移動の季節と変わる気候A Season of Travel and a Changing Climate

Lately I have been moving between Osaka, Bangkok and Tokyo, and what wears on me most at this time of year is the shift in climate. The Japanese autumn that once eased gently into winter is already a thing of the past. Now the weather lurches from summer to winter and back to summer again before tipping into an unsettled winter, and even for someone who looks after his health, the strain on body and mind is severe. Climate change runs in cycles, so none of this began today. But if we limit ourselves to "Japanese culture" in the sense the world understands it now, the source that nourished it was the graceful, gradual passing of the four seasons.

Now that those seasons are lost, I keep wondering what will become of Japan and its people. Put differently, Japanese culture as everyone understands it has already ended. When I visit Tokyo, I see crowds of tourists rapidly consuming the Japanese culture of the 1990s, a culture that was thirty years ahead of the world. To me they look like the debt left by our failure to create a new Japanese culture.

Yet we must not forget that our ancestors once faced climate change fiercer than anything today, changed their lives entirely to adapt, and survived a brutal age with great skill. They were the Jomon people. By Jomon people I do not mean a single tribe spread across the archipelago. I mean the people who lived on the Japanese islands during the era defined as the Jomon period. If we learn from them and change our way of seeing, everyone in Japan today seems to me to face a task that compresses history: to change radically the way of life and the values we have built, cultivating and exercising our sensibility along the slow rhythm of the changing seasons, and to ask how the Jomon way of living can be taken into the present and carried further.

Bangkok should have been in its mild dry season, but during my three days there the rain poured down as if it were the rainy season, and the air was thick with humidity. When I moved on to Tokyo, there was no autumn at all. I shivered through winter cold and soon fell ill. Japanese folklore studies called the non-settled people who were once the majority in many parts of the world "drifters" (漂流民). Considering climate and social conditions, the way of life of the drifter, who moves in search of food and the best place to live, is beyond doubt growing more important every year in the twenty-first century, an age of planetary risk.

The problems of the modern world are especially grave. There is the radioactive fallout from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, wars and conflicts in many regions, and constant geopolitical risk in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. Each of us has to imagine every kind of risk, prepare for it, and keep experimenting with a forward-looking way of life that can respond flexibly to whatever happens. The answer does not lie in the long-lasting settled life.

Above all, my frequent trips to northeastern Tohoku in recent years have shown me that nature, the basic operating system for human survival, has changed more than anyone thinks. The most telling symbol is the string of bear attacks across Japan this year. Bears have of course lived in Japan throughout history, the brown bear only in Hokkaido and the Asian black bear throughout Honshu. As I remember it, the number of bears was a worry only a few years ago because it was falling. In the past few years they have bred in large numbers and moved steadily into human living areas, causing friction. But as someone who has watched northern Tohoku, one of the country's main bear habitats, as a fixed observation point, I can say that what is happening now showed up as signs several years ago.

Even in the provinces, life in the city (a life centered on concrete) has become the norm. Most people in Japan have no occasion to touch nature, and they have lost this sense that runs back to ancient times. So the risk from bears seems to have suddenly risen this year. Having watched Japan from a fixed point for a long time, I also feel that the bear problem is the entrance through which management systems decided far from the field will be applied, unchanged, to other social problems.

Already there is movement. The leader of Sanseito, the party that surged in the July 20, 2025 House of Councillors election and is labeled far-right worldwide, is Sohei Kamiya. In the four months since, he has moved quickly toward far-right parties and right-wing populists in Europe and America, led by the AfD, meeting them repeatedly and strengthening international ties. In the Budget Committee of the House of Councillors on the 13th of this week, Prime Minister Takaichi and Kamiya debated for the first time, and it matters that Kamiya told the prime minister firmly, "Let Japan decide Japan's affairs." He did not say it outright, but we can read this as urging distance from the influence of the United States, which since the Second World War has always stood behind prime ministers from the Liberal Democratic Party with strong voice and decision-making power. That is probably Kamiya's real intent, and I agree with it.

In other words, the future of Japan that the leader of Sanseito sees is not "Nipponjin First," as it is framed in the current context of the immigration debate. It lies in distance from the United States. A movement to discard Japan's status as a dependency of the United States and become independent is beginning. It will take a long time, and resistance from those who hold vested interests in Japan is unavoidable. That is exactly why they are drawing closer to a Europe that has likewise begun to walk toward a future at a distance from the United States.

Indeed, this week Prime Minister Takaichi's provocative remarks about Taiwan have drawn a fierce reaction from China. Her statement that provoked China, that Japan could respond with the Self-Defense Forces if China attacked Taiwan, has no basis at all, and anyone in Japan can see at a glance that it is impossible. A prime minister who says so calmly something the public itself knows to be impossible exposes how little international sense she has.

Many people in Japan misunderstand this, and so it is not widely known internationally, but the Japan-US Security Treaty says nowhere that US forces will fight alongside Japanese forces in an emergency. It says only that the matter will be put before the US Congress. Yet for some reason people in Japan still believe the US military will defend Japan in a crisis. Thinking plainly, that cannot be. Given the prime minister's remarks this time, and as is indeed accelerating of late, the picture that emerges is one in which US forces (Yokota Air Base) handle only the chain of command, while Japan's Self-Defense Forces and the South Korean military actually fight to help Taiwan.

