Good evening.

I'm Steve Jobs from Apple Computer.

I'm very glad to be here tonight.

In 1984, Steve Jobs revolutionized computing.

The Macintosh promised new levels of self-expression.

At launch, a familiar face.

But another, perhaps not.

She's from a Japanese woodblock print.

And when it comes to Jobs' love of Japan, she's the tip of the iceberg.

Close friends, colleagues and design experts shed new light on why this came to be.

Steve was thinking about how do you take the things that the Japanese culture

has developed in a way that it could go into commercial products.

Steve was exposed to the way my mom decorated the house,

the Japanese sense of style and design.

Jobs developed close bonds with Japanese artisans.

He wrapped his hands around the work.

Then he would do this.

He touched very gently, handling it with loving care.

And their creations informed his own approach to design.

One pioneer.

And a passion that changed the world.

Steve Jobs first encountered Japanese art as a boy.

His best friend was Bill Fernandez, who hails from San Francisco.

Bill was even Apple's very first employee.

Before that, they whiled away the days tinkering with electronics.

Jobs was always at his friend's house.

He felt right at home.

And Bill's mother treated Jobs like a son.

Bambi says he always had an inquisitive mind.

He was in and out so much.

Bill had a portion of the garage that we made
into a desk for him to do his electronic stuff.

He was interested in what was around him.

And he was interested in talking to you and
he could talk well, even at that time.

So, he was interesting to talk to as a person,
as a friend. So, we became very good friends.

Bambi studied Japanese art.

And her home was full of it.

One wall featured three shin-hanga woodblock prints.

Jobs was transfixed.

The three shin-hanga hanging over the white couch in our family room.

The one when you came into the house, the first thing you saw.

He loved those.

He was drawn to them.

They appealed to him.

There was one shin-hanga that had a forest and a person walking down a road

that looked very similar to forest in California.

We have a rare Redwood forest, very tall stately trees.

And he remarked, you know, is that California?

And, you know, that looks like California.

And she said, no, that's Japan, you know,

The ones over the couch.

Those are the ones that caught his attention,
even though over time he saw other ones that I added.

Those are the ones that he was drawn back to.

And he would stand across the room from them
and just look at them.

And then as he grew older,
he started talking to me.

He'd look at the prints and he looked at me and
he'd say, "You know, I think you should share."

I said, "No, I don't share my father's collection,
but you're welcome to look at them whenever you want."

Shin-hanga is a 20th-century take on ukiyo-e, an older form of woodblock printing.

Artists sought to modernize and increase the appeal of their craft, which was already popular overseas.

Bill shows us a gift from his old friend.

So, this is the shin-hanga by Hasui Kawase that was his wedding gift to me and my first wife.

I felt very happy that shin-hanga still meant so much to him

and that he would honor me by giving me a gift that he knew would be very meaningful to me.

A very thoughtful gift because I also love shin-hanga.

Bill says shin-hanga was the starting point for Jobs' appreciation of Japanese beauty.

Our house was a catalyst for Steve Jobs' development of his aesthetic sense.

A big part of that was the shin-hanga, because that's what you see.

You walk in and boom, pictures, beautiful pictures.

Oh, that's so wonderful.

I love that.

They speak to me.

I think that was the beginning where he said, I like this, I like simple, I like clean, I like natural wood.

I like this style of art.

I like this aesthetic, this sensibility and so forth.

You can see his love of simplicity and elegance throughout his life, like in the products that he developed at Apple.

There are similar sentiments from a key player in Apple's history.

Hello. Mr. Sculley.

Former CEO John Sculley.

Jobs poached him from Pepsi.

And the pair quickly became close.

Sculley's background includes industrial design, and they would often discuss art.

Sculley remembers a man who invented products, but kept his own possessions to a minimum.

When I went into his house for the first time, I was very surprised.

I knew he could afford anything he wanted, but the fact that he lived such a simple life at home personally.

And I asked him.

I said, "Is this what you like to do, or you just didn't have time to, you know, attend to getting things in your house?"

He said, "No, I actually like it.Very simple. This is how I like it. I actually have the things in my home that I wanted to have in my home."

But one wall spoke volumes.

