Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (12 page)

More than a thousand years old and now worn by poor and rich around the globe, the zori is endlessly adaptable to new materials. This experimental sandal, called “Cold Feet,” has a neoprene outsole overmolded on a polypropylene insert containing refreezable, cooling “blue ice.” Designer: Gretchen Barnes. (Courtesy of IDEO)

Rubber and plastic zori were not limited to
Japan. In fact, as interest in closed footwear grew after the war, the Japanese considered them neither traditional nor Western. In the memory of one Japanese-American scholar who was a young man in the 1950s, it was Harry Belafonte who popularized rubber sandals simply by walking down the main street of Kyoto wearing them during a tour in the middle of the decade. Belafonte’s style impressed crowds
and began a national fad. But the new zori was more than a Japanese event. It was a technological reincarnation of what Steele Stewart, as we have seen, described as the pan-Pacific fiber sandal.
³²

In the United States, rubber sandals began to appear in California in the early fifties. Allan Seymour, a surfing entrepreneur and historian of the sport, recalls seeing the first cheap models in Laguna
Beach, where he was growing up, worn by soldiers returning from the Korean War. Bins of them at 29 cents a pair soon appeared outside liquor stores and markets in Laguna; they became wildly popular on the beaches, and standard attire for surfers. They were badly made. The straps often broke or “blew out”— the phrase is an unconscious reminder of the role of automobile tires in the early history
of rubber sandals. They lasted for a month of surfing, and broken and discarded sandals littered the beach at low tide, but they were priced as disposables. In northern California the Beats are said to have adopted zori as part of the culture of Zen. By the early 1960s rubber sandals had made their way down the coast to northern Mexico, and were selling under the trade name Havaianas (Hawaiians)
in Brazil. In Mexico and South America, they were originally considered plebeian rather than chic. Mexico City residents disdained them; in Brazil, they inspired the phrase
pé de chinelo
—literally, “slipper foot”—for the downtrodden. The Brazilian government included them in its working-class price index, along with milk, bread, and beans.
³³

All the while, zori were spreading slowly to the American
heartland as an exotic novelty. A small advertisement in the May 1958 issue of
House Beautiful
presented sandals in men’s, women’s, and children’s sizes “[f]rom an Oriental Teahouse … For Beach, Pool, Shower or Street.” The text lauded the sponge-rubber product as the “[n]ewest style-rage inspired by
the mystic East and imported direct from Japan—yet practical and modern as Miami. Strong, sturdy,
lightweight, comfortable, long wearing … skid-proof, silent,” and only $1.95 postpaid. Six years later, they were no longer a novelty. Another advertiser was offering women’s Japanese-made “Dress Zori Sandals” with leather insoles and straps for $2.95.
³⁴

In Australia, too, postwar beach (if not bohemian) culture created a ready market. Australia’s giant tire manufacturer Dunlop was already beginning
to make sandals in 1954, using inflating rubber with air bubbles in molds and letting it shrink to size in steam rooms. The real boom started with the arrival of the Japanese swimming team at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, wearing rubber zori as part of their uniform. By 1957, the David Jones department store in Sydney was selling them to delighted customers from a bin at the door. Soon local
makers were cutting them out of sponge rubber sheets, three pairs at a time. Even then, demand seemed insatiable. A Dunlop executive ordered 300,000 cut-rate pairs on a single short trip in 1959. But while in largely chillier North America they remained beach accessories, in Australia they became everyday mass footwear. Dunlop alone sold a pair a year for every man, woman, and child in Australia.
A local joke was that you could tell the bride at an Australian wedding because she was the one wearing new thongs. By the late 1980s the sandals were not so funny, and certainly not chic. One newspaper critic, Leo Schofield, called them “the national symbol of bad taste,” on a level with furry toilet seat covers, and “[t]he ugliest and least practical kind of footwear. Also dangerous.” In 1995
the director of the Melbourne School of Fashion, Miriam Cuna, declared them “vulgar” and “awful.” David Jones had dropped them, and even a spokeswoman for Kmart told a journalist, “We don’t advertise them.” But they remained popular. In 1995, a single large distributor imported 2.5 million pairs of high-fashion models annually, and Kmart itself sold 240,000 pairs in the state of Victoria alone.
³⁵

