文化偽装の終わり：淘汰の予兆The End of Cultural Camouflage: Signs of a Shakeout

The crash in Japan's government bond market, and a currency that has already slipped beyond Japan's control, mark a decisive moment. It is the collapse of "trust in Japan," a credibility maintained since the era of high economic growth, and the starting gun for the end that has finally begun. I say "finally" because Japan can find the will to be reborn in a true sense only by ending once. And yet, although recent events have technically shown the world that Japan is already fiscally insolvent, the country has strangely not fallen into bankruptcy. In daily life the livelihoods of the people have clearly broken down, but the bottom has not yet dropped out. Something is keeping it standing.

In almost any other country, a shock of this scale would very likely have led to default. In Japan's case, the dramatic growth achieved after the war has become a shackle on the present generation, for better or worse. Japan still holds funds, such as foreign currency reserves, accumulated in that period, and so it cannot go bankrupt. Japan today is a country that ought to have failed and is suffering because, for reasons peculiar to its past, it cannot.

This phenomenon is the subject of heated debate abroad as a serious problem, but as usual the mass media inside Japan keeps its silence and shows no sign of reporting it properly. Japan's mass media pursues neither truth nor the facts behind events. It occupies the airwaves with "not reporting" as its one guiding principle, so even in such a crisis the public does not understand what is happening. In a super-aged society, the overwhelming majority, the elderly, cannot use the internet or handle smartphones, and they place great trust in newspapers and television as sources of information. Politicians understand this situation, so rather than address the problem they scatter large sums for elections. A country facing bankruptcy under debts it can never repay holds elections only so that a few rulers can treat the system as their own property, large sums are scattered in the process, and in a super-aged society this is calmly tolerated because of the distortion of information in the mass media. Japan is arguably no longer constituted as a state, and yet there is a peculiarity in the Japanese state that lets it survive nonetheless. In this article, however, I focus on the areas that will soon be affected by the collapse of the fiction of "trust in Japan," which has lasted about fifty years.

First, like the mass media, the government is plunging into a dissolution of the lower house and a general election in the midst of this turmoil, thinking only of treating the system as its own property. It has declared that it will scatter money in earnest by cutting the consumption tax on food to zero, ignoring every fact of the fiscal crisis. This is the typical pathology of a state in its final stage, rushing toward a near future in which the livelihoods of the people will break down completely. Because so many people still look too exclusively at money, there is a serious problem that no one is considering at all. That problem is culture.

As I have written several times, my standpoint is not to equate the state with Japan. At the same time, from the viewpoint that "Japan does not exist," I live each day resolved to investigate Japan more deeply than anyone. This means that by investigating thoroughly the fact that Japan does not exist, I grasp the Japan that is there. It is not an empty rhetorical turn. I sense that a true universality lies here. I therefore keep investigating, on my own, from the phase in which the government and Japan are different, and this is deeply tied to the structure of the world of illusion I have been discussing intensively of late. It is a thorough awareness and discernment that the communal illusion of shared interests is of a different phase from the individual illusion and the pair illusion. Almost no one directs thought to the forms of illusion, so this remains an uncharted area left in total fusion. Accordingly, the usual theories of Japan, developed without discerning this fused state, remain at the level of the signified and can never become a force for knowing what is happening in essence. To put it harshly, it is a farce.

To limit our view of the collapse of trust in the Japanese state to the sphere of public finance alone would be shortsighted and would lead to a fatal error. This upheaval did not come suddenly either. Debts in the broad sense, put off for many years, have merely surfaced as we enter the mid-2020s. Even with the blade of the end held at its throat, not one politician has the will to face this problem squarely and take drastic measures. Those who depend on treating the system as their own property would be troubled, within the span of their own lives, if the problem were solved. From another angle, people who have once indulged in going along with the rules of others can never stand up again. Going along is a softness toward oneself, an ease, a shortcut. As everyone knows, life is severe in this way: once you fall onto the easy road, you can never recover the drive you once had. There are people who still speak calmly of marketing and branding and the beautification of the past, but that is a falsehood to oneself and nothing more than the hiding of a deception. Those who hold real conviction become solitary figures without marketing or branding, and in every age it is such a few people who can be trusted most.