His bedroom had just a simple single person bed on the wall where three photos,

one of Einstein, the other of Mahatma Gandhi, and the 3rd of a Japanese woodcut print of a lady.

And the other thing that was in the room was a Tiffany lamp.

The shin-hanga Sculley talks of is likely a work titled "Asanegami" - or "morning hair".

Compared with Einstein and Gandhi, it's a little bit weird to see this kind of presence, right?

It doesn't feel weird at all with me knowing Steve.

Steve was highly impressionable by things that influenced him and he was very careful to select things that were important to him.

He was highly influenced by Japanese culture personally.

So, it makes total sense to me that would be of equal importance to Einstein and Gandhi.

Jobs bought the work in Tokyo's upscale Ginza district.

Gallery clerk Matsuoka Haruo remembers a man introducing himself as Steve.

But this was no ordinary customer.

He said, "I'm going to start collecting Shin-hanga. So please teach me everything."

And he gave me his business card, featuring the multicolored Apple logo.

I was a little surprised, because color printing was still very expensive at the time.

Jobs had clearly done his homework.

"Morning Hair" depicts a woman who has just woken up, and it was banned by authorities at the time.

Only a few still exist, which meant the price was high.

I was somewhat taken aback.

He seemed so casual about choosing it.

He was particularly fond of landscape specialist Kawase Hasui.

Just like his friend's mom.

Hasui traveled across Japan, skillfully depicting nature and moments in time.

And he is often mentioned in the same breath as famous ukiyo-e artists Hokusai and Hiroshige.

He wanted to learn, but already seemed to have a mental picture of everything, and of what he liked.

I was impressed by the way he could single out major works.

Shin-hanga are deceptively simple.

The production process is actually highly intricate.

A carver creates an outline based on the artist's vision.

And woodblocks are made for every color.

They are then taken to a printer, who renders the outlines first.

The colors are added one by one, layer by layer.

With Ukiyo-e, the craftsmen work independently at each step.

But shin-hanga artists convey their plan directly to the carver and printer.

The aim is to keep the results as close to the original idea as possible.

The number of layers increased as artists pushed the boundaries.

In some cases, more than 30.

That's two to three times more than your typical ukiyo-e.

The way shin-hanga artists had control over an entire production process was not lost on Jobs.

I do remember distinctly that he was very excited when he came back

and we met in New York in the end of March when talking about the shin-hanga.

Because he said,

"I really, so excited on this trip, because I thought that woodcuts were made by different people through collective process."

And then, I was introduced to the shin-hanga.

It was the individual expression of person from artist to carver to printer.

And he said, "That's exactly what we are trying to do with technology with Macintosh."

You could create the design, you could render it in a digital format and then you could print it out on a printer.

And he said that's the essence of what Macintosh is in this day, he was working on what he called Desk Top Publishing,

giving people the creative possibility to print on their own desk.

Jobs amassed as many as 48 shin-hanga over the course of 20 years.

He even bought two prints of this work, titled "Combing her hair".

A beautiful lady, and a model for self-expression.

In a 2001 interview with NHK, he set out his ideas for what we can do with a computer.

I'd shoot some footage, and I remember making my first iMovie, where I could edit the clips together,

and I could put some cross dissolves in, and some titles on,

and then I took one of my favorite pieces of music and stuck it in and added a soundtrack, and I made about a three-minute movie,

and it was, I showed it to my wife, and she started crying.

Some of the movies are not better than others.

But they all are very emotional.

Can we help you in express yourself in richer way in your music, in your movies,

in your photography, these kinds of things that people want to do.

Apple was on the cusp of big things back in the early 80s.

Jobs was developing the Macintosh.

But some of the firm's success was down to another visionary in a faraway land: Sony Chairman Morita Akio.

The Japanese company's products were widely regarded as some of the world's best.

Simple, and beautiful.

Jobs was a big fan.

Satjiv Chahil used to be Apple's senior vice president of international marketing.

He says Sony provided more than just influence.

Every component of the Macintosh, the Apple product came from Sony.

The screen was a trinitron screen.

In fact, the first even laptop was actually completely produced by Sony.

So, Steve Jobs had great respect for Sony, for its design, for its perfection.

And it's an innovation in miniaturization.

