無辺の円の概念The Boundless Circle: The Disappearance of ma under societyism

A circle with boundaries is always regulated by those boundaries. The concepts that emerge within it never escape the confines of this regulation. These boundaries are both internal and external, and they are not produced by outside compulsion. No one is exploited and no one is stripped of anything.

These very boundaries have become a grave sickness at the heart of Japan. When rulers set the boundaries at will, we lose our freedom. But the boundary is not the villain. The problem lies in how it is used.

Looking back over Japan’s cultural history, the boundary was a source from which culture was created at a high level. The border of a tatami mat and the threshold of a Japanese room are examples: the very idea of a “boundary” created everything, from the distance between hearts to the relation between oneself, others, and nature. Hidden there is the culture of ma (間), the interval, tied to shitsurae.

Seen from a Western vantage, Japan today looks like bureaucratic totalitarianism or socialism. The one account that convinces me is “societyism,” described at the end of the 2000s by the philosopher Tetsuji Yamamoto. It goes beyond socialism: a state in which the production and reproduction of society itself become the purpose of everything.

As societyism is realized, the human being as one who lives a life disappears. Faces are erased from people, and over the years relations between them decay.

Japan now has reached the lowest point of this process. Because every face has been erased, no one can be trusted. The only yardstick left is what society has conferred on people who have become social agents: numbers, academic background, employer, title. What passes between people is not trust but social credit.

Seen another way, a society that ought to have been a circle with a boundary, held within, became boundless without anyone noticing and extended outward. It has succeeded in expanding so far that it has internalized even the great overall concept of Japan and the Japanese.

A society that runs on its own like this is troublesome because, while using its boundlessness, it places arrangements everywhere that keep people from escaping internalization, and because it makes the internalized believe that if the circle is stretched to the utmost there must be an absolute boundary beyond it, a “horizon.”

The reality, though it may sound contradictory, is that it is both boundless and bounded. A society that uses the boundary gives the internalized rule after rule, and by internalizing people in those countless rules it leads them to active subordination, which robs them of their humanity. The result, in an ironic sense, is the most efficient ultra-totalitarianism.

To anyone whose ideal is autocracy, this would look like the ideal mechanism. Perfect control costs no budget, and no cutting-edge technology of management is needed.

From this viewpoint, present-day Japan is not statism, ethnic nationalism, emperor-centrism, nationalism, or socialism. Societyism is the only reality. In a sense, the political ideologies of the modern process from prewar to postwar were all gathered up into making society the purpose, and were preparation for it.

The internalized lose their humanity and, as social agents, consume their whole lives. When the point of a problem is turned toward society, society at that instant turns boundless and vanishes. Since the sickness that unhinges people cannot be grasped at all, only an “unaccountable anxiety” raises the tension and breaks down real life.

Meanwhile, people around the clock receive countless closed circles at once, and in the exchange of an endless loop of production and reproduction they are utterly exhausted and cornered.

At this point ma, once an important cultural concept of Japan, became unnecessary. The important cultural ma of Japan, such as the burnt-out fields of the post-war years and the back alleys of cities, was lost entirely.

So people in Japan lost ma in real life and, ahead of the world, withdrew all at once into digital space in search of the lost ma. From here hikikomori (引き籠り), social withdrawal, rose sharply. Unsettlingly, hikikomori has come to be used as it is in languages around the world.

Today, many countries have entered the last stage of a strong reaction against a large movement toward socialism. But from Japan one can say that the real problem lies beyond socialism, in societyism. Societyism can be described as a world in which everyone in society stirs as a bearer of one system of rules. It is the inhuman world an autocrat dreams of.

Once societyism begins, society itself can no longer be grasped, because the “circle” and the “boundless circle” move at the same time. Once this stage is entered no one can escape, and the purpose of everything becomes society. There are no human beings there, only the remnants of modernized humans. That is the form that appears under societyism.

How could a boundary, which should be limited, expand until it destroys people’s lives? One answer appeared in Takaaki Yoshimoto’s The Theory of the Communal Illusion (1968).