東アジアのカナリア：ソウルから近い未来を読むThe Canary of East Asia: Reading the Near Future Through Seoul

There is a passage in the Chinese I Ching that reads [観国之光 利用賓于王]. The East Asian word Kanko [観光] for sightseeing can be called its descendant. On a weekend visit to Seoul, I felt the depth of this passage anew.

The meaning of these words is to observe what shines in the country, the society, and the people one visits, and to learn as an outsider. What matters is carrying through the awareness of being an outsider. From there one steps into a foreign world calmly and neutrally and deepens one's learning. To observe the light is at the same time to observe the shadow. Leaning too far toward either one makes the essence vanish from view. For this reason tourism is the moment when the daily discipline of the heart is laid bare and an occasion to examine one's own inner reflection. Whether it ends as mere tourism for consumption or deepens into learning put to use for the future of one's homeland and the future of the world is always left to the choice of each individual traveler.

Living in the West you would not feel it, but I sense that East Asia has recently begun to move greatly and rapidly. From my own perspective, in this article I want to peer a little into the near future I learned through Seoul.

To put the wave beginning in East Asia plainly, it is a movement to take distance from the United States and to search for a twenty-first century relationship with China. Until now Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were placed under American influence, so while treating China as an imagined enemy they were held to no more than economic cooperation. However, Korea grew distrustful of recent American conduct and passed the limit of its patience. It moved first to search for the next era. Of course no such statement is made officially. But once you set foot in Seoul, you can feel everywhere that the ground beneath Korea has already begun to shift.

On the other hand, Japan is not like this. It still cannot break free of dependence on the United States, and the government leadership hesitates and cannot bring itself to decide on distance. While Korea across the sea makes decisions with its survival at stake, Japan decides nothing and only mills about in confusion. This figure of Japan will mark an important turning point even in historical terms.

In fact, in just three days of walking through Seoul, you feel everywhere that Japan has been overtaken by Korea in every respect over a short period. The pace is fast. By my own sense Japan was overtaken within a single generation. To my eyes Korea forcibly overwrote the twentieth century framework of its cities with a twenty-first century one. That is, without greatly changing the hardware structure of the city itself, it kept upgrading the software to the latest version. Korea can be said to have succeeded brilliantly in rewriting the OS within the city of Seoul. Advancing a city to the twenty-first century type would demand development extensive enough to renew the conventional urban structure, and that costs enormous budget and time. So Korea carried out limited renewal of offline space while dramatically pushing forward the renewal of online space.

By contrast, Japan failed badly at this latest OS update. In Japan both the hardware and the software of the city remain fundamentally twentieth century, and it has become a world with the déjà vu of an old OS still running. There is no will there to boldly build a twenty-first century city. I see behind these bold Korean decisions a driver that is rarely considered.

First, in 2022 Korea surpassed Japan in nominal GDP per capita for the first time, and over these past few years state led digitalization has accelerated through society. In purchasing power parity GDP per capita as well, Korea overtook Japan in the late 2010s, and the gap widens year by year. At the same time, in 2024 Japan was overtaken in nominal GDP per capita by Taiwan as well. While the countries of East Asia leap toward the near future, Japan alone is accelerating its relative decline. This is data borne out by the many Korean and Taiwanese travelers you see when you visit Japan's tourist sites.

Looking at passport ownership rates among citizens, as of the end of 2025 Japan stands very low at 18.4 percent, while Korea is very high at about 60 percent. The Japanese passport boasts some of the greatest strength in the world, yet in actual ownership only about one in five people holds one. Korea and Taiwan are both smaller nations than Japan, yet each exceeds 60 percent. Reading this data merely as enthusiasm for travel or study abroad misjudges the essence. Rather, the passport ownership figure reflects citizens searching for a future on the premise of a life that cannot be completed within the country alone, while also spreading risk across many directions.