So, that was, the North Star for Steve was Sony.

Sculley remembers meeting Chairman Morita in Japan.

And how Jobs made no secret of his desire to learn.

Steve wanted to know from Morita-san how involved are you personally in the creation of the Sony Walkman.

And did you think of the product, do you stay connected with the designers of the product?

How much attention do you pay to the manufacturing of the product, the materials of the product?

So, he was, Steve was very curious and he was always asking questions.

And it turned out that Morita-san was very involved in the product.

He was a product person, just like Steve Jobs was a product person.

So, they resonated in that way in a very positive way.

To Jobs, Sony products were like textbooks.

Not least, the first CD Walkman.

I remember when we're visiting with Morita-san in Tokyo, and he presented Steve and I both with Sony Walkman.

This was before the product was actually introduced on the market.

And when we got on the plane to fly home, we both opened our box and we were looking at it.

And Steve said, "Give it to me", and I said, "What do you mean give it to you?"

He said, "Morita-san gave us each one for a gift."

He said, "No. We're going to take it back and our engineers are going to take both of these apart and we're going to look at every detail."

And Steve had so much respect for Sony because Sony paid attention to the details.

And at that time, in the electronics world, nobody was paying attention to details except for Apple and Sony.

Apple's early promotional materials proudly conveyed the firm's philosophy.

A philosophy with deep roots in Japan.

We always would come back to the foundational idea that simplification is the greatest sophistication.

And Steve admired that in the Japanese culture and with Japanese artisans.

And, Akio Morita confirmed that.

He said, "Yes, we pay a lot of attention to that. That's a principle for us of priority of how we develop and build our products."

Jobs saw the need for a seismic shift in the way Apple runs.

He recruited Hartmut Esslinger, who had worked extensively with Sony.

The designer created over 100 products for the Japanese firm.

And Jobs was impressed.

He wanted Apple products to be the...well, computers ...to be the best designed computers in the world ...

Actually (he wanted)Apple to be the best design in the world.

Quite ambitious.He had a sense of what is nice, what is not.

But he didn't have the sense of how to make it.

And how to get it through organization.

So, the first proposal that we handed to Apple was that the designers get a little more power

by reporting to the Engineering head of the group.

Esslinger suggested the designers have control over the engineers.

Just like Sony.

And he then proposed a series of designs that helped shape Apple's future.

But it wasn't all plain sailing.

That's kind of pretty radical but it doesn't work otherwise.

The good thing is Steve did it.

We actually had a lot of fights.

For example, when that was installed, and Steve let me, and I just said, "That's what we do", people hated it.

They made their own designs parallel, they sabotaged it.

I think the connection of Steve to Japan, Japan's culture in general, really happened in the very early days when he worked,

and he created products then found out using the Japanese system of collaboration,

of improvement, and so on and so on, and trust, is really the source for Apple's future success.

So, Apple in fact is based, I think, on the Japanese model.

Call it 'Industrial Model'.

What we need now is the third industry milestone product.

And that's what Macintosh is all about.

Jobs imbued his groundbreaking computer with everything he had gleaned from Japan.

It was his time to shine.

To change the game.

And he delivered.

When he's standing back there, he is shaking like a leaf.

He's so nervous and he turns to me.

He said, "I can't go out there." He said, "I'm too nervous to go out."

I said, "Steve. Take some deep breaths, you know, breathe in deeply, breathe in deeply."

He's doing that and he's taking in exaggerated breaths

and then all of a sudden he has to go out on the stage and I don't know what's going to happen.

Steve goes out on the stage.

The moment he steps onto that stage, he completely transforms.

Suddenly he is totally confident.

Suddenly he has every move perfect.

Jobs made sure to tell the audience his invention would improve their lives.

It let you sing.

It let you make pictures.

It let you make diagrams.

You would cut them and paste them in your documents.

It let you put that sense in bold Helvetica, our old English.

If that's the way you want to express yourself.

By the 1990s, personal computers were everywhere.

And people were using them in ways Jobs always knew they would.

He told NHK of his ambitions to keep on innovating.

We see at Apple, one of the things we've always felt is that we want to stand at the intersection of the technology and humanities.

We just talk to the side of people that has to add up, you know, numbers and write a letter, but it, there's so much more to it in that.

