Journalist and broadcaster Michael Fitzpatrick has run with all the big game of journalism while inhabiting more countries than is absolutely necessary.
TOKYO — Nothing triggers the bog-walloping Fenian in me quite like a visit to the British Embassy. This one, with its fine Georgian-revival facade, looked on my last visit a decade ago like a lost Cotswold manor-house brought to life in Tokyo.
But what was it that I found so unsettling? Perhaps the stately setting? Or its gilt-framed displays of a preternaturally regal, late queen? Her gaze following me about the room as I moved among the fine art and mahogany, like those creepy Sacred Heart of Jesus portraits I grew up with. Me, a lad reared in an Irish republican home where the Queen’s annual Christmas messages were as welcome as a poltergeist.
To the more clubbable, the embassy’s English country house manner would have seemed merely civilized; a demonstration that Merrie England had acquired over generations the ability to arrange the upholstery without the aid of an AI shepherd.
The decor was a projection of centuries of British self-assuredness and ease, distilling, as adroitly as the form allows, the essence of (an ebbing) sovereign power. The fine art, damask and agreeable lighting gave no hint that Britain’s technological might has long migrated elsewhere. That such hegemony now lies with American platforms and Asian supply chains. But the genius of spaces like these is that you can start to believe in a type of fanciful continuity of the imperishable.
It inveigles you into sharing a fantasy. This one being that if these old arrangements had survived war, decolonization, Tamagotchis and the mobile phone, perhaps it might survive the latest digital convulsions, too. Here was a refuge, some autonomy even, from the technological superpowers that increasingly own us. Proof that small jurisdictions of taste, privacy and human-scale abound.
Of course, like any contemporary state, the British must put on a show of modernity. Outside the embassy hung long banners declaring that England was now a “Unicorn Kingdom.” But from where I was standing, the oak heart of this very British establishment demurred. They had seen it all before. But it was co-opting some of Silicon Valley’s grandiose illusions just to be safe. Inside the older, more powerful unicorns of mythology resided sinewy on the royal coat of arms. Not just representing rarity, but purity and extreme ferocity, reminding me of some English public-schoolboys I knew.
But this is the great charm of the embassy interior — its refusal to update. Even in the face of economic realities and the dark, immutable forces that forge them. Here was a stand for the moral and institutional habits of our ancestors.
A Sinking Feeling
Big Tech oligarchs can threaten to transform all that is before them, but the timeless endurance of this lived-in aristocratic grandeur will survive, I was starting to feel. Now I — sinking in someone else’s club chair — was beginning to get it.
Assailed by crypto pirates, the succubi of VC-led extractor corporatism and the crumbling of knowledge work, we feel profoundly the foundations of power shifting ominously beneath us. Countering that are the Embassy’s older, time-tested values and their comforting familiarity. People like the faddish Steve Jobs would probably have hated it. Like death for Californians, he thought furniture was optional.
Beyond the embassy precincts, Japan too was stealing itself from Darwinian upheaval, slouching toward it from across the Pacific. That was 10 years ago. Now the evolution has landed, proposing a shotgun wedding with a prenuptial dubbed Pax Silica.
The vow is simple: Join our techno view of the world or be made irrelevant by it.
Or you can do what the embassy valiantly attempts: indulge in wishful thinking that we are beholden to no one; sovereign power is unassailable and will prevail over any forces that seek to unseat it. Look! We have brass sconces! Damask pelmets!
Eventually, I allowed myself to be consoled, finding one of the ambassador’s snugglers, an oversized armchair, to sink into and reflect. Besides, despite residues of unease, it was too late to bolt. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson at the time, had been promised forth — attended by the nation’s press and its tech somebodies — to expand on a subject without any obvious tripwire: London’s thrusting home-grown cashless tech.
I had a fancy I might know better. As a former hack himself, Johnson knew how to give good copy, and I had an uncharitable thought he would not disappoint.
After all, Johnson had already just snot-o-grammed a schoolboy in a game of mock rugby the day before. Metaphors for the bumbling, bruiser foreigner riding roughshod over finer Japanese sensibilities came tumbling off the press. And why not? We in the geographical West have plenty of form here.
“Japan too was stealing itself from Darwinian upheaval, slouching toward it from across the Pacific. That was 10 years ago.”
Polite rebuffs, coded rebukes, and death threats from Japan aimed at preventing Johnny Foreigner from putting his size-12 welly through the shoji doors have often proved futile over the centuries. We were never much good at taking the hint.
It fell to U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853 to finally dash aside Japan’s isolationist polite “Please Do Not Disturb” sign to demand, with menaces, access rights. Included in the list of “diplomatic” offerings was a white flag, should the Japanese ever feel the need to employ it.
Almost touchingly British, this American politely tapping on the door while carrying a battering ram. And echoing today’s political realities, when faced with “having no cards,” capitulation must follow as night follows day.
