＜内省＞意味の生成: 絶望なき世界を生きる思索エッセイThe Generation of Meaning: A Meditative Essay on Living in a World Without Despair
For the past several years, the same atmosphere has been spreading across the world. It is not a particular recession or a particular war. It is a far deeper sensation, as if the very ground beneath us is quietly disappearing. The problems of economy and geopolitics appear rather to be phenomena that began to surface all at once as a result of this sensation spreading through the world. We do not now possess "the means to truly solve problems." Because we try to handle the complex problems of the present in this state, we may be making the problems even more tangled.
In a world that has lost the power to suppress problems already surfaced, we should be probing the root causes and the essence and moving toward problem-solving suited to the distinct troubles of each country and people. Yet this conception is absent. Many people besides me likely feel that every morning when they see the news, the day begins in an unpleasant mood in endless repetition, and some may be in despair. But what I want to ask this time lies here.
"Is that truly despair?"
The empty and powerless sensation spreading through the world, the sense that "there is nothing more we can do," was not in fact born from a lack of ability on our part. I consider this an inevitable sensation that arises in an era when two frameworks have simultaneously lapsed. For us who live the present situation, this sensation is the inevitability of the era and cannot be avoided by our own will. We must therefore accept that sensation ourselves and act after taking on the responsibility.
The two frameworks I speak of here are these. One is the premodern framework in which "place, ritual, and community" gave people the meaning of life. The other is the modern framework in which "labor, progress, and career" promised a future. I have simplified greatly, but the character of the eras can be condensed here. The problem is hidden here. Why?
Because these two frameworks have now collapsed simultaneously.
People born and raised in countries that have reached the impasse of modernity all face this problem. This problem is in truth occurring in a limited way to particular countries and peoples, yet people are under the illusion that it is occurring simultaneously on a global scale or a human scale. Careful attention is required here. For countries and peoples who have been able to retain one of the two frameworks, many people do not feel this emptiness and powerlessness in the same way that those who want to think "everyone is the same" assume. They do not share it. Being aware of this distinction is important. The true inquiry begins from understanding that "the world is not one."
To lay out the elements, they are place, ritual, and community, and labor, progress, and career. Anyone who lives a life that strongly retains even one of these does not in fact fall into the despair that can be called the greatest problem of the present. The essential problem is that "two frameworks have now collapsed simultaneously," but for people able to retain these, this problem is void. This voidness is proportional in particular to the strength with which the premodern character is retained. They have something to lean on. Many people have now completely lost this thing to lean on.
The premodern framework was mercilessly destroyed and trampled by modernization. I was born and raised in Japan and have conducted research on Japan, so regarding this destruction by modernization I likely understand more than people of any country. Modernization destroyed all of "place, ritual, and community." As its replacement, the modern framework designed "labor, progress, and career," but the endpoint of this ironically resulted in the wholesale replacement of the very workers who had carried "labor, progress, and career." Regarding AI and automation, many people until last year still had the composure to scoff, but that is already a thing of the past. The extremity of modernity was the nullification of human beings conducting social life, the rendering of human beings useless within the frame called society.
Here many people, out of anxiety and impatience, or irritation and anger, invert this problem in an easy direction. AI, automation, and algorithms are certainly problems, but the true problem is that even now with the two frameworks collapsed, many people still design their lives on the premise of "society." No one speaks of it, but the true problem lies here.
Since the modern era destroyed "place, ritual, and community," it is hard for us to picture, but society did not exist in the premodern era. It is a new space of governance born in the modern era. The modern framework of "labor, progress, and career" consists of elements that can survive only in society, and the premodern framework of "place, ritual, and community" does not in fact exist in society. This is the key point. If you feel you are confusing this distinction, that expresses the strength with which you are socialized. Contemporary technology has begun to occupy "the framework of society." It does not have the power to occupy place, ritual, and community.
I do not want to speak of some outdated notion of returning to the premodern. In Japan too, a trend of people exhausted by city life moving to country life advanced after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, but what I want to consider is not there. To keep thinking this through, I want to consider what exactly we have lost, what is truly precious, and how we can find and nurture the next sprout from within now that the two frameworks have collapsed. To put it more clearly, the inquiry is "what was the most precious of the things we lost?" Continuing to think through this single point thoroughly is important.
As a first step, what must be corrected first is that we are not in despair. We are merely feigning despair. For people living in a world where the two frameworks have collapsed, there is not even room for despair in the true sense.