It is not understood at all, but to see the future of a Taiwan contingency from the Japanese side, we should look not at the moves of Japan, Taiwan and China but at South Korea, which faces a national fiscal crisis and an accelerating decline in births. If South Korea reaches a national dead end, it may unify the peninsula, North and South, and then draw close to China. A Taiwan contingency would then effectively become a problem for Japan and Taiwan alone. Meanwhile, with internal strife intensifying in the United States, East Asia will be the last thing on its mind, and it is likely to transfer to China the interests it has held in Japan, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan since the war. This is a possible future in which Japan's suzerain changes from the United States to China (and the same goes for Taiwan). In the worst case, nuclear war in East Asia is conceivable. As long as the stalemate continues in which Japan cannot decide its own affairs, the future for everyone living in Japan, Japanese or foreign, lies in being able to move at any time, with earthquake, volcano and tsunami risks in mind as well. The early omen of all this is, in fact, the bear.

Unprecedented damage is already occurring in many places, and bears are moving widely into areas where they never appeared before and expanding their range. In response, the government and local authorities are moving toward discussions that include requesting the Self-Defense Forces. Strangely, they claim in many quarters to have "measures to prevent contact between bears and people," but such talk is surely armchair theory. Needless to say, the most frightening thing is not the bear. It is that Japan still gives a voice, and the power to push things forward by armchair theory, to people who have never seen a bear and never gone out into nature. This surfaced in its worst form with the Fukushima nuclear accident after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and since there is no sign of learning from it, something even more tragic will be repeated. At a time when anti-elite and anti-bureaucratic currents are spreading worldwide and system renewal is being plotted, this is plainly anachronistic.

So what happens? However much bear countermeasures are devised in a bear-free indoor space in the city, they will never reach the heart of the problem. People in the regions hit by bear attacks now say they live with daily anxiety, hesitate to go outside, and risk their lives just to work, and it has become clear that they do not even have the option of moving as circumstances require. Going out means the risk of meeting a bear, yet they stay where they are and begin days of living in fear. When I visited a friend in a provincial city in Iwate Prefecture five years ago, I was told it was dangerous to walk at night because of the risk of meeting a bear, and I remember it again now. The movement had already begun around 2020. Meanwhile, people in large metropolitan areas such as Tokyo come to feel anxiety and fear about bears from the news that reaches them each day, and that urban anxiety and fear spreads to the regions through the mass media, which still hold strong influence, so that even people in the regions, who have long lived alongside bears, are tormented by anxiety and fear. It is an abnormal structure, and it is the same structure as the pandemic of the early 2020s.

Behind bears moving this far into human living areas, a variety of problems are tangled together, but the basic premise goes unseen. The fact that industrial society has destroyed the operating system of nature is debated worldwide and has won strong support among the young. Even more fundamentally, I believe, the root lies in the modern industrial system having taken nature far too lightly. Before the industrial destruction itself, the way of thinking that led to it is the essential problem, and as long as that is not corrected, every countermeasure is only symptomatic treatment.

What is happening now, then, is that the operating system of nature has changed, and the bears, repeatedly on the move like drifters, are showing us the signs. Even the bears are in a stage of searching for a new way to survive beyond the old operating system of nature. So however much people pretend to debate in armchair theory, city dwellers will never turn their eyes to the operating system itself, and no amount of discussion will bring a solution. It is plain to see that it will end in rash action. In recent days the claim has been made that bear numbers will be limited and managed, but that cannot be done. In reality, what will matter is the decision of people living in the new habitats where bear damage is frequent to abandon their homes and move. The problem is not limiting the number of bears. The operating system of nature itself has changed, and a backlash from nature has begun against humanity, which has devoted itself to destruction. What matters is that each of us reflects on what the bear is teaching us. This cannot be a problem for the Japanese alone.

What the bears teach us is simple and clear. Since the operating system of nature has changed, maintaining the familiar style of "life as it has been" is out of the question, and the only way to survive is to adapt to this change quickly, take the initiative, and keep moving. I personally feel that this sudden collapse of the existing rules strongly echoes the movement of the age of AI. In a sense, the bears began to drift ahead of humans, and because that drift shifted their habitats, the animals living there (humans) are being forced to drift too. Considering the speed of the destruction of nature, though, even that is too slow. The bears, who grasp the danger by animal instinct and act at once, teach us, as everything does, that the old rules no longer hold. They expose the fact that the operating system has changed and human beings have been unable to respond.

Can the people of Japan become drifters as they once were? Unfortunately, the chance that they will do so of their own accord is extremely low. Becoming a drifter depends on many basics of the modern world, and the most striking of these is digital skill. But the image of Japan as strong in the digital field is ancient history. Japanese society today is weak in its digital footing, and watching the younger generation especially, I feel that the system itself has failed to keep up with the times. It is worth noting that in Japan, unlike other countries, the spread of new technology has always been triggered by a major disaster. The 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake triggered the explosive spread of personal computers and the internet, and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake triggered the explosive spread of social media, starting with Twitter.

