公開の新時代：相互監視社会の行方The New Era of Public Disclosure: The Fate of a Mutual Surveillance Society

Lately a certain method has begun to run rampant in Japan's social control: "public disclosure" (公表).

This tendency grew during the pandemic. The government's basic stance then was to make a "request" rather than to show legal force over the people. That may look odd from other countries, but it was quite effective in a Japanese society that had already achieved a surveillance society, beyond a managed one, not through state control but through the people's mutual watching of one another.

Having tasted success, the government and local governments are building post-pandemic Japanese society as an "emergency that is never declared." Most recently, Fukushima announced that from March it would publish the names of individuals who break the rules for putting out garbage, and there was a report that the "AI law" the government aims to submit to the Diet in February would publish the names of malicious businesses.

Disclosure may look absurd at first glance, but in a Japanese society where the individual does not exist, that is, where there is effectively no privacy, it is enormously effective.

In the line of this history stands mura-hachibu (村八分) of the village community (*). In closed village societies on an island country, when there was a problem, a person was cast out of the community and driven into a situation where, in effect, living was impossible.

*: Mura-hachibu is a form of sanction within a traditional Japanese community: help is given only for the remaining two parts, such as ceremonies of marriage and funeral, and ordinary exchange is cut off.

Moreover, modern mura-hachibu is not limited to control of the nation; it runs in parallel in the control of citizens in a place of residence, and at one's company. Seen broadly, in contemporary Japan everyone belongs to a socialized community at the national level and the civic level, and there is nowhere to flee.

In Japanese society, a single failure is the end, and there is no next chance. So no one can take a challenge, and people have been driven into a faceless state without self, not allowed to state their own views. Everyone follows an invisible code more binding than the law, and demands the same obedience from others.

Until the pandemic such things happened only to famous people and powerful companies, but now Japan's social control is at last stepping into the individual. In a few years a society in which publishing individual names is commonplace will surely be realized. People will then fear failure more than ever and be able to do nothing, and Japan is expected to become more incapacitated than ever.

In other words, the present state is that settling in Japan has become an extreme risk. The only way past this wall is to leave the country. Those who cannot move have no choice but to raise the intensity of this mutual surveillance day by day, and then society may enter an unknown state beyond its current tension, where events beyond imagination break out one after another.

This tendency is still only in an early stage, but I strongly feel the risk rising year by year. Will this social tendency never change?

It is already impossible for Japan to put its own self-cleansing to work and change this tendency by itself. But one way remains: external pressure. It includes the political or economic pressure of other countries, but in the broader sense, what seems realistic ahead is a large-scale natural disaster.

Considering historical cycles, an earthquake directly beneath the capital in Kanto, centered on Tokyo, and a great Nankai Trough earthquake centered on Kansai through Tokai are thought extremely likely in the near future.

Once, the burnt-out ruins of the cities after defeat in the Second World War in effect swept away the society of the prewar and wartime years. That nothing but a force from outside, like a natural disaster, can be found to restart present-day Japan: this situation tells how deep the problem runs.