My reason for thinking that this problem will show itself in culture is that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is the legitimate successor of Shinzo Abe. Former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, despite high public support, was pushed out in September 2025 in a semi-forced manner. Sanae Takaichi's installation as the new prime minister in the vacant post was a move by certain politicians and supporters in the line of Shinzo Abe to regain the real power they had lost. The central figure in Japan's collapse today is without doubt Shinzo Abe, leader of the second Abe administration of the 2010s. His responsibility remains unexamined to this day, and it has been passed on to his legitimate successor, Prime Minister Takaichi. How many people understand that the technical bankruptcy of public finance is not the only seed the Abe administration sowed? If we take the present fiscal situation as the surfacing of the results of Abenomics, the main policy of the second Abe administration, I expect that the aspect that was the axis of the other main policy of the time will collapse in tandem, because the root of the problem is the collapse of "trust in Japan." Without grasping this, one cannot see what will happen. I can state that the area where this great collapse will occur is culture, because it shows itself typically in the colossal failure of "Cool Japan," the cultural strategy Shinzo Abe launched.

The crisis now unfolding in Japan is the delayed return of the complete failure of the branding of Japan that the second Abe administration carried out toward the international community. Just as Japan's public finances have spread falsehoods to the world, I expect it will be rapidly exposed that Japanese culture has been spreading falsehoods too. The two absolute walls that once stood as physical barriers between Japan and the world beyond, geographic distance and language, have collapsed under overtourism driven by the weak yen, and under AI. In thinking about the foreign tourists who surged in on this tide, the most important point is that they gained an actual experience of Japan that they could not feel in their bodies before. It is decisive that people around the world now hold a lived sense of Japan, learned through experience. In the extreme overtourism of Japan over only about two years from around 2024, many foreign travelers had their first chance to travel across Japan, and they came face to face with an extreme gap between that experience and the image of Japan they had vaguely held. Of course most travelers lack the power to sense such a thing and are merely part of the overtourism crowd, but for the few who still believe in the power of thought in a world like this, nothing is more intense.

In other words, it is the shock of confronting the extreme gap between the "image of Japan" they held unconsciously and the reality of Japan. My view is that this shock has appeared in the bond crash I described. Each person needs time to think through the cause of this gap, but the thinking of the era has already shown itself as distrust of the Japanese state and crashed the bond market, so I feel that the time lag has become extremely small because of the acceleration of the age. Thinking with this case as the axis, what comes into view is that what will develop rapidly, with a slight delay, is an accusation against a false culture.

As far as I can see, nearly one hundred percent of the content that transmits Japan, whether in text, video, or photographs, is produced without exception within a mechanism that sets this false Japan brand in place as its premise. This is typically the case with the Cool Japan launched by the second Abe administration. In fact, almost all Japan-related content today has been born only from a dimension that holds no culture, the "culture" of Cool Japan. Put another way, it is the export, as content, of a "Japan that is not Japan." The production and reproduction of this content has advanced within a mechanism in which the ease of bridging languages joins with a ready-made, easily sold image of Japan. Being able to transmit in English and thinking from the real ground of Japan are different matters, yet a base for introducing Japanese culture to the international market has been formed on the former alone. In that mechanism, a "Japan that is not Japan" circulates as Japan without being doubted. Why on earth does this happen?

At the root of this mechanism lies one shared premise: the structure of Orientalism, a relic of the past. That structure is still the major premise, but the people who speak of cultural content do not notice it. It goes unseen, and the content is presented as Japan. As a result, Japan-related content that all looks alike has flooded the market, and a falsehood has formed and spread, as though this were the whole of Japanese culture, or of Japanese history and philosophy. The trouble with a falsehood is that once it becomes the majority it can be mistaken for truth. My basic stance toward this mechanism is to retell the reality of Japan from where I stand. More plainly, it is to show, from one place after another, that "the image of Japan in circulation is not Japan itself." What has happened until now is a cycle in which an attitude like Cool Japan is taken, without doubt, as Japanese culture, and content is reproduced from that viewpoint. In it there was no room for understanding, resonance, or respect for culture to grow.

