Why Is Japan So Orderly? No One Decided

Every foreigner who has visited Japan carries away a question that will not quite turn into words. How can a nation of more than a hundred million people be so well ordered? Why are the streets so clean, the trains so quiet, the people so regular in their ways?

The Japanese themselves cannot answer it. Half a century ago Yamamoto Shichihei wrote of the invisible order called kuki, "the air," and Japan is still reading him, because the mystery has never been explained.

No one decided, and yet it is decided. No one ordered it, and yet everyone obeys.

The reason is that what continues to act strongly even in Japan's modern governance is Neo-Confucianism, a school of Confucianism from China. With the start of the Edo period the Tokugawa shogunate actively employed Neo-Confucian scholars such as Hayashi Razan, systematized an ethic that values loyalty to the lord and order between high and low, and built it into the system of rule. At the level of the common people too, the shogunate grouped households in fives and imposed joint responsibility for paying the annual tax and preventing crime. This was not "mutual aid." It was the Edo period's system of mutual surveillance. Here "peer pressure" within the community comes into play. Once that pressure became a system, not defying the hierarchy and conforming to those around you became the normal state of society. Modern history has kept glorifying this as the traditional concept of "wa," harmony.

The spirit of sacrificing the individual "for the country" built in wartime, and local mutual surveillance and peer pressure, left their traces in social consciousness after defeat. The influence of Neo-Confucianism was passed down there too, unnoticed. Democratization advanced after the war, but while institutions changed greatly, the system was never really renewed. It looked on the surface as if everything had changed, but the inner sense of order was handed down unchanged, so when the bubble collapsed the old order, which had seemed to vanish, came back. Behind this lies a layer of spirit, from the order-keeping Neo-Confucianism cultivated over a long time, that does not easily disappear and has kept flowing at the base of society to this day.

So insight into Japan through Neo-Confucianism is the greatest key, and the same holds for modern Japan. The basic structure of the Japanese sense of norms, formed through this history, values "not defying authority and not disturbing wa with those around you." I said at the start that modern Japan has not introduced an open surveillance system of advanced technology as China has, yet society stays stable without great confusion. That is because even without the state managing the people centrally through technology, a function by which people watch over one another and adjust individual conduct works to a high degree. This mechanism rests on a spirit that comes from history and on how this land was formed, so it cannot be moved whole to other places.

Seen from a Western vantage point, contemporary Japan looks like bureaucratic totalitarianism or socialism. Yet the only account that truly rings true is what the philosopher Tetsuji Yamamoto, at the close of the 2000s, called "society-ism" (shakai-izumu): a condition beyond socialism in which the production and reproduction of society itself become the sole end of everything.

In reality, paradoxical as it may sound, it is at once boundless and bordered. And a society that manipulates the border hands down one rule after another to those internalized within it; by folding people into those countless rules, it drives them toward an active subordination that strips them of their humanity. In an ironic sense, it has achieved the most consummate ultra-totalitarianism imaginable.

To the eyes of anyone who dreams of dictatorship, this must look like the ideal mechanism. After all, it costs nothing to maintain total control. Not even cutting-edge surveillance technology is required.

This social tendency gained decisive momentum during the pandemic. At the time, the Japanese government adopted a posture not of enforcing legal mandates, but of issuing polite "requests" to the public. To outside observers, this approach might have appeared bizarre; yet in a Japanese society that had already transcended a managed society to realize a surveillance society—anchored not by autocratic state coercion, but by the relentless mutual surveillance of citizens themselves—it proved devastatingly effective.

In Japanese society, a single misstep is fatal; there is never a second chance. Consequently, people have been stripped of the courage to take risks or voice dissent, driven into a faceless, depersonalized conformity. Everyone bows to an invisible code far more binding than statutory law, while zealously demanding that same subservience from their peers.

Because this totalitarianism operates without visible symbols or overt coercion, it remains elusive and baffling to foreign observers. Yet because it permeates invisible dimensions such as daily habit and the intangible kuki, it exerts an extraordinarily powerful, unacknowledged grip — one that ordinary Japanese people cannot even articulate. As a consequence, Japan has formed a bizarre sociopolitical structure where rulers need neither the charisma of an autocrat nor the panoptic surveillance technologies of high-tech authoritarian regimes to maintain order; they govern effortlessly by doing almost nothing at all. This peculiar state of affairs confuses analysis, leaving commentary both at home and abroad hopelessly adrift.

Many foreign leaders look upon Japanese order and discipline with admiration, yet they fail to recognize that this system is the product of centuries of specific historical and cultural conditioning; it cannot simply be exported or replicated elsewhere. I urge anyone visiting Japan to look beneath the tranquil surface and observe the reality of this Japanese totalitarianism for themselves. Look with open eyes, and you will see that it is not a harbinger of a humane future. History, lamentably, has a way of repeating itself.