In Korea's case this owes to neighboring North Korea as a national imagined enemy. Taiwan likewise holds China as an imagined enemy, and there too the passport ownership rate is high. For people living in these countries, the choice to hold a passport is not merely a matter of overseas travel or overseas expansion. It can be reread as proof that citizens do not overlay the future of the nation with their own future. With this perspective, the true cause of why Japan alone keeps declining in East Asia surfaces.

The low passport ownership rate of the Japanese is by no means because people are "inward looking." To my eyes it appears as proof that many citizens still depend on the late twentieth century illusion of "safe and secure Japan." Japan uses its own era names based on the reign of the emperor, and each era name expresses a distinctive character of its time. For example, the present is Reiwa 8. Before it came Heisei (1989–2019), before that Showa (1926–1989), before that Taisho (1912–1926), and before that Meiji (1868–1912).

I was born in 1991, so in the Japanese reckoning I was born in Heisei 3. These thirty years are called "the lost thirty years." They were an era when Japan steadily declined. This structure is hard to grasp, but in essence the illusion formed in the mid to late Showa period had supported Japan from the postwar years through the era of high economic growth. Over the thirty years of Heisei, Japan could not dispel that illusion, and as a result it spent those years prolonging the life of Showa. To put it more clearly, Japan remains caught in the structure of the Cold War era and has still not managed to escape it. On Japan's timeline it is as though the Berlin Wall never fell and the Soviet Union never collapsed. As a result, when Reiwa began in 2019, the debt accumulated in Showa came to weigh heavily on the lives of citizens and drove an overall decline at an accelerating pace.

Because I reread the passport ownership rate as proof that citizens do not overlay the nation's future with their own, in this context it becomes clear that the Japanese do overlay their own future with the nation's future. When most people speak of "Japan's future," for example, they point to Japan as a bureaucratic system of state centered on the government. Certainly the future of Japan within this system is shrouded in dark clouds, and its eventual collapse is self evident. But there is no inherent need to overlay that onto one's own life. Living for the future of one's homeland may be necessary, but that does not equal protecting Japan's bureaucratic system, and one should never fall into such a framing. The Japanese have strong patriotism to begin with, but troublingly they cannot make this distinction. In other words, their patriotism is basically nothing more than a convenient tool for the rulers who run the state, and it has drifted away from the essential heart that thinks of and loves the country.

On the other hand, the citizens of Korea and Taiwan divide this clearly. Behind Korea reaching this distinction lies a past in which it experienced what amounted to national fiscal collapse through the Asian financial crisis of 1997. At the time Korea requested emergency financial support from the IMF (the International Monetary Fund) and barely avoided collapse, but against the harsh austerity demands of the IMF that began in 1998, a movement arose in which citizens contributed the assets in their homes to the nation. Korea holds the bitter experience of donating gold, rings, and other convertible possessions to the government and somehow striving for national renewal. Moreover this was an event of the late 1990s, so the experience is steeped into the bones of many of Korea's working generations, and for Koreans of my own generation it serves as a lesson.

Taking the fiscal crisis as the occasion, Korea swept away the chaebol that had been the guardians of the old system and set about renewing the opaque structure as the foundation of a new state formation. Armed with bold structural reform, a shift to the IT industry, and an "attacking" national strategy that raised export power including soft power, Korea achieved a miraculous recovery and repaid the full roughly 19.5 billion dollars borrowed from the IMF in August 2001, ahead of schedule.

In the midst of this drastic renewal, top tier domestic players such as the Daewoo group went bankrupt, and the surviving Samsung and Hyundai groups accelerated their global expansion. On the other hand, under IMF guidance society's "lifetime employment collapsed," mass layoffs were carried out all at once, and the unemployment rate shot up. This negative legacy is a distant cause of the brutal examination competition and the extreme low birth rate in Korean society today.