Can’t Put A Good Man Down
Now we had a capering politician on a trade mission to Japan for whom such blundering was just a warm-up act. Japan’s wall of unassailable, face-saving etiquette would ensure his next gaffe.
Johnson was on his pins, grandly pitching the City Boys’ latest Fintech triumph — its “light-years ahead” magical, cashless payments tech. The marvelous BRITISH tech in question was contactless IC (integrated circuit) cards, which made paying for travel on the tube absolute duck soup.
Pausing to ask rhetorically, “Who else can boast that?” he practically invited an intervention. And so … apostle of truth that I am, I did not hold back. From the press seats, I pointed out that Japanese travelers were largely already there should they wish it. Japan had had the cashless tech for years, and practically single-handedly conjured up the tech in question while others fumbled for dimes. A couple of years back, I had even completed a journey — with mixed results, I have to say — around Japan to try out humanity’s first tentative steps toward going cashless.
Obviously, no news of this had reached the British capital, or the ears of the mayor’s flunkies, because suddenly Johnson looked all in, spluttering into his cuffs: “Really, is this true!?” A sea of dark heads bobbed in assent.
“Have I just undermined the whole raison d’être of this event? So, what is my raison d’être for being here?” he queried, eyeing his aides. “Why was I not told this?”
Summing up the possibilities, I arrived at a few rapid deductions. Firstly, his immediate staff and the embassy had signally failed to do their homework. Secondly, too many of his hosts were equally bereft of the facts concerning their own country’s digital prowess in this matter.
Third, and most crucially, a naked emperor, no matter how richly deserving of exposure, is still an Emperor in Japan; only on pain of social death should he be confronted with the humiliating truth.
It was an object lesson in the terrifying extremes to which Japan is willing to take its impeccable manners. Selling coals to Newcastle may be ill-advised, but apparently in Japan the correct form is for Newcastle to politely deny the existence of its coal pits in the face of such magnificent British magnanimity.
Yet this gaffe can be forgiven, if only because the Japanese themselves were largely in the dark about their own tech — having long refused to trust anything but hard cash. Because of this typical national recalcitrance, the contactless technology perfected in Japan decades ago initially went nowhere, no matter how hard any Japanese Boris Johnsons tried to push it. It was only after the tech took off in Europe and elsewhere in the 2000s that it gained a widespread local following.
The Root Of All Evil Is Progress
For me, this became a quiet symbol of the failure of progress and of our rightful reluctance to submit unconditionally to its tyranny. A new tyranny that demands societies adapt to every new technology. But as Japan proved, we do not have to. The fact that Japanese innovation remained so entirely invisible, even to the fintech envoys themselves, is also symptomatic of how Japan’s tech research routinely fails to achieve a global impact commensurate with its genius.
What is missing, as is so often the case in Japan, is the aggressive cultural machinery required to turn raw research into a bankable international asset.
The country lacks, above all, the cultural instinct to shout its name from the rooftops. When advised to do so, heads are patiently shaken in agreement, and eventually, it’s determined that no shoestring is too threadbare for the task. Even the most prestigious startup factory at Tokyo University has only one part-time PR rep. She does not speak English.
“What is missing, as is so often the case in Japan, is the aggressive cultural machinery required to turn raw research into a bankable international asset.”
Consequently, there is very little understanding of how global visibility is created.
Treating communications, international business development and storytelling as peripheral administrative functions suggests a genuine contradiction here. Universities are being ordered to create globally competitive companies but seem blind to the fact that they are institutionally unsuited for the task. After observing such behavior time and time again in Japan, the communications gap is glaringly real.
Could such attitudes be an atavistic return to the days when storytellers, entertainers and the like were classified under Japan’s feudal caste system as literally “hinin” non-humans?
A suspicion, not unwarranted, that marketing and PR, like all stories, are a kind of … lies. Manipulative ones at that. When I asked about the story from these cloistered university startup hubs, the basic reply was, “Anyway, what use is a mere ‘story’ when you have specs!?”
Was this where Japan was failing startup-wise? I wondered.
Never Losing The Plod
A few years later, I think I heard my answer: “It’s not about the tech, it’s about the execution,” explained one Tokyo tech insider at a startup meeting.
Where Japan often fails, he continued, was the slow pace of business. He was right. Japanese commerce likes to plod, and the Japanese are inveterate plodders. Decisions take months, even years, to kick things around, assess, assess, assess, then slowly “build trust” for the sake of “nemawashi” (preparations).
Japan’s sluggish adoption of cashless payments perfectly illustrated this trend. What was lost on its hapless Japanese inventors and investors was that they alone held the keys and were the legislators and instigators of a powerful new digital tool that the Tech Tyrants across the ocean had failed to monopolize.
