Japan - Utopia or Illusion?

Too much cooperation makes Jack a dull boy...

I just got back from Japan, and what really struck me on this trip was how well the Japanese cooperate with one another. Social cooperation is an essential ingredient for a flourishing civilization, and they have seemingly solved for it — despite few trashcans or police, there’s no littering or petty crime. Their trains are punctual to the minute, there’s no one jumping the ticket barriers or blaring crap music from tinny phone speakers. They don’t even jaywalk! Everything is clean, quiet, civilized and safe. 

When you contrast this to the tragedy-of-the-commons style degradation we’re seeing in many U.S. inner cities: trash everywhere (despite plenty of trashcans), open-air drug use and theft, barely functioning public transport… Tokyo feels like a metropolitan utopia, and the Japanese like enlightened beings.

But have they truly unlocked paradise?

Well, they’ve certainly unlocked orderliness: they have countless social rules, and almost every citizen abides by them. And unlike other “orderly” nations (which are usually draconian totalitarian regimes), Japan’s social cohesion is a bottom-up process, emerging from each citizen’s deep inner aversion to social shame. As such, no one defects to Moloch, the commons stay pristine, and the nation maintains a relatively functioning democracy. An impressive feat for sure.

But alas, it seems even self-imposed orderliness comes with a cost. Japan has a disproportionately high suicide rate for its GDP. It also suffers from a growing epidemic of “hikikomori” — hermetic adults who have opted out of the pressures of normal working or social life to live in isolation in their childhood bedrooms. And given the nation’s plummeting marriage and birth rates, the culture itself may be on a suicide trajectory. 

So as rosy as it seems for us visitors, I worry the Japanese are stuck in a local maximum. By prioritizing social cooperation above all else, you lose a lot of time judging others, or shaming yourself. Such a mindset also limits your ability to experiment for fear of looking bad. And without any experimentation, a society inevitably stagnates.

One of my favourite sci-fi worlds is the Culture Series; a galactic-level techno-protopia that manages to accommodate both virtues of personal freedom and social cooperation across trillions of individuals. Of course, much of that adaptive power comes from their technological superiority (it’s much easier to live and let live when you can just hop on a superintelligent ship to another planet if you’re not happy with your current one).

But the Culture’s real magic lies in its governance structures. It’s simply the best at finding Win-Wins through coordination: its citizens are free to live as competitively or cooperatively as they want; it only steps in when you or your group start seriously threatening the freedoms of others, at which point you might find yourself “Slap-Droned” (an intelligent, autonomous police drone is assigned to follow you 24/7 and intervene whenever you’re about to do the bad thing). You don’t even have to go to jail!

From my understanding of the U.S. Constitution, this isn’t that far from the ideals of liberty, egalitarianism and limited government the Founding Fathers had in mind. The big difference here being the U.S. doesn’t have God-level abundance up its sleeve (at least not yet), and thus the tragedy-of-the-commons remains a very real problem. If you’re soft on crime or pollution in a very egocentric, non-Japanese populace, you end up with Downtown SF and decades of toxic PFAS in the water supply.

So, IMO, any future builder worth their salt should take inspiration from both U.S. and Japanese cultures. Design a win-win governance structure whose rules optimize for social cohesion and individual freedoms. For cooperation and competition. For safety and growth. While these might sound like dichotomies, they don’t have to be: a rectangle and a circle turn out to be equally real and co-existent when you step off the 2D page and see the 3D cylinder they’re just shadows of. 

In the same way, I suspect many of our society’s paradoxical struggles can dissolve if enough of us find a sufficiently high-dimensional view of the situation. In fact, I’m so sure of this, I made it one of Win-Win’s Ten Principles!¹

So friends, what 3D perspective would you like to see in the world?

1. See Principle #9: “While trade-offs can exist, beware of false dichotomies. A paradox often dissolves when viewed from higher dimensions.”