However, I consider such collapse indispensable for renewal, and I think Korea is one of the countries that seized the opportunity and achieved a brilliant revival. In other words, when faced with collapse, Koreans abandoned their conventional attitude of entrusting their future to the nation and came to their senses. At this moment their patriotism was freed from being a tool for defending the vested interests of rulers and transformed into a sincere concern for the country's future. I see this as the true force by which Korea overtook Japan all at once in the twenty-first century. In fact it appears as the transparency of society. In Korea the pursuit of corruption functions even against a president, while in Japan it does not function at all. In short, what is truly needed for the citizens of Japan to gain sovereignty is not legislative reform but the individual decision not to overlay the nation's future with one's own.

If you visit Japan, this Japanese habit of overlaying the nation's future with one's own can be felt in every corner of a society marked by excessive tension. I call this "selfish totalitarianism." From the outside it looks like simple totalitarianism, but inwardly it overflows with some of the most selfish people in the world. It is a state in which those selfish people carry a totalitarian motion, and this expresses how firm the illusion of Japan is.

But the citizens and companies of Korea who faced the national fiscal crisis understood in their skin that a society stable on the domestic market alone is an illusion, and they took the searing lesson that depending on the domestic alone destroys the nation. Here a global consciousness sprouted in Korea, and the era was precisely the one in which the United States accelerated globalization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Riding the wave of this new era, Korea steered hard toward global strategy from here.

What advanced into other countries through this global strategy was not only companies and products but people as well. Among the citizens who came to their senses through the national fiscal crisis, many made the decision to leave the country once for the sake of their homeland's future. They formed Koreatowns on the West Coast of the United States, avoided the crisis of national decline, and quietly devoted themselves to preparing for the time of their homeland's revival. Before long the second generation immigrant youth raised in the Koreatowns rose as the cultural core that creates today's Korean Wave content such as K-pop, K-drama, and K-film. On the West Coast they learned American style global marketing, absorbed one of the world's foremost agent systems, placed the very material of their content in their parents' homeland of Korea, and over time swept the world.

Having broken free of the old dependent system, Korea is a place where each person understands in the skin the risk of overlaying the nation's future with their own. So it succeeded in a turn toward sincerely considering how a rich individual life can be put to work for Korea's future. As you stroll through Seoul, the streetscape and atmosphere are those of a twentieth century city, but the city's "invisible OS" has been updated to the twenty-first century type, and on the single matter of digital society Japan cannot come close. At the same time many places are still mid transition, and you feel a near future intoxication where remnants of the old system mingle with the new. In other words, present day Seoul is the world's most advanced city where online and offline intersect. Like walking through a parallel world, you can bodily experience a city that exists simultaneously in two layers.

The impression I myself received from Korea's digital policy was this. Korea did not climb the staircase cautiously in step with each citizen. Instead the nation's leaders stood at the front and pushed bold digital reform, and the citizens made the effort to adapt. This is hard on the older generations, but it is a matter of getting used to it, and through this the digital native youth became able to continue living almost without leaving home. In fact, among Korea's younger generation the number of people who live for a whole week without leaving home is surging. As a result the city has begun to hollow out.

In fact, Seoul has become the world's most advanced online city, and everywhere you can feel the figure of Korea updated at a national scale. Korea's average fixed line speed is the fastest in the world, more than three times that of New York or London. Mobile payment penetration exceeds 90 percent, and occasions to use cash are almost zero throughout the day. The penetration of e-commerce is in another league. Korea's online shopping market is roughly 230 trillion won a year and ranks among the world's highest as a share of GDP. With rocket delivery, an order placed by 11 at night arrives by 7 the next morning. As a result, the Amazon Prime delivery that sweeps the world was defeated in Korea.

Food delivery is on another dimension too. Within Seoul nearly any restaurant delivers in 15 to 30 minutes, and Seoul is the only city in the world where Michelin level cuisine arrives at your home at three in the morning. And the most important thing is the social fact that culture itself moves online. What surprised me most walking through Seoul was the abnormal number of cafés. A shop that has just opened goes viral on social media for two weeks and closes three months later. So a memory of Seoul from three months ago is updated so fast that it no longer holds three months later. The Tokyo of the 1990s changed at the fastest pace in the world, and it looks as though that Tokyo has migrated to Seoul as a figure accelerated for the online age. On the other hand, Tokyo has stopped such accelerating change and has already been reduced to a city of the past.