The reason I want to consider this meaning is that many people misjudge it here. We are not in fact suffering from having "dropped out" of these two frameworks. Because by rights, beyond the point of dropping out there should still remain another framework. Looking back even on the twentieth century, everyone should be able to agree that beyond dropping out there always remained many yohaku [余白] in the world for forming another framework. The disappearance of this yohaku beyond the drop-out point from the world may perhaps be a matter of only the past decade or so. Human beings invariably fall under the illusion, when their present painful situation continues, that the situation has continued from long ago, but this is not actually so. From this perspective I propose that the true problem lies not in dropping out but in the disappearance from the world of the yohaku for making another framework beyond the drop-out point.
Dropping out itself is not the problem. But the matter is different when it concerns the modern framework of "society" (labor, progress, career). Dropping out of society was possible after the Second World War but is now impossible. Society has filled the world's yohaku to that extent. The true problem lies here. What filled the world's yohaku is society. What I want you to consider again is why it is called "social" media.
The problem of dropping out can be considered in diverse ways, and now is precisely when many people should consider it from various perspectives. I will give one example this time. The typical case I have considered is the Japanese yakuza. The yakuza have now had their membership drastically reduced through an elimination campaign carried out over nearly half a century, and most organizations have effectively been destroyed. They are not permitted to belong to "society." They cannot open bank accounts, cannot take out loans, and are removed from all “social activity.”
I have a habit of reading subtle changes in word usage as reflections of the era. In Japan, for example, from a certain point people stopped saying "yakuza" and began saying "anti-social forces." Now the media does not use the term yakuza at all and invariably says anti-social forces. The question that arises here is what "anti-social" is. Media people of course never hold such a question. They disseminate it as they please and never reflect on its influence or effect. Yet the very term "anti-social" expresses the history of Japan's yohaku being filled by society.
What exactly is compressed within "the world of the anti-social"?
Considering this is necessary for considering "a world that is not society."
The yakuza are not an existence to be eradicated. To unilaterally label them as evil is the method of binary opposition that did not originally exist in Japan, and this too is the "invisible destruction" brought by modernization. When Japan was defeated in the Second World War and various regions were reduced to scorched earth, it was the yakuza living in those places who protected the citizens from the countless rapes, extortions, robberies, and murders that the occupation forces and foreign gangs carried out systematically. I do not want to beautify the yakuza here. I want to grasp that the problem this article asks about appears in their very existence. Because it holds the premonition of a sprout toward the future.
Why is looking at the yakuza important?
Because the early postwar yakuza appeared as an important existence strongly retaining the premodern framework of "place, ritual, and community" across the various regions of Japan accelerating from scorched earth toward reconstruction, and their existence worked as a force that suppressed the emergence of the modern framework of society.
The answer to why the yakuza could do such a thing is clear. In a word, because they lived in place. The early postwar yakuza lived in place. They did not live in society. Grasping this firmly becomes a hint for us to draw the next future. The yakuza's place can be translated as turf, and countless organizations existed across the land. In the early postwar period the yakuza had not yet reached modern organization, so they were clearly communities. Countless communities were scattered place by place. This dispersed existence of place-communities in fact worked effectively as an action suppressing the formation of society. The word anti-social was not used at this time.
Against the tyranny of the occupation forces and foreign gangs in the early postwar period, the police organized to "protect society" were utterly powerless and could do nothing. The "police (social organization)" therefore requested aid from the "yakuza (place-community)" themselves, and an era began of protecting the "citizens (people living in place)." This simultaneously shows that the citizens of the time were not "people living in society." At the point of the early postwar period there was no society in Japan. It is mistakenly assumed here as if society had existed from long ago, but what causes this misunderstanding is the action of society. Society performs itself as universal, yet there was no society in Japan. Thoroughly grasping this fact is the precondition for contemplating what lies beyond the modern framework.
Even the Yamaguchi-gumi, now known as the world's largest yakuza organization, has its roots in the early postwar year of 1946 when Taoka Kazuo took on a community and began with only thirty-three people in a small place from Nishidemachi to the Shinkaichi area in Hyogo Ward of Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture. This era was a community rather than an organization, and the existence of this place-community functioned as "another framework" for living for people who had dropped out after everything was burned, their families killed, and their work lost, and for people who had returned from the battlefield with no one to rely on.
