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Musings Report 2025-23 6-7-25 Japan: Social Inflexibility and Decline
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Japan: Social Inflexibility and Decline
I have stood in the late autumn chill of Niigata Prefecture, pondering the overgrown ruins of the rural house my wife's grandmother inhabited as a child, before she immigrated to Hawaii as a teenage picture-bride.
I studied the language, literature, geography and culture of Japan academically, have Japanese friends, and have many fond memories of travels there--the local trains winding through the untouristed countryside, watching a friend's aunt make noodles from scratch on a well-used wooden cutting board set on the kitchen floor, a can of hot coffee from a vending machine on a freezing rural train platform.
This is to say I am familiar with Japan but claim no expertise.
I do know one thing: children define the future of Japan, and of every other nation.
My first visit to Japan was in 1992, 33 years ago. Japan's massive credit-asset bubble in real estate and stocks had popped in 1989, effectively ending four decades of economic ascendency.
The issues I'm discussing in this post were already visible in 1992: we walked past abandoned elementary schools, for example, and shifted uncomfortably when a distant relatives' daughter erupted in an emotional tirade at her parents at the dining table. The other daughter had already escaped to Tokyo. The tensions were embedded and real.
We met another distant relative who had married an Indonesian woman, as the pool of Japanese women willing to live and work in rural Japan was shrinking even then. They seemed happy together, and it was nice to speak English with his wife, as my schoolboy Nihongo was occasionally useful (or risible) but woefully inadequate for real conversation.
We live in a world that has been so financialized that we're no longer even aware that "the economy" isn't all that matters. The structure of the society--its norms, values, cultural mythologies and taboos--all shape and define its economy.
Much of my work can be understood as an attempt to discern how American mythologies have generated the financial dysfunctions that have reached extremes that are, beneath the surface cheerleading of "growth," destabilizing America's social order.
When I turn this analytic lens on Japan, I see a culture that is inflexible in ways that are visibly undermining its economy and society, yet few feel any urgency to examine these inflexibilities with fresh eyes. Instead, there is a kind of fatalistic acceptance that some things can't be changed, and so there are what I call policy tweaks, modest efforts that leave the true sources of mal-adaptation untouched.
As far as I can tell, extreme social isolation, Hikikomori in Japanese, did not exist as a recognized social disorder 40 years ago in Japan's boom years of the 1980s. Bullying has long been an unspoken reality in Japanese life, but the response of withdrawal--Hikikomori--reflects something more.
There is much to admire about Japan and its culture, and these admirable qualities are well known. Less well known are the mal-adaptive, dysfunctional qualities, the underbelly of the "Japanese Miracle" of economic expansion of the 1950s through the 1980s.
'Marriage feels like a hostage situation, and motherhood a curse': Japanese author Sayaka Murata.
Why Japan's in Trouble with Female Hikikomori (6 min)
What is a friendship marriage? From pals to platonic partners, Japanese couples embrace unions without romance or sex.
Life at the heart of Japan’s lonely deaths epidemic: ‘I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried’; They are an important reminder of what happens when community ties give way to social isolation.
‘They refused to let me go’: Japanese workers turn to resignation agencies to quit jobs.
Birth rates fall to all-time lows in Japan and South Korea.
Why These Japanese Cities are Returning to Nature.
Johatsu--Vanishing without a trace in Japan. (47 min)
The last video is especially eye-opening for those who have only seen the orderly surface of Japanese culture. Spousal abuse and having to disappear to avoid being hunted down and beaten--and the official regulations that recognize the need to disappear--these are realities that are not mentioned because they cause a loss of face, something to be avoided at all costs in Asian cultures.
What I see is a culture of work that hasn't adapted to the modern era. The long work hours and indentured servitude to employers that fueled the Miracle Economy in the 1950s and 1960s is still firmly in place. Japanese men typically work absurd hours and as a result have very little time or energy to be fathers and husbands.