But this is the future. The future is easily misunderstood. It does not lie in the flashy "future city" once depicted in Hollywood science fiction. It is a timeline that quietly permeates daily life. The American future tends to be tied to visual images of advancing into space and flying transit networks, but the true future lies in a scene where people who have lived the same way for centuries hold smartphones and electronic payment unfolds at a street stall. While the cityscape retains a twentieth century or even earlier form, the daily life of the people steadily moves online. This is the true future, and that future is opened by the sense and the decisions of those who stand at the top.

Once you experience Korea's sense of speed, you feel anew that Japan is moving at an astonishingly low speed. In Japan's case, digital policy sets its main aim on fitting each citizen, and above all the elderly who form the core of the vote. So it proceeds cautiously, like slowly climbing a staircase. Moreover, before it can take a single step up the staircase, it must first arrange handrails and accommodations for the height of each step, and meetings for this are held again and again, and insurance in case of a fall and legal frameworks are examined first. As a result, things do not move forward. I myself feel this again and again, partly because I have been involved in tourism strategy lately.

As a result Japan has been left completely behind by the accelerating advance of digital technology and has become one of the world's foremost digital laggards. Digital natives do not grow within the country, and Japan has reached the dire state where it is rather the young who have the lower grasp of digital technology. And Japan has no system like Korea's in which the young can shut themselves in for a whole week and complete all of life at home.

Japan, Korea, and China are also a special region that must be thought of as a Confucian sphere. At the root of Confucianism is the idea that the character of the leader is reflected directly in the lives of the people and creates the richness of individuals, and it holds that the one who stands at the front bears the duty to keep learning daily, take in new experiences and values, and lead reform. In other words, the way of thinking differs fundamentally from the West.

In this sense 1997 was the turning point of East Asia. In the same year Korea faced national fiscal collapse, in Japan Yamaichi Securities collapsed and the bubble economy that began in 1985 came to a complete end. Japan had amassed assets during the high growth era incomparably vaster than Korea's. Ironically it did not face national fiscal collapse like Korea. Even after the bubble burst the vested interests of the rulers were protected, and because the regime could be maintained by drawing down the national savings the citizens had accumulated, Japan steered toward a bad future. The history from here on is called "the lost thirty years," but in short the government leaned on the savings of the citizens of the late twentieth century and prolonged its life by drawing them down. The growth of twenty-first century Japan was an illusion, and the reality was carried through as exploitation of the citizens.

Korea swept away its conventional power holders such as the chaebol, but in Japan a dysfunctional bureaucratism survived by colluding with politics in the 2001 reorganization of the central ministries, and today bureaucratism operates at a level surpassing politics. In short, in the same year Japan missed its last chance for transformation while Korea succeeded in its drastic treatment. This reckoning now appears as a stark difference thirty years on. The futures that Japan and Korea each reached after 1997 speak this outcome plainly.

Korea succeeded at "dismantling the old system and shifting to IT and globalization." Japan failed. Nearly thirty years have passed since then, and in that time Korea conquered the world with a soft power content strategy while Japan declined through the Johnny's scandal. Who thirty years ago would ever have thought that Korean content would sweep the world and win international awards one after another? And the young Koreans with passports and high purchasing power visit Japan one after another, stock up on new material, carry it back to their homeland, and begin one business venture after another.

This time the symbolic scene I noticed was specialty coffee. Looking back, around 2023 when I visited a specialty coffee shop I frequent in Osaka, I was surprised by how many young Korean travelers there were, and when I asked, they told me they came to Japan because they could not drink good specialty coffee in Korea. But three years ago is already a distant story.