The yakuza did not begin after the war. They have a considerably old origin and were culturally mature in terms of control. To belong to a yakuza community, a strict ritual rite of passage called the "sakazuki" was performed, and that ritual became the force binding them to the community. From then on they were not permitted to run wild as they pleased and were controlled under an extremely strong bond. They always lived in the place called turf, solved the problems of that place, protected the people of that place, and counterattacked if another yakuza community violated their place. In place, the community yakuza and the people coexisted. The reason is that it was before the citizens lived in society.
Looking at this era it is clear. In an era when the existing frameworks have collapsed, the police that hold significance only in society are completely powerless. It was the yakuza, not the police or politicians, who maintained public order and protected citizens across the various regions of Japan in the early postwar period. Of course, afterward the yakuza too came to recognize that they needed modernization and socialized in the process of swelling. The yakuza in fact advocated the conversion to modern organization on their own from the mid-1950s into the 1960s. This was the advocacy of socializing themselves, of subordinating themselves to the modern framework.
Behind this socialization process lay the increase of police power accompanying the swelling of society. The yakuza repeated mergers and consolidations to survive, dipped their hands into every kind of social business, and eventually lost their former premodern framework. This is the reason the yakuza were defeated. The yakuza were not defeated because they were evil. They were defeated because they abandoned their own rooted significance and subordinated themselves to society. Their significance lay in resistance against the process by which the modern framework mercilessly trampled the premodern framework, yet they abandoned that significance and chose the path of socialization. This occurred over the roughly eighty years from defeat to the present.
Now, the fate of the yakuza who lost this premodern framework and were labeled with the strange tag of anti-social symbolizes the complex problems of the present. By becoming organizations or companies over time, they had their own communities destroyed by the modern framework, and as a result they lost the bond of community and their former power of control. As a result, from around the 2010s people who were not yakuza but behaved like yakuza rose in urban areas. Existences like an intermediate between citizen and yakuza appeared one after another and expanded their power while carrying out crime in the gray zone.
What lies on the extension of this is the present anonymous and fluid international criminal groups. They are called "tokuryu" within Japan. They are yakuza who have fallen so far as to ally with Chinese mafia in scams with fraud bases in Asian countries that have become a problem lately and become involved in organized crime targeting the Japanese market. Even recently, scam-based robbery incidents have occurred almost daily within Japan. In the robbery-murder incident that occurred in Tochigi Prefecture this month, a shocking case occurred in which all four perpetrators were sixteen-year-old boys.
If the yakuza as place-community still existed, they would have been a deterrent against such incidents. But as a result of the place-community yakuza socializing themselves (subordinating to the modern framework), this deterrent was lost, and they fell into the state of using the very people of the place they should protect for the sake of money. This simultaneously means that the citizens lost place and socialized. The problem lies not in the yakuza but in socialization. Misjudging this point falls into prettified armchair theory.
In the early Yamaguchi-gumi, as the prohibition on drug trafficking was strongly imposed on members under boss Taoka, the yakuza bosses of the time who were also people of character did not permit members to dip their hands into such criminal acts. At the same time, within Japan now, crime by foreign immigrants occurs frequently. This too is the price of having lost the yakuza as place-community. Such crime already exceeds the category of a particular society, so the police are naturally powerless. This powerlessness of the police is precisely what expresses the fact that the yakuza were a place-community. Now, among people who hold irritation at the powerlessness of the police, the demand for vigilante groups is gradually rising. This is to have vigilante groups take on the dirty work that the socialized police cannot do.
The faceless tokuryu whose command center moves from place to place outside Japan, and crime by immigrants who could not enter Japanese society, have splendidly exposed the powerlessness of the police that have effect only within society. It is still mistakenly assumed that the police have the power to deter these, but this is what the yakuza originally possessed. Confusing society and place makes this invisible.
I have briefly shown the premodern and modern frameworks through the perspective of "dropping out" using the yakuza as an example, but this can be demonstrated using every kind of example. What this means comes down to this. People of the past, even when they lost faith or were cast out of the community, could still mourn the "lost meaning." Because the "meaning to be mourned" still existed there as memory. This is extremely important. The world that had the yohaku to drop out was happy, but this has now completely vanished. Because the true problem we face lies not in dropping out itself but in the nonexistence of the very framework beyond the drop-out point. Everything has been socialized, and the yohaku has vanished from the world. In this case, the yohaku turns out to be place, ritual, and community.
To give another example, the reason Europe treats Muslim immigrants as a problem and sees them more clearly as a threat is that they strongly retain the premodern of place, ritual, and community on a religious base while simultaneously being able to use and live within the modern framework prepared by the European side. Muslim immigrants live by riding on the modernity that the European side formed at sacrifice without having their own premodern destroyed by modernity, while retaining their own premodern. This is not verbalized by people but appears as an unidentifiable threat, anxiety, or anger.
