サービスとホスピタリティの違いService and Hospitality Are Not the Same

Year by year I notice that many people confuse service with hospitality. Foreign tourists, for example, praise Japan as a country of service, but what it is, in fact, is a highly mechanized society in which every service is provided uniformly. There the human face has vanished, and not one person is truly alive.

Japan today follows manuals handed out by someone else more thoroughly than almost anywhere in the world. For a tourist-level encounter it looks like a world that has built a highly advanced service society, but live here for the medium or long term and everyone understands that this is the root of deteriorating human relations. Service rests on a business in which employees, bound to the convenience of the company that hands out the manual, press on customers norms closed inside that company.

In that sense Japan is the most advanced service society in the world. So in the lives of the people who live here, the individual is always absent. A reality has formed in which faces are erased and only an abstracted, vague existence runs rampant, uniformly. I spent the year-end and New Year in Tokyo, and it seemed to me that this inverted norm of service had at last begun to show itself quite clearly as employees' irritation toward customers.

In other words, modern Japan can no longer deliver service, which was its lifeline.

Hospitality fails to hold, to begin with, because in the relation between provider and customer, the two do not share a high level of cultivation. However cultivated the provider, if the customer is nowhere near that level, hospitality does not take shape and tips over into service. The essence of overtourism, a problem around the world, is in the end the irritation of the people who live in a place when everything tips over into service and hospitality cannot be established.

Worse, the best has become the worst: there are still quite a few people who believe the problem will be solved if the customer is only enlightened.

When faces are erased at the root, individual existence is nullified. Judgment at that level is made by a notion someone has already generalized, such as “Japan is excellent at service.” That cannot be, in fact, but Japanese society and its tourists work such generalizations on each other. Since there is no individual existence in Japanese society, a subject who tries to have one is forced into a serious struggle.

In Japanese society the individual cannot win this struggle over the subject. Without exception the subject becomes a corpse. Still, it is a fact that a few people refuse this and hold an autonomous subject. Against them, society thoroughly places arrangements everywhere to make them social agents, and keeps up the pressure at every hour.

One goes to a company from nine to six and spends the days doing nothing, as a corpse, and outside those hours too one is forced to be socialized as a corpse. What makes this possible is a device that makes you think, “this bothers me.” By stretching such devices everywhere, it produces a state in which one thinks of nothing but society twenty-four hours a day, and corners people.

Even a person with an autonomous subject is entangled over the years, and so from the 1990s to the present, Japan has fallen into a state in which no future whatsoever is proposed from it.

I too have wrestled with this reality. I have escaped the state of societyism, where one is made to think about the twenty-four-hour society, and made a healthy state in which I put my effort into thinking about the future. In other places that are still on the way to realizing societyism, it will become a social problem in time. But what happens in the transition from socialism to societyism is the wholesale abandonment of the will to think about the conditions for the possibility of the future. In the basic nature of societyism, doing nothing becomes the only way of doing something.

That is, not thinking is thinking, and not living is living. Reach this state and a complete service society can be realized, but hospitality, the pairing of one individual subject with another, is lost. The public and the private are erased there, and everything shifts to the space of the social and of privacy. Then faces vanish, complete abstraction becomes general, and a being robbed of life loses the strength to live and soon becomes like a corpse. This is where societyism ends.

Leaving this is not easy, but what matters is that, in any country, to look critically at the modern one must know the premodern well. And to think about the future one must know antiquity well.

With this wisdom, by continuing to act out an advanced dehumanization, we can come to recognize living again.

Over the year-end and New Year I felt again that Japan's societyism has reached a harsh dimension, and that society has at last gone past maturity and begun to age into senility. Human beings are left behind entirely, and only society grows old: that is Japan today. Travelers come to Japan and make a journey through a society where no one exists.

Japanese society is now, in effect, an uninhabited society.

Japan as an Uninhabited Society: No One Is in Tokyo