Now in Seoul, where the survival competition among cafés is the fiercest in the world, new cafés are born and vanish one after another, and the market swells even as it is culled at high speed. They carry the specialty coffee and café culture they learned in Japan and Australia back to Seoul and open ambitious cafés one after another. In fact the number of cafés is abnormal, and I had a premonition that to survive the fierce competition each café is gradually beginning to shift toward personalization. It is the figure of trying to answer the requests of each individual customer as much as possible in order to survive a brutally competitive society. Behind this lies an unexpected presence. That is China.

The quiet presence of China creeping up on Korea. Its symbolic embodiment is CHAGEE. This modern premium tea brand founded in Yunnan Province in China in 2017 swept mainland China in the blink of an eye, and on April 30, 2026 it opened three stores in Seoul simultaneously. CHAGEE appeared all at once in Gangnam where the young enjoy shopping, in Sinchon with its many university students, and in Yongsan the focus of recent redevelopment plans, and in no time it captivated trend sensitive Korean youth and won explosive popularity. Then on May 21–22 of the following month CHAGEE opened two more stores in Seoul. Within just one month of landing in Korea it had built a five store presence. This is the moment when the speed of China meshed with the speed of Seoul.

CHAGEE already has more than 7,000 stores in mainland China and has expanded into Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, the United States, and Korea. In other words, neither Japan nor Taiwan is included. It is easy to attribute this to Japan China or Japan Taiwan relations, but rather it is also possible to see that in reality the purchasing power per Japanese person is already judged unattractive compared with other Asian countries.

In fact, when I visited a CHAGEE in Seoul on the weekend, trend sensitive Japanese travelers stood out. What is interesting is that they now go out of their way to visit Seoul and enjoy going to the Chinese brand CHAGEE. Here I feel the near future of East Asia. CHAGEE's pace of expansion is modern, and it is accelerating its move online and setting abundant options that can respond to the taste of each individual customer. And within just one month it opened stores in the districts where every customer segment moves, from travelers and young shoppers to university students and businesspeople. Above all, it tastes good.

Around CHAGEE there are countless Starbucks symbolizing American led globalization, but the sense that they are behind the times is striking. The contrast between CHAGEE and Starbucks in Seoul seems to reflect the end of the United States and the rise of China in East Asia. Interestingly, CHAGEE built its brand logo and store design from the outset so that it could take over Starbucks premises as they stand. Going forward, in the process of America's influence receding, there is a possibility that Starbucks stores in East Asia will be replaced one after another by the likes of CHAGEE. Above all, Starbucks is globally saturated, and in Japan too it has become a mere study room for students and has lost its brand value. For this reason CHAGEE is being transmitted through the Japanese travelers who visit Seoul, and many of Japan's younger generation are beginning to take interest in it.

This trend is a first in my life, and it is a structural turning point at which Japan's younger generation has begun to think of China as cool. At the same time the United States is beginning to become a symbol of the uncool. Behind this is that for Japan's younger generation the distorted relationship between the United States and Japan and its historical exploitation are seen as problems, and because of the extreme weak yen they can no longer travel to the United States in the first place and cannot feel it as close to them. Around the 1980s and 1990s the younger generation of Japan actively advanced into the United States, to the point that Japan bashing arose for a time. Because my father was involved in a magazine publisher, many magazines from that time remain in the office, and that era is simply filled with features on the United States.

In short, now that thirty to forty years have passed, the object that is cool for Japan's younger generation has begun to migrate not to the United States but to China by way of Korea. This change cannot be overlooked. In fact, at the end of last month large scale demonstrations against war and against constitutional revision were held simultaneously at 151 sites nationwide including the National Diet Building, and the participants were people in their twenties to forties. Looking at the placards among them, there is the marked feature of strong calls not merely criticizing the administration but seeking the normalization of diplomatic relations with China. The factors are that the younger generation deepened its distrust of the United States as a result of the Gaza war and the Iran war and that they grew psychologically distant from the United States, and at the same time it shows a figure that does not wish for confrontation with China. In short, the young of Japan are already prepared to allow a rapprochement with China.

