私が敬愛する人々の三つの共通点Three Things the People I Respect Share

Recently I noticed that the people I respect all share something in common. It has to do with the way they think, and put roughly it comes down to three things.

Think with a long-term perspective. Grasp things from multiple angles and as a whole. Examine them at the root.

These may seem obvious when considered calmly, but Yasuoka Masahiro, a Confucian scholar and one of the figures I most respect in all of Japanese history, is said to have constantly taught his students these same three principles of thinking.

Yasuoka lived through the turbulent years of 1898 to 1983 in Japan. Regardless of what era he found himself in, he lived by his own convictions without being swept along by his surroundings or circumstances. He has been called the behind-the-scenes fixer of postwar Japan and served as an advisor to prime ministers. But what was truly remarkable about Yasuoka was his character and the fact that after Japan's defeat in the Second World War he devoted himself to the future, grieving for a people that had been stripped of their backbone.

Unfortunately, in every era it is people of this caliber who are forgotten fastest. Today very few know Yasuoka's name. From time to time I find myself imagining what he would think if he were alive to see the Japan of the present. What I feel more keenly with each passing year, and not only in Japan, is that the number of people capable of genuine thought has shrunk to an extreme. The reasons behind this are no doubt various, but it does seem certain that the three principles themselves have fallen into dysfunction for most people. Yet these principles are the foundation of human development. Put another way, they should be the basis of reflection. If humanity has already abandoned them, then no matter how eloquently we speak of ideals and principles, none of it will mean anything.

I find this situation easier to understand when I translate it into the language of film. In cinema there is a metric called ASL, Average Shot Length. It is calculated by dividing the total running time of a film by the total number of cuts, yielding the average duration of a single shot. Nearly a hundred years ago this figure was roughly ten to twelve seconds. Today it has contracted to roughly two to three seconds. The involvement of shrinking attention spans is obvious. Put differently, it is the four-directional siege of excessive sugar intake, social media, online gaming, and pornography.

The trend toward extremely shortened ASL in film can be read as proof that people around the world have had their brain's reward system captured by this siege. These people cannot sustain attention on a video whose shots run too long because their brains no longer release dopamine in response. They cannot watch.

The brain's reward system refers to the mesolimbic pathway located deep within the brain. It operates primarily through the coordinated activity of three regions: the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, and the prefrontal cortex. The VTA is the starting point of reward. It is packed with dopamine-releasing cells, and when it judges that something good is about to happen it sends the signal. The nucleus accumbens is the accelerator of reward. When it receives dopamine it produces intense pleasure and euphoria and generates the craving for more. The prefrontal cortex is the command center of reward. It evaluates the pleasure obtained and formulates plans for securing the next reward, or exercises reason to restrain the craving.

Dopamine itself is not pleasure. It is better described as the molecule of anticipation and learning, and it is considered the most important neurotransmitter in the reward system. What matters is this quality of anticipation and learning. For example, dopamine is released more abundantly not while eating something delicious but at the moment you learn that something delicious is coming. It also responds powerfully to unexpectedly good outcomes and burns the associated behavior into the brain's memory. This is known as reward prediction error, and it has become so standard a technique in modern video content that it is harder to find a piece of content that does not deploy it.

The most conspicuous examples are major animated films. Animated films that primarily target children deploy dopamine-triggering mechanisms in every corner to keep young viewers, whose ability to sustain focus is limited, immersed in the work. The short ASL is a given, but just as characteristic is the exaggerated reactions of the characters. Unlike live-action filmmaking with human actors, animation even at today's high-definition 3D levels still struggles to approximate the nuance of real human performance. To compensate, overreaction is adopted as the most efficient means of communicating legibility through image. The reason there is always at least one relentlessly energetic, fast-talking character is precisely this.

What is being exploited here is the human instinct to unconsciously direct attention toward sudden loud sounds and rapid movement. For our ancestors this was a survival instinct for detecting predators and prey. Today it is used as a means of hacking the brain's reward system. By ensuring that characters on screen are constantly shouting and moving, the filmmakers can unconsciously capture the attention of the viewers least capable of maintaining focus, which is to say children. Children's brains are drilled from an early age in the pleasure of dopamine stimulation through these films, and they become particularly submerged in the addictive quality of dopamine release through reward prediction error.

