”

Japan Today points out a blunder by the Western media:

A major U.S. daily commented Tuesday it was surprised to discover that instant noodle soup was invented by one individual — Momofuku Ando, who died last Friday in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, at 96. In an editorial titled “Mr Noodle,” the New York Times said the news of Ando’s death “surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual.”

“It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan. Ramen noodles have earned Mr Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress.

The embarassing thing is not that the journalist who wrote the piece is willing to admit that he had assumed that some mythical borg-like Japanese collective had invented instant noodles, but rather that he named Hello Kitty and the Sony Walkman as products of this collective. As a simple wikipedia search reveals, Hello Kitty was created by designer Yuko Shimizu and the Sony Walkman is usually credited to Nobutoshi Kihara or Andreas Pavel. Japanese corporations might not give tons of credit to their designers, but in the case of at least two of the products named in the NYT article, the corporations have acknowledged that individual researchers and designers were responsible.