Starbucks was originally a sensibility suited to the global era. It swept the world with coffee that Americanized Italian espresso culture. But its home turf of Seattle hollowed out rapidly around the time of the pandemic, and with a marked worsening of public safety it ceased to be an attractive city. And with the rise in global coffee demand, specialty coffee climbs in price year by year. CHAGEE, by contrast, proposes a reinterpretation of the tea culture native to China, so it is not swayed by the price movements of the global coffee bubble and can maintain abundant supply, and it expands by skillfully drawing off only the sweet parts of globalization.

In short, the former American symbol once held the merit of using the global stage. Now that it has lost that privilege, it is rapidly falling into an old and uncool symbol. There is no way the trend sensitive younger generation would overlook this damage to the sensibility. Thus the young of Asian countries no longer even glance at the United States and have begun to take in the sensibility of China in various forms. In Japan's case, even if taking it in directly from China is difficult, the import of influence has begun by way of Korea. I cannot help but feel that this is the twenty-first century figure of East Asia. In other words, as if to buffer the worsening of Japan China relations, Korea stands between them and has begun to connect Japan and China. This clearly suggests that Korea has entered its next update. So why exactly did Korea begin such a turn?

The reason is that Korean Wave content has saturated and Korea's soft power has reached a turning point globally. Over the past decade Korean culture sent the world into a frenzy, but now that frenzy is cooling, and Korea as a nation is being called on to make a major decision. As if to express this shift in the balance of power, China's soft power has quietly begun to advance into Seoul. The figure of Korea I myself felt from here looks like a new image of a nation that takes distance from the United States in every respect and has begun to search for a twenty-first century way of facing its neighbor China. In a sense, present day Korea is the canary in Asia's coal mine.

After this Korea will likely attempt its update while steadily taking in Chinese influence, and if it succeeds in its next renewal as it did in 1997, a future in which Korean unification is realized becomes reality. If Korean unification is realized, the structural low birth rate, the deadlock of reform, and the small market size that Korea holds would be resolved. Moreover North Korea's military technology, Korea's advanced industrial structure, and the wisdom of global marketing would interlace, and the structure could head toward placing a China with a cutting edge technological base behind it. What I personally felt in Seoul is that China aims for this construction. In short, within this century Korea holds the possibility of achieving an evolution beyond our imagination.

Even looking at the past month, a US China summit, a China Russia summit, a Japan Korea summit, and a China North Korea summit followed one after another within a single month. It is better to see East Asia as already in the midst of great change. A future in which the United States gradually withdraws and China rises to supplement its influence. Korean unification and the economic absorption of Taiwan connecting the space between.

When it comes to this, the one driven into a corner is Japan. It still cannot decide to take distance from the United States, its way of dealing with China is careless, it has become a digital laggard, its diplomacy has fallen into dysfunction, and most of its citizens do not even hold a passport. On the other hand, Seoul has begun to take distance from the United States, and while searching for a new relationship with China it has become a digital leader, and most of its citizens hold passports and are on the move. Thinking this way, we can see that it takes at least thirty years for a country's major decision to determine its future.

The dizzying tectonic shift I felt in Seoul seems to me the new era of East Asia that Korea is leading right now, in progress. Just as the young of Japan visit Korea frequently, we have already entered an era in which we must sincerely learn the next image of a nation from Korea. I said this time that Korea is the canary in East Asia's coal mine, and in this sense, to read the future of East Asia, I think looking at Korea rather than Japan deepens understanding far more. A neighbor only two hours away by plane, and yet one that has begun to walk an entirely different future.

Seeing this figure of Korea, it seems to me that the time is drawing near somewhere for Japan and Taiwan too to make a major decision. At present world affairs are preoccupied only with the Middle East and Eastern Europe, but a great structural change has begun in East Asia as well.

From here on Japan will likely become completely isolated in East Asia. At that point, with whom exactly will Japan walk its future? The time remaining until the great decision is not much.