The reason is that from a business perspective animated films generate enormous profits through character licensing. The design extends from hacking the child's reward system and burning the character into the brain all the way through to driving the purchase of character merchandise. This business model has existed for a long time. The modern problem is that the immediate extension of children's reward systems being hacked through animated films leads into a structure prepared across every domain to draw them further into dopamine addiction. In a sense, modern humans are educated into the world of dopamine addiction through animated films in childhood, and from there they are smoothly transitioned into dependency on other dopamine-addictive content as they grow. The system is complete.

For children growing up in this world, dopamine addiction is already a general phenomenon. Avoiding it grows more difficult with each year. Under these conditions the three principles of thinking with a long-term perspective, grasping things from multiple angles and as a whole, and examining them at the root become a fantasy for such people.

The sociologist Miyadai Shinji, drawing on his own fieldwork experience, has described how from around 1996 onward people in districts like Shibuya in Tokyo stopped making eye contact and began avoiding the gaze of others with full force. The reverse implication is that before then the eyes of strangers did cross in the street. Miyadai interpreted the casual crossing of gazes between strangers as a kind of low-grade fever in the city, and he saw the Tokyo of that time as a city that had lost its fever. From this vantage point of a city that had lost its warmth, he sensed the decline of Japan that we see today.

What makes this striking is that 1996 was more than ten years before the smartphone appeared. In other words, regardless of the smartphone's arrival and the rise of social media that accompanied it, the streets had already become places where gazes no longer crossed by the late 1990s. Whether his findings from Shibuya and Shinjuku in Tokyo apply to cities elsewhere in the world I cannot say, but the observation seems critically important.

It is certainly true that in today's Japanese streets you will never make eye contact with a stranger. I do not touch my smartphone when I am out, so I walk through the city empty-handed, constantly observing. Present-day Japanese people are almost without exception looking at nothing but their smartphone screens. Compared to the Shibuya of 1996 that Miyadai described as a place where people had begun avoiding eye contact with full force, the situation now feels as though the crossing of gazes itself has become a kind of taboo. People walk with their heads bowed as if under prohibition. To put it in unusual terms, the code of the modern Japanese street is "you must not make eye contact with anyone."

On trains everyone is either scrolling through social media feeds or playing online games. Finding someone who is not looking at a screen has become about as difficult in Japan as spotting an endangered species in the wild.

Under these conditions it is self-evident that holding a long-term perspective, grasping things from multiple angles and as a whole, and examining them at the root becomes impossible. The worst aspect of Japan's unconsidered situation then comes into view. The problem is not simply that the majority of the electorate consists of retired elderly people. The deeper problem is that virtually the entire population consists of people who hold no long-term perspective, who cannot grasp things from multiple angles or as a whole, and for whom root-level examination is impossible.

This is a complete dysfunction of thought. When people in this condition constitute the overwhelming majority and determine the direction of the country and its society, the fact that Japan is accelerating toward the moment of its decline begins to make sense.

This is my personal view, but I suspect that once the capacity for long-term thinking, multi-angle and holistic perception, and root-level examination is lost in a person living in the modern world, it can never be recovered. The reason is that no opportunity for recovery has been provided. The only thing growing stronger day by day is the system that strips these capacities away. In a sense, living without being submerged in this world resembles the life of an austere monk of old. Discipline yourself thoroughly and live by your own convictions. To that end, take the three principles of thinking and reconsider them as a problem that belongs to you.

The reason the Japanese, and Tokyo residents in particular, are sprinting at the global forefront of this trend in its worst sense may have something to do with the 56,000 convenience stores where sugar can be procured and replenished twenty-four hours a day, the roughly 150,000 restaurants in major urban areas that place Japan in a league of its own worldwide (even Seoul in second place has only 83,000), the absurd density of unhealthy ramen shops lining the streets in numbers that seem like a joke, the country's status as one of the world's heaviest users of pesticides and additives, and the roughly 19,000 drugstores standing ready for the people whose health has collapsed under this lifestyle. I spent my weekend pondering these inconvenient truths that the government and corporations, devoid of any conviction, will never acknowledge, living the day like an ascetic monk as spring arrived without warning.