And I think we're finally, with this digital lifestyle era opening,

going to be addressing those other things that all of us do, you know, some of, every single day.

The iMac hit shelves in 1998.

Curvy and colorful - this computer was an instant global hit.

The design was radically modern.

But the concept arguably traces back to Japan's ancient capital.

Jobs found constant inspiration in Kyoto, and he would visit often.

Traditional gardens, kabuki theater, and much more.

Sometimes we would stay at a "ryokan", inn.

And Steve loved the experience of the tatami bed

and just the whole ceremonial process of how food was served and, you know, just the process of taking a bath.

There were, all of these things were almost ceremonial as much as they were practical.

So, Steve loved the experience of kind of being exposed to the Japanese culture.

And during mealtimes, the food often played second fiddle to the plates.

It was a very quiet experience watching Steve Jobs touch a Japanese ceramic, hold it in his hands,

you know, feel the texture of the surface, and he would ask questions slowly and saying...

Where did the clay come to make this?

What was the artisans thinking?

Had he done things like this before?

He was very inquisitive about what the process was, you know, what motivated the artisan to do this.

Whenever Jobs visited Kyoto he would stop by the galleries to buy ceramics.

He even commissioned one artisan over a period of ten years.

Shakunaga Yukio's pottery dates back centuries.

He remembers meeting Jobs for the first time in 1996.

Jobs picked up Shakunaga's works to get a feel for the shapes.

He wrapped his hands around them.

Then he would do this.

The way he touched them was very gentle.

And he handled them with loving care.

After a long time inspecting the works, Jobs would buy some.

Others would be made to order.

He wanted the usual items like vases, cups and plates.

But he was extremely particular.

I suggested the corners be like this.

But Mr. Jobs said he wants them even rounder.

He was very specific.

When corners gently curve, it's easier to follow the shape with the palm of your hand.

It feels very different.

I think that gave the dishes a certain charm.

Works like this may appear unassuming, but they convey clear intent.

Jobs was pursuing organic forms that make people happy.

Good morning Sir.

Kyoto-based ceramics expert Robert Yellin spent time with Jobs.

One day, he got a call from Apple's Tokyo office asking if he could guide Jobs around some galleries.

Yellin took him to two, and also the home of a private collector.

He was like a child in a candy store.

He was just so excited, and everything was new and fresh, you know.

He goes, "What's that?" And we would take it and he would hold it and he'd go,

"Okay. This is very interesting, I like that."

Jobs was immediately enamored with a 16th century jar.

It had a squat-like form factor known as "uzukumaru."

He was very interested in these, you know, and he would take it and turn it and kind of rub the shoulder a bit,

you know, see how it felt the curve, turn it on the base, see how the clay looked and just like Ooh, Ooh, ok.

He really loved the slope of the shoulders.

Look how natural that is.

It's just so pleasing to the eye.

You know, there's a softness to it.

There's a romantic feel of sorts, you know, it's like rubbing your shoulder,

rubbing your hands over your own shoulders or your girlfriend or wife or whoever, it might be your child.

So he goes, "Yah, I want my products to have that smooth shoulder feel."

So I think he got a lot of hints from looking at these old jars.

The iMac design team sought to create a product that would be cherished by all.

Every part - from the monitor to the mouse - featured beautiful curved lines.

And it heralded an era of similar forms across Apple's entire product line.

I would watch him back in Silicon Valley where he would pick something up in his hands.

It could be a mouse, pointing device, and how he would hold it in his hands, and he would feel it and look at it from every different angle.

And he would study it carefully.

So, for him, he was not interested in consumer research.

He didn't believe in it.

He was interested in in his own ability to be able to determine what materials, what products, what shapes.

So, he had a lot of self-confidence in that.

Steve was focused on, you know, what impression is it gonna make on the user?

How will they feel about it, yeah.

Can we make people aspire to have our products and fall in love with our products?

Jobs was instinctively drawn to tactile shapes.

And he used that sensibility to invent brilliant products.

His passion for curves extended into all areas of the Apple universe.

"Now, this is our store."

"So, the first 25% of the store shows you our entire product line."

Jobs opened the first Apple Store in 2001.