In the same way, the reason the West regards Russia and Iran as evils is that they strongly retain the premodern of place, ritual, and community while simultaneously being able to live the modern framework they formed by their own power. The form of living that reconciles the two frameworks as Russia and Iran do does not in fact exist in the West. This becomes an unidentifiable anxiety and fear for the West and the motive for hostility to a meaningless degree. Seen from the Japanese side, neither Russia nor Iran is any threat. But the West regards them as a threat and is always afraid. At the root of this lies the fact that they are actually realizing in reality the world that the West could not achieve.
Europe became one-sidedly devoted to the modern framework and has already lost its own premodern framework, so when external people including immigrants enter holding the premodern framework, it has no means to resist. This is the essence of the immigration problem, conspicuous particularly in France and Germany. If Europe and Japan today were to send large numbers of their own citizens to each other as immigrants, such problems would probably not arise. Because ironically both share the common point of having lost the two frameworks.
Limited to Europe, Britain, the United States, and Japan, as I stated at the outset, the two frameworks of the premodern and the modern have now collapsed. This collapse of the two frameworks is a phenomenon distinctive to these countries that carried modernity through to the end, and it does not bring the same level of serious damage to other countries despite differences in degree. So they hold anxiety toward countries and peoples who have not suffered such influence as they have and come to blindly believe them to be threats. Even within Europe, the ones most affected by this collapse are France and Germany, while Spain, particularly Catalonia which contains Barcelona, is not as seriously affected as other regions. Because they strongly retain the premodern of place, ritual, and community while still continuing to resist modernity. So, Spain alone still has the power to raise its voice at the front against the errors of every international problem without yielding. When I look at the Western world in particular, I think Spain shows a hint of the future, and it would be better to learn from Spain.
Building on this it becomes visible. We are not alienated from meaning. The very horizon on which meaning can be established is disappearing. So many of us suffer without even being able to hold the memory of meaning to be mourned. This is not despair but a far more miserable state. Because despair is the emotion of mourning what is lost, but here we cannot even hold an object to mourn. People holding anxiety and anger with nowhere to go become prey to the principle of mass conformity and gradually and steadily radicalize.
This is a world humanity has never once passed through, and it is the problem faced most seriously by the portion of countries and peoples that have run up against the impasse of modernity. Rather than having lost "the meaning of life," the true problem is that the horizon on which meaning is established is itself disappearing. A problem distinctive to modernity lies here. Because the belief that the individual subject creates meaning carries a peculiar limitation that holds only within the modern framework. Because "meaning" is not something the individual subject creates. Meaning is generated in place from the relation between person and person, or person and thing, or thing and thing, and there must be a place where it is generated. This is the point that the philosopher Kitaro Nishida asserted thoroughly, and it now surfaces for us as an extremely important hint. I will proceed in my own way building on Nishida.
First, place is mistakenly understood in the modern framework, but it is not based on geography. When one says place, you will think of Tokyo or Kyoto, but it is not that. As Nishida says, it is "the place where relation is generated." That place holds no limitation in geography and is in a sense nomadic. What is needed for relation to be generated is place, so if this perspective is applied to thought, the possibility of generating every kind of place opens up. This is what I most want to assert. Up to here I have spoken of place as the premodern framework, so you will invariably link it to geography, but place is not in fact regulated by geography. The sprout of the future lies here. In the same way, the premodern place, ritual, and community can be newly interpreted through this perspective.
However, the principle is not to carry out this interpretation within the modern framework. The cause of people reaching an impasse and feeling endless suffering lies precisely in still holding this modern framework unconsciously. What must be done first of all is the awareness of the modern framework one unconsciously implements. Even if it cannot be removed, it must at minimum be made conscious. Otherwise one cannot move forward, and nothing begins.
In the present in particular, it is nearly certain that the modern framework will be completely replaced by AI and automation. Rather than resisting, it is better to actively cede this modern framework itself. Because as Europe, the United States, Britain, and Japan have clearly proven, the modern framework does not make people happy. This is my point. I do not want to ask about the superiority or inferiority of the system. Whether people became happy is the true problem. The American leadership, for example, still continues to increase military spending under the slogan of "safety," but did the people of the United States become happy through the "safety" they speak of? If as a result the people of the United States became happy, there is no problem. But the fact is the opposite. The problem that should truly be asked lies here. And when will the "safety" they speak of be completed?