Meanwhile, another style of sandal was making news. The North Vietnamese army and Vietcong, perhaps taking a leaf from the Japanese army’s book, made their own sandals from rubber tires. The soles had multiple slits for straps—the design resembled the sandals of the Romans—and, according to an American physical anthropologist who examined recovered specimens later, could last for years. Ho Chi
Minh, who had worn white sandals during the independence movement against the French, now himself set an even more austere example by keeping the same pair of rubber-tire sandals for years, refusing to replace them. But this austerity
lost its prestige after victory. The civil servants of Ho Chi Minh City were under orders to shed their sandals for closed shoes at work as a symbol of their country’s
new economic realism and aspirations.
³⁶

In Hawaii during the 1960s, zori showed how the simplest of technologies could evolve into a complex system of ethnic symbols. The first civilian sandals produced by Scott Hawaii after the war had crossed straps over the instep, but zori emerged as favorites by the early 1950s. Steve Scott, a son of the founders of Scott Hawaii, recalls his family making
the early models from molded pieces of EVA from Japan, fitting them with leather insoles and thongs. By the time Victoria Nelson arrived in the late 1960s, Japanese students at the University of Hawaii wore
lauhala
, a local version of the classic zori with a bottom made from native plant leaves and a velvet thong, also known as Jap slaps. Haole (mainland European-American) surfers wore thick black
rubber zori with a racing stripe down the side and a thong of parachute fabric. For the fashionable there were “cork-soled plastic-thonged steamboats [presumably local slang for bulky footwear] made in Taiwan or Brazil” and the “Hollywood forties-style wedgie with bejewelled thong favored by Dragon Lady types.” Some had holes running through them for draining water; others had no thongs at all
but came with a preparation for sticking them directly to the wearer’s sole. Stores served locals with seemingly unending varieties to match the tacit dress codes. If Hawaii was a cradle of multiculturalism, zori were its baby shoes. And even today, zori are as ubiquitous in Hawaii as in Australia. Their secret, according to Steve Scott, is the variety of materials— including EVA soles injection-molded
with a new technique borrowed from the athletic shoe industry—that keep production costs low and styles and colors easy to change.
³⁷

The zori did not remain confined to the Pacific Rim, though many of the world’s sandals are still made there. It became one of humanity’s first universal manufactured goods, much more so than the branded soft drinks and cartoon-character merchandise
that in many places could be bought only by the relatively well off. During Nelson’s tropical idyll of the 1960s, Mitsubishi and other giant Japanese concerns took over the small factories of Kobe, where many zori were made, and decided to shift production to Taiwan, where costs were lower. Taiwanese manufacturers had experience
in producing synthetic goods like plastic tablecloths, and it was
not hard to convert their machinery to the production of footwear uppers. Existing technology, some of it located in duck huts and hog houses, needed mainly the spread of new techniques. The Japanese trading company inspectors, as one of them later put it in an interview, “moved around like bees spreading pollen among separated manufacturers so that innovations in manufacturing spread quickly.” At
the same time, the Republic of China (Taiwan) was beginning a drive to expand its export industries because it expected American aid to be phased out. Despite or because of the presence of the Japanese giants and the skills they brought, opportunities opened for smaller companies. Especially for the supply of PVC, which was winning favor over rubber (because of the latter’s high vulcanization cost),
Taiwan had an excellent base: the plastic industry had burgeoned from only two factories in 1948 to more than four hundred in 1966. Sandal and shoe plants followed. (Zori probably were not the only sandal forms made but almost certainly were the most common.) From 1969 to 1988, the number of registered footwear firms increased from 75 to a peak of 1,245. Even after a decline in production in
the 1990s as cheaper labor costs in mainland China, India, and elsewhere led to a shift in production, Taiwan remains a major center of capital, design, machinery, and supplies.
³⁸

A 1982 publication of the International Labour Organization in Geneva provides a clue to the spread of sandal manufacture. While zori manufacture of course requires far more capital than artisanal leather sandal making,
it can be done efficiently in a relatively small shop. The report lists thirty-one stages of closed-footwear making and only two of the injection molding of flip-flop sandals. A large shoe manufacturer can gain an advantage from adding additional equipment and workers at many steps. It pays to be big. The maker of PVC-injected sandals needs no skilled employee, only two or three operators and
a packer. There is no equipment that would reduce costs substantially for high-volume plants. Because opportunities for automation were so limited, Taiwan government statistics from 1976 showed that in the plastic footwear industry, the few very large factories of a thousand or more employees actually added only two-thirds the value per employee that the many plants with under thirty employees added.
³⁹