Londoners, forever with an eye out for every angle, understood better. Fintech of this ilk being perhaps its only success yet at stemming a tide of American tech dominance, there was much to harumph about. While not a wholly British success story, it was about the only Big Tech triumph the UK could cling to before burlier Fin-Tech Bros sharp-elbowed them back to their country estates.
In the face of it, Japan and the UK seem powerless to stop this leaking away of sovereignty. Japan’s puzzling foot-dragging on the tech illustrates an overlooked aspect of its innovation drive — its long history of brilliant innovations that were, for various reasons, overlooked and sidetracked. It also illustrates very well Japan’s institutional-character problem and its uncanny ability to turn wine into water.
Opportunity Knocks
It was Toyota that ushered me into one of its first commercial electric cars 30 years ago. Ditto, a self-driving vehicle that same year. Thanks to a “mad-scientist dream” for humanoid robots, a Japanese computer scientist told me 15 years ago that her country led the world in AI machine learning. Now, like Japan’s version of the Rip Van Winkle tale, Taro Urashima, the nation is waking up to find it overslept in all these fields.
Its less cautious neighbors, famously, ran with the tech Japan had been quietly pioneering, leaving the country on the wrong side of a technological divide entirely of its own making. The American giants, meanwhile, rose rapidly, ate everyone else’s lunch, pocketed their dinner money and now appear to be talking options on any future breathing plans others may be foolishly having.
That’s why we rant about Amazon, Apple, Meta, and the like as tech’s “Magnificent Seven,” and not the Seven Samurai. Contemporary Japan simply often fails to capitalize on, or communicate, its genius.
China, too, is leaving Japan and the rest of us at the bedroom door. It may have gotten its lead by “distilling” all the best ideas from Japan and elsewhere, but China is now outpacing us with the speed it has put these applications to use.
Ask any savvy Japanese, “How so?” and they’ll evoke the “Galápagos” theory. Like the plants and creatures on those famous islands, Japan’s tech standards and business practices have developed a unique character incompatible with overseas wants and desires.
Even the country’s myriad startups throw up lots of weird and wonderful concepts only seen in Japan, earning them domestic fans but a condemned death march if tempted to ship abroad due to their lack of marketing savvy and other entrepreneurial qualities. Because to grow globally, Japan lacks the linguistic skills, overengineers its products and fails to understand what might play well abroad. Nor is it an accident that Japanese researchers boast the most recipients of the Ig Nobel prizes, an annual satirical award presented by the “Annals of Improbable Research” science humor magazine.
“Japan’s puzzling foot-dragging on the tech illustrates an overlooked aspect of its innovation drive — its long history of brilliant innovations that were, for various reasons, overlooked and sidetracked.”
A New Kind Of Innovation
There was even a craze called Chindōgu for what became known as useless “curious or strange tools,” in the ‘80s and ‘90s when Japan actually made stuff the world wanted.
This Galápagosian inward focus, while fostering some unique innovations, has also left Japan isolated in the global tech landscape, or so the thinking goes. This created a superficially hi-tech Japan, Hideki Onda, a former Apple director, once told me.
Onda believed Japan’s deeply cautious and conservative business and political classes were the root cause. This allowed Japan to evolve along Galápagos lines because the ruthless nature of startup capitalism and radical technocratic disruption was such a poor fit for Japan’s slower, more considered way of doing things.
When economists were chivying for the re-ignition of Japan’s competitive “animal spirits,” the country responded with its trademark animal caution.
To best illustrate this, Onda recalled a time in 1996 when Apple was pushing Japan to introduce its teaching tech to schools. The education minister’s answer was a polite “Kekko desu,” or no.
Apple’s then-CEO Michael Spindler asked Onda when they might return to try again. “When the ‘60s-era floor indicator above the ministry’s elevator door goes digital,” Onda told him.
A decisively Luddite response, many thought at the time. But fast-forward through 30 years of digitization, and we are seeing method in the minister’s madness. The rush to digitization and the digital economy, we found belatedly, has resulted in its own casualties.
The American models of capital efficiency and market disruption we so admired are now being seen as possibly ruinous. We are learning, for one, that networked screen-based learning is no silver bullet. Nor do all cultures suit the startup models; just ask the equal-with-Japan on social-cohesion-first Swedes.
The Medium Is The Message
After noting a drop in student literacy, Sweden has now reversed its push toward digital learning. Cellphones have been banned in schools, and the textbook industry rejoices at schools’ return to paper.
And yet the assault from a proselytizing Big Tech on Japan, where digitization has been slow and AI remains largely a curiosity in the workplace, is intensifying.
There is still an unfulfilled desire to digitize; that is true. Broadcast mainly from some business quarters and certain politicos. Japan’s AI regulations, for instance, have been made as loose as those in the U.S., and many see them as an incentive for American corporations to move in.