This is my basic way of thinking. The reason is that even if the modern framework is ceded, I understand that it is not the fear that people speak of but merely the framework of society. This is probably where many people misjudge. Although it is merely the framework of society, they are under the illusion that it influences the entirety of life itself. In the worst case they even mistakenly believe it threatens life. This very sensation is proof that those people are already algorithmized. This is precisely why I want to advocate that human beings should cede the modern framework and pour their effort into generating place. However, realistically the pattern will likely be that only when people fall into extreme anxiety through the cession of the modern framework by technology accelerating independently of our will, will "the vitality for generating place" first well up. Or it may be more accurate to say they notice its preciousness. Without going that far, people probably will not change.
At that time, the design to be carried out in daily life is not to try to return to the premodern but to reexamine the premodern framework and take it into oneself as a certain sensation. In Japan the word "hadazawari" [肌触り] (the feel against the skin) is used, and the presence or absence of this sensation seems to me to divide people's futures from here on. Place, ritual, and community need not be the meaning they once held. Looking at the premodern settled peoples will invariably make one fall. Because in the world that the readers including us live, the premodern has already been killed. On the other hand, we are arguably the only existence that knows both the premodern and the modern frameworks. The two frameworks have now collapsed from us, but the sensation remains faintly as memory in body and spirit. To grasp this, devote oneself to introspection, and act to generate relation.
The essence of the nomad lies in the generation of relation, not in performing freedom. In the place where that generation of relation occurs, meaning is inevitably generated. At that moment, in how we face the inquiry into "the meaning of life" so powerless in the present, we will notice that the framework was simply wrong. "The meaning of life" considered within the modern framework is invariably influenced by labor, progress, and career as the conditions of society. Now that these have been replaced and voided, asking about meaning within the same framework is fundamentally wrong. Rather, an era of introspection has begun for digging up the "hadazawari" within oneself while referencing the premodern framework and probing for the next sprout. The "hadazawari" is invariably within the memory of each individual.
Digging it up is the exploration of the sprout of the future, and it is the responsibility of people who wish to make the world even a little better. For that, move and meet people, listen to their stories, find a master if possible and explore the spirit together, explore the history of that place, and touch the culture. This accumulation generates relation. Nothing is realized by thinking in the head.
Because people once lived before asking after meaning.
I realized this while traveling through various regions in my research on Japan. For our ancestors, meaning was not something to be asked. It was embedded like air within the daily activity of living and was self-evident. They had no need to ask. When morning came they went to the fields, when the season turned they prepared the festival, when a person was born they celebrated, and when a person died they sent them off. Into each of these, the question of why they did so was not inserted. Because living and the meaning of living were not separated.
We who have carried modernity through to the end cannot recover this. But it is also the sprout of the next horizon that cannot be seen until one reaches the limit, so facing this problem thoroughly is necessary. Because that is the responsibility of us who live the present toward the future. What I want to propose is to keep asking in a world without answers.
The key lies in the inner world. Now, after filling the earth with society, there are nothing but people declaring advance into space, but in the end, even if those socialized people realize advance into space, there is no result or effect other than pushing the swelling of a society that has lost its yohaku on earth onto space. It is invasion in the clear sense. Advance into space is neither the hope nor the dream of humanity. It is merely an arrogant and self-serving violence that tries to push the swelling of society onto space. The exploration of the outer world is not in fact important for human beings. What on earth does a species that cannot even consider the earth itself go to do by advancing into the outer world of space? That is the prolongation of colonialism.
The only and final unexplored region left to us exists nowhere but in the inner world, not the outer world. Now that we have lost the drop-out point, this is the last drop-out point left to us, and moreover this inner world has not yet been destroyed by the modern framework. Of course, at the level of physiological phenomena the modern framework has already begun to hack the brain and so on, but the true inner world is not at that level. The brain can hack the social dimension of people through "social" media and the like, but it cannot hack place. The fundamental reason film photography, analog records, and knitting are reviving as a return of bodily sensation is that they hold a "hadazawari" prior to society. It is not a mere trend.
If we train ourselves now to reach the inner world, then when the modern framework advances we will not suffer its influence. This is the last freedom left to humanity and the only world where spiritual place, ritual, and community can be infinitely generated. This is the future. Because the relation that arises there is infinite and is a world we cannot yet imagine.
To keep asking in a world without answers.
This will be the passport for diving into that inner world.