I could say a great deal about how lacking in sense Cool Japan was, but it suffices to consider its model, Britain's "Cool Britannia." In 1997, with Britain suffering from the "British disease," the New Labour government led by Tony Blair proposed a Third Way and a new image of Britain beyond traditional socialism and conservatism. Using culture as the nation's soft power, it was the origin of an epoch-making national branding. Because Blair's government did not depend on the old regime, fresh and radical ideas different from before were needed. What matters is that even Tony Blair, still young at 43, doubted whether he could keep up with the times. His strategy was to appoint Mark Leonard, a 23-year-old researcher at a think tank, as a person fit for the new era, and to leave everything to him. Leonard met the expectation and put forward a splendid concept, "Britain(TM): Renewing our Identity," renewing Britain's conventional traditional image and redefining it as a cool, modern country. The Union Jack was used in a pop style, and public money went into selling everything from Paul Smith in fashion, to Oasis and Blur in Britpop, to Fatboy Slim in dance music, to the world, with great success. Tourism and cultural exports were boosted on all fronts, and the image of Britain was renewed.

While Cool Britannia was unfolding, in Japan too a few people with understanding were quietly proposing, behind the scenes, a national branding learned from Cool Britannia as a strategy suited to the new era after the collapse of the bubble. But the politicians and bureaucrats of the time did not know that Cool Britannia existed, and did not understand what culture was, so in effect the proposal was never accepted. At exactly the same time, the neighboring country South Korea actively embraced this British success as the current of the new era and staked its hopes for revival on it, and South Korea's later success in soft power strategy is known to everyone. On the Japanese side, as I said, the funds accumulated in the period of high growth still left considerable room at the time, so Japan neither entrusted new work to the young, as Tony Blair did, nor staked national survival as South Korea did. It judged instead that doing nothing was the only way to keep the government in power, and in time means and ends were reversed, and doing nothing became the goal.

This attitude, that doing nothing is the only goal of politicians and bureaucrats, spread day and night through the mass media. In time the upper ranks of companies and the public also fell into dysfunction, with doing nothing as their only goal, and we arrived at the 2010s, triggered by the symbolic Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. As a result, a political order that symbolized the stagnation of the era returned to the prime minister's seat. This was the beginning of the second Abe administration.

The second Abe administration, needing to show results, took out a strategy that had been proposed in the past but not accepted within the politics and bureaucracy of the time, and made it the foundation of national branding. More than ten years after the first proposal, a national branding strategy that was already out of date was dug up and deployed, without studying its substance, for the sake of Shinzo Abe's record. That is the truth of Cool Japan. It was placed within the nation's soft power strategy, and since Japanese politics is good only at scattering money, budgets were scattered one after another from the state. The culture of a "Japan that is not Japan" was thus spread around the world. But it was a "Japan that is not Japan," with no substance inside from the start, so it did not succeed in catching up with South Korea, which had gone ahead in soft power. The public could not grasp the intent of the unfamiliar term Cool Japan that the mass media talked about daily, and before anyone noticed it came to an end. The inconvenient fact that what spread internationally as Japanese culture through this national Cool Japan was hentai and karoshi is, naturally, unknown to the officials who led Cool Japan. I remember being weary every time I heard those words abroad at the time.

What rose to prominence here, riding the Cool Japan strategy, was the structure, mentioned above, that carries Orientalism forward. Because it proceeded without standing on the roots of culture, the soft power export strategy ended without significant results. Meanwhile, the Cool Japan strategy was never properly examined, the structure that carries Orientalism forward lives on, and a "Japan that is not Japan" keeps flowing through various media as an extension of Cool Japan. But this cultural camouflage, like the bond crash, will soon come to an end.

Above all, a crash in culture would bring the worst outcome for a Japan that has already lost its hard power. Imagining Japan after such a crash, I can see a world in which large numbers of people who look like the Japanese of the past but do not know what Japan is wander the island country. Will they then turn again toward a sincere understanding of the essence of culture, or give up everything and be buried? I do not know when it will happen, but I think it is only a matter of time.

The future of Japan will be decided by a crash in culture, more than by the recent crash in government bonds.