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You're in the waterfront area, you have some time on your hands, and you fancy pushing a few buttons on contraptions and chatting with friendly, uniformed demonstration girls. You head for the new Panasonic Center.
As might be expected from this grand showcase to Matsushita and its works, the company is keen to present itself as sleekly cutting edge, with the first-floor Broadband Cafe and various techy wares out for inspection. To accentuate the wired image, those demonstration girls have headphone and microphone sets - though whether the sets get more use out of streamlining customer inquiries or fine-tuning arrangements for after-work drinks is anybody's guess. Most of the second floor is taken up with model living areas, showing Panasonic appliances at work in ideal-home situations - immaculate kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms of picture-perfect lifestyles that you cannot remotely imagine anyone of your acquaintance actually living. Panasonic Center obviously cost a pretty penny. Still, Matsushita is not beyond making visitors fork out Y800 for Dinosaur FACTory. This museum to things fossilized is an interesting-enough interactive center, towering over which is 12-meter-high Brachiosaurus altithorax. As the leaflet explains, FACTory implies "FACTs" found by paleontologists about dinosaurs at excavation sites (presumably as opposed to "FACTs" that an archeologist might deliberately plant at an excavation site). Sadly, nowhere did the leaflet gamely attempt to explain what all this has to do with Matsushita. This is a place to see Matsushita's breezy view of the future - of home and network solutions and ubiquitous information. But as well it is a place to see the Matsushita of the past: the Design Section shows models from the sixties - a rice cooker, vacuum cleaner and record players in clean, uncluttered designs - when the company took itself and its mission in life far less seriously. by David Capel |
Panasonic Center
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