But it was about much more than shifting units.

One of the things we want to do is to create a place where people can learn not just about computer

but more importantly what they can do

rather than just talking about just Megahertz and Mega bites and things like that.

US-based Japanese art director Yagi Tamotsu helped with the store's basic concept.

He says Jobs wanted to create a friendly atmosphere.

When we first started working together, the kidney shapes used for the children's desks were something visually very new.

He most certainly had a preference for those curves,

as opposed to the sharp edges you see nowadays at Apple stores.

Jobs had full-size models made up of all the furniture.

And true to form, he inspected them with more than just his eyes.

He stood up and circled the counter many times,

touching the edges with the palm of his hand.

If the curves felt good, he could come to a decision.

I felt computers on curved tables would leave a deeper impression on the customers than computers on square tables.

That push for making things as simple as possible, and visually memorable.

I feel that was constant throughout the project.

Jobs was diagnosed with cancer in 2003.

But that didn't stop him from creating more groundbreaking products, including the iPhone.

Jobs visited Kyoto again in 2010 for what would be the last time.

He also stopped by Shigaraki, a nearby town long known for ceramics.

He wanted to meet the local craftspeople.

Including master potter Takahashi Rakusai the Fifth.

His family has been producing ceramics for two centuries.

Rakusai remembers Jobs enquiring about "haikaburi" - a prized style of Shigaraki ware.

He suddenly asked while holding a teacup, and I could sense he was a pottery lover.

With haikaburi, ash from the burnt firewood becomes embedded into the clay.

The results can be stunning.

Artisans spend their lives refining the technique.

But no matter how close to perfection they get, much of the process is left to fate.

It takes two days for the kiln to cool down.

We then take out each work.

If I get just one or two good pieces, I'm thrilled.

Rakusai was glad to meet someone as knowledgeable and passionate as Jobs.

He bought a large bowl just like this.

The best one I ever created.

It's covered with lots of nicely colored ash.

I was happy that he singled it out.

I could tell he really loves and understands what we do.

Jobs had a strong appreciation for the work that goes into making beautiful objects.

He took inspiration from Japanese culture in various means.

You know, obviously one was pottery and the beautiful slope of curve of shoulders of ancient jars.

You know, the carpenters of old Japan, they made something look very simple like this room,

but it's a very complicated procedure that they were able to produce.

Looking at something which you perceive as simple beauty,

but there's a lot of consciousness and technique and thought and design and many failures I imagine,

to create something so simply beautiful.

It all sounds a lot like Apple.

He said what we do at Apple will have no compromises.

So yes, we'll simplify.

We'll find the essence that brings out the perfection of the vision.

But we will take our time and do it right.

That isn't like the United States, you know,

we create things quickly and they may be popular and then they may disappear.

And that's not what Steve saw.

He saw continuity through time with the Japanese culture and always a purpose.

And everything he did at Apple had a purpose.

There was nothing accidental.

Steve loved beautiful products and the distinction between a beautiful product like the Sony Walkman.

Or a beautiful art object.

Like a ceramic.

Those had a continuity in terms of the principles that were involved.

So, Steve was fascinated by the fact that artisans would spend a lifetime creating a certain kind of product and.

Whether it was a print or whether it was a ceramic and he just had so much respect for that

and what he wanted to do as a business leader was to commercialize those ideas.

Sculley invite us on a tour of his home.

So, I wanted to take you into my office and show you something that has great memories for me of my time together with Steve Jobs.

And I keep it in my office because Steve made a diorama for me as a surprise on the 1st anniversary of my coming to Apple.

A diorama, handmade by Jobs.

Apple and IBM are on the up.

But there's also a Japanese flag.

Perhaps Jobs was saving a little room at the top for a friendly competitor like Sony.

And there was a great consistency, I think, in Steve's life with things that he learned and observed, particularly in Japan.

He loved the food, you know.

He loved visiting there.

He loved the art.

He loved the craftsmanship of artisans.

And each of these things found important ways of shaping the life that Steve chose to live.

Jobs kept a shin-hanga in his study.

And his daughter wrote in detail
about his final days.

She said there were two framed prints
on the wall by Hasui.

On October 5, 2011, he died.
Steve Jobs was 56.