With a global market in machines and variety of materials, sandal production could move wherever there was a market and capital. For international
giants like the Canada-based, originally Czech manufacturer Bata, the largely barefoot parts of the developing world were a challenge to promote the “shoe-wearing habit.” Thong sandals, at an international price of 30 to 40 cents, cost less than an
unskilled worker’s daily wage, and even the higher-quality models could sell at retail for only 65 cents. In Kenya, for example, Bata was able to build its sales from 972,000 pairs in 1964 to two million in 1968. (Even in 1997, many villagers in Kenya were still barefoot, risking threadworm infection transmitted in outhouses; a resourceful Japanese community development specialist was teaching rural
women to make straw zori.) But there was room for many local entrepreneurs, too. Because plastic zori wear out in as little as three months and are not readily repairable, the market is steady. Urbanization makes footwear increasingly necessary. There is evidence that a number of prominent families in developing countries formed at least part of their capital with zori factories. And sandal making
can become big business indeed; in less than forty years the Brazilian company Alpargatas, once a manufacturer of rope-soled canvas moccasins, has sold two billion pairs of its Havaianas brand flip-flops. Sales are now at 125 million pairs a year, and Alpargatas is producing high-fashion lines for sale at luxury outlets overseas.
⁴⁰

Sandals have built not only wealth but nations. In the early
1980s, overseas Eritreans presented the Eritrean Popular Liberation Front (EPLF) with an Italian PVC injection molding machine that could produce a hundred pairs of black (for camouflage) plastic sandals per hour. The rebels imported base granules of PVC but supplemented it by recycling the worn-out footwear of their troops. Just as family companies later diversified from sandals into higher-margin
activities, the EPLF later was able to open pharmaceutical factories using foreign feedstocks to make 40 percent of the basic drugs Eritrea needs. (EPLF sandals had straps across the forefoot rather than thongs.)
⁴¹

The zori sandal appears to be wonderfully universal, improving the health of people in the developing world yet adaptable to the high fashion of the West.
The president of Alpargatas calls his Havaianas “the most democratic product made in Brazil. The guy who owns a mansion wears Havaianas and the guy that cleans his swimming pool wears them, too.” Queen Silvia of Sweden delighted her hosts on a recent state visit by wearing the company’s Havaianas Brazil model, with its little national flag. In the United
States, a leading magazine for young women
urges its readers to “let the air breeze between your toes—and … show off your sexy feet.” The illustrated sandals closest in appearance to the original Japanese zori are made by Calvin Klein of wood with leather thongs and cost $245. They probably are not much more or less comfortable than many of their discount-store plastic counterparts.
⁴²

In their global reach, though, sandals unfortunately
represent more than affluence and glamour. As the footwear of the world’s poor, they also stand for the replacement of the frugal environmental ethic of early Japan with a worldwide throwaway society. Occasionally old flip-flops are recycled; in fact, an enterprising Liberian artisan, Saarenald T. S. Yaawaisan, has fashioned entire working toy helicopters, blade tips and all, from a rainbow of
discarded sandals. The throwaway society still has a way of prevailing, even in Monrovia, where Yaawaisan ultimately had to buy brand-new sandals from a local factory to meet growing demand for his delightful playthings. Unfortunately, it is probably more usual to burn sandals with other refuse, potentially generating dangerous dioxin. And dumping them may not be much better for wildlife. It is not
only a few surfers who abandon broken sandals on the beach today. Discarded plastic footwear is a major component of the world’s flotsam, washing up in surprising places. In 1996 the Australian Cocos and Keeling Islands, home to a number of endangered species, were assaulted by hundreds of thousands of discarded flip-flop sandals, rejects of Indonesian manufacturers. After touring the islands, an
Australian member of parliament, Julian McGauran, declared: “The beaches are the home of the green sea turtle and the blue rubber thong. One of them has to go.”
⁴³