While various feel-good counter-examples are trumpeted as evidence this is changing, it's mostly veneer: In the real world, men are still transferred every few years without regard for their family life, they come home late and are exhausted.
Mothers are under tremendous pressure to deliver up a childhood of success, so that their child doesn't sink into the dismal economic status of insecurity and low pay. Women who marry are on the hook not just to have dinner ready for their husband when he finally makes it home, they're also obligated to take care of their own parents as they age and their husband's parents, if he's the one delegated that responsibility.
The net result of these inflexible cultural norms, mythologies and taboos is women are eschewing marriage and having children on a scale that is shockingly at odds with the Japan of the 1960s and 1970s.
Yes, this trend is global, and for many of the same reasons: inflexible cultural norms, economic precarity and stagnation.
Yes, there are bright spots in Japan, cities that are devoting resources to helping young families with financial and social programs, and making the city more child-friendly.
But this is window-dressing if the father gets transferred to a distant prefecture or has to work a grueling six-days a week schedule. If all the childcare is on the mother, nothing's actually changed.
All these inflexible norms and taboos have economic consequences. Here are two charts of Japan's central government spending and revenues. The aging population is predictably weighing on the budget, as social security and healthcare costs rise as the workforce shrinks.
Japanese Public Finance Fact Sheet. (Ministry of Finance)
As someone who has studied Japan for over 50 years, it's both surprising that nobody seems willing to discuss radically reordering the nature of work in Japan and not at all surprising that this cultural norm is still sacrosanct 50 years later.
One of our Japanese friends retired as an executive who'd spent his career working for a major Japanese corporation. Having worked around the world, his English was excellent and his worldview was broadminded. He described how Japanese corporate culture was hidebound and inflexible, and it frustrated him. No one seemed able to change anything.
People see the need for changes in social norms, values, mythologies and taboos, but no one seems able to make any changes. We accept the decay and decline caused by outdated, mal-adaptive norms and values as if they're fate rather than social constructs we create out of thin air.
Many societies are in need of a reordering of inflexible social norms and values. Our obsessive focus on economic-financial statistics serves to distract us from the need for fundamental social change rather than PR policy tweaks and feel-good trivialized counter-examples.
Highlights of the Blog
The Ratchet Effect: Easy to Spend More, Spending Less Triggers Collapse 6/3/25
What AI Can't Do Faster, Better, or Cheaper Than Humans 6/2/25
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Our new fiber-optic Internet service failed after two weeks, and it took a phone call in which I said I was canceling the service to get past the useless overseas tech support. Sadly, this is the norm in Corporate America. The good news is the local employees are doing their best and were unfailingly polite and responsive. Mechanical connectors had failed, now the process is to "weld" them with a gizmo that melts the plastic sleeving of the cables.
I washed my "work boots," still have a lot of miles left....
What's on the Book Shelf
Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (Bridget Read)
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
Going to an office and pretending to work: A business that’s booming in China (via R.P. and C.A.)
‘Do you have a family?’: midlife with no kids, ageing parents – and no crisis-- Korean-American writer...
‘No smartphones before 14; no social media until 16’: The Anxious Generation author on how to fight back against big tech.
It’s my goal to live to 100 – and it’s not just diet and exercise that will help me achieve it.
‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects.
The 50 Coolest Cars Ever Made--Road & Track writing at its best... My quibbles: no Avanti, no Porsche 356, no Camero, no Deux Chevaux...
How protests over designer handbags threw Mongolia into political crisis.
AI Friends Are Not Your Friends, Here's Why.
It’s Summer Vacation Time. Tourists Are Saying No to America.
Why Nations Go to War? A Researcher Analyzed 94 Wars and Found One Common Reason.
AI: "90% Marketing 10% Reality." Linus Torvalds,,,
When ‘Trickle Down’ Hits the Rich: It was one thing when only the poor were affected, but now it’s about to hit everyone.
Five Questions: Jim Mitre on Artificial General Intelligence and National Security.
"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things." Rainer Maria Rilke
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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