I remember both triggers well. Before the Great East Japan Earthquake, the people in Japan using Facebook, Instagram or Twitter were limited to a few returnees from overseas and people who had studied abroad, mostly living in Tokyo. I remember learning from such friends in Tokyo myself. When the earthquake struck, I was in the middle of an office district in Tokyo. As the buildings swayed, most mobile phone communication went down, email did not arrive, and no government information came through at all. What worked in real time in that situation was Twitter (and public telephones). Right after the quake, all transport in Tokyo stopped, and information about how to get home and about recovery appeared on Twitter, again and again, ahead of the government announcements. After this disaster, social media spread explosively in Japan, but since there was no discussion of literacy, I still feel that the use of social media in Japan lacks literacy entirely. Travelers from Europe and America, where literacy is debated and legal regulation is strong, may be surprised, but Japan's main source of information is still Yahoo!, which is regulated in other countries, and cookies, a technology of the past, still hold great sway.

Still, this view that a disaster triggers the spread of new technology applies only at the level of the majority of consumers. Visit Japan today and you will understand: because of the falling birthrate and aging population, an outdated system that still forces twentieth-century norms on the young remains strong, and the young people's digital skills are strikingly low. This system without speed is almost comical, like answering today's accelerating communication speeds in advanced countries with the speeds of twenty years ago. A large cause is that Japanese companies, which once stood in a leading position worldwide in data and communications, reversed course, and that is of course also a matter for the people who work in such companies. Here lies a troublesome side of Japan, the first country in the world to enter a super-aged society.

In fact, the retained earnings of Japanese companies, about 130 trillion yen at the end of the 1990s, grew to 600 trillion yen in 2023. I was born in 1991, so I remember my father through the 1990s. Even as the bubble economy collapsed, depending on the industry there was considerable freedom of discretion, and the faces of people at work were full of life. But with this growth in retained earnings too, as the year 2000 approached after the bubble burst, a shareholder-first structure that thought of nothing but going public grew stronger, and it ended up sapping the motivation of employees. Employees of companies whose retained earnings pile up on their own then judged it beneficial to belong to the company and do nothing, and they devoted themselves to strengthening a system that pushed out, one after another, anyone who threatened their careers, which nurtured today's great problem. Because this attitude was the majority, liquidity, the key to the digital age, went unused, and the system turned into a liability that fights to preserve past custom. Digital skill then fell to an extreme low.

For example, home computer ownership in the United States and Europe exceeds 90 percent, while Japan lingers just under 60 percent. Yet on the Japanese side, the figure is portrayed through the media as an excellent number, ignoring international standards, as though it showed a population skilled in the digital. According to a survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 87.2 percent of people owned a personal computer in 2005, a figure that had fallen to 65.3 percent by 2023. At first glance the spread of smartphones seems a reasonable explanation, but inside, the data can also be read as showing that the drive to learn cutting-edge digital skills has faded. In less than twenty years, the structure of society stopped encouraging the learning of new, advanced digital skills, and a bureaucratic structure of dependence on the existing system and self-protection spread widely.

The biggest problem is that computer ownership among people in their twenties in Japan has changed drastically. Among Japanese in their twenties, those who own a personal computer have become the minority, and even among those in their thirties only about half do. Before we even ask how to use the possibilities of data and communications accelerating worldwide, Japanese society as a whole, old and young alike, has not opened enough places to learn digital skills. Looking at the people I meet, I see no chance to learn digital skills or literacy, and the risk of pouring personal information into large corporations is not shared. I routinely see people younger than I am unable to use AI or no-code tools, and this is a problem that comes before standing on the ground of the AI debates under way around the world. Taking this into account, it is clear that the stagnation of this country's society will deepen.

More generally, discussion of how AI will transform social structures is racing ahead, but before that, we humans need to live in tune with the operating system of nature. Now that this basic operating system is shifting, unless we adapt at once and update our own operating system (our way of thinking), we cannot make use of anything, AI or any new technology. Failing to understand this current leads to a comical reality. In the name of bear countermeasures, there are even companies boasting that they will strap loudspeakers to drones and fly them, blaring dogs barking at full volume to keep bears from entering human living areas. This idea comes from outdated thinking that cannot see that bears are fleeing and moving because the operating system of nature is broken, and it is far too poor. That such ideas appear shows that the old image of Japan as skilled in technology no longer exists.

Personally, I feel the bear problem exposes everything Japan has ignored for the past twenty or thirty years. Even now, to make these problems disappear, the argument that we should simply exterminate the bears is running ahead, and seeing that, I think Japan's "lost era" will go on. They have one of the world's strongest passports and one of the world's safest societies, yet the young people of Japan today lack places to learn the digital skills they would need to move as digital nomads. This structure will weigh on the next generation like a snowball, and it will greatly change the shape of Japanese society.