I asked a Japanese friend and tech journalist what he thought about this new “Black Ships” moment, and he told me he expects an awkward culture clash of Titanic proportions. “Because American technology companies are often extraordinarily irresponsible about the social consequences of what they build.”
He had another keen observation for me: “Ultimately, Silicon Valley is not primarily optimized to maximize human wellbeing. It is optimized to maximize returns.”
Japan. Ostensibly capitalistic, has a rather different take. The emphasis is on social cohesion, not profits. This contrast is not simply cultural. In a 2006 Japanese government survey, nearly 70% of responding Japanese companies said employees were important stakeholders, and 90% planned to maintain long-term employment.
He now suspects that when we look back several decades, or perhaps several centuries, from now, we may conclude that our current tech revolution produces too much “technological pollution” — innovations that ultimately caused considerable suffering to large numbers of people despite Silicon Valley’s innovative bent. This is particularly daunting in light of well-informed concerns that AI development will lead to our extinction.
His conclusion echoes Japan’s nascent clarion call for “technological sovereignty.” It is now the responsibility, not of America, but of countries with long histories and deep cultural traditions such as in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, to propose ways of using technology that engage much more seriously with social responsibility, he argues.
And it is true that some Europeans and Japanese are now working to reduce their dependency on U.S. tech. But when you don’t have the cards, a certain raspy voice likes to remind us, the white flag your pushy competitors hand you can seem like a lifesaver after all.
Techno Darwinism Dawns
Until the triumph of such heretics, the inescapable dark logic of techno Darwinism gets to cast its shade far into Japan’s corridors of power for now. Supping with the Devil as a hedge against total irrelevance, you might want to call it. Just bring long chopsticks and hope you are not on the menu.
“The rush to digitization and the digital economy, we found belatedly, has resulted in its own casualties.”
Presiding over national decline and a plummeting yen, Peter Thiel’s recent appearance in Tokyo must have seemed an omen of sorts to the government — perhaps even an opportunity. Certainly, Japan’s premier Sanae Takaichi received Thiel and his trade mission cheerfully enough, despite any whiff of sulfur. Besides being something of a missionary from the darker side of the Singularity faithful, his visit was the latest in a long list of tech emissaries from across the water. U.S. venture capital, too, is arriving fast. Marc Andreessen , boss of one of the heftiest firms, opened his first overseas office in Japan this summer. It is no secret that Japan now sees the Silicon Valley model as the one that might get it out of its considerable hole.
Brandon Hill, founder of an outfit that helps startups on both sides of the Pacific, told me Tokyo is desperate for more startups and more “successful exits.” The hope is that those eager entrepreneurs will spark another period of rapid reinvention like the 19th-century’s Meiji-era modernization, or Japan’s dramatic re-industrialization after World War II. This one, we imagine, will be driven by homegrown Silicon-Valley wannabes with less perishable wings of wax.
But Japan should be thinking beyond simply creating more startups, Hill insists, keen to impart to an attentive Japan the magic formula: “It should be creating more globally competitive companies.”
Death March, What Death March?
But these are death march orders again. Because given Japan’s current climate of anxiety and its lack of survival skills, English and narrative nous, the global market will exact its toll. Once a nation of outward-looking, inveterate tinkerers willing to make technology central to national survival, the collapse of the ‘80s economic boom in 1991 led to lost decades and economic stagnation. The bust also created a fear of risk-taking and a retreat into safe jobs, safe investments and safe conservative governments.
Thanks to that trauma, contemporary Japan is a much more inward-looking and risk-averse place now. The bubble’s collapse and the financial crisis that followed gave way to a long corporate decline. In a 2024 survey, the Bank of Japan found that many firms had curbed investment and built cash reserves after the crisis and later shocks. That history helps explain business caution, though it cannot by itself explain Japan’s wider inward turn.
The moral and institutional habits formed by Japan’s lost decades are unlikely to evaporate at the urging of a few Tech Valley gurus. Many here, perhaps rightly, take pride that the Libertarian, go-getting style of the buccaneering new world capitalists remains as rare as buttered sushi.
Despite this, some sections of central government, such as the bullish Ministry of Economy, are insisting the nation pledges its shirt to such a miraculous resurrection of entrepreneurial spirits. Even if it means the much-dreaded importing — however imperfectly — of alien business practices, plus accommodating the Devil of foreign investment and all its stratagems.
The current thinking is, if Japan’s satraps are to become Satan’s latest freshly minted imps so that the country can flourish, so be it. Accordingly, Japan’s ministries must undergo a Damascene conversion, buckle under for universal digitization, get with the program and ditch the fax for the splendid shining lie of the startup. Strong medicine for a nation that swears by “not waking the baby.”
The Revolution Will Not Be Commodified
As already mentioned, the revolution will not be restricted to business. Shanghaied into the program are its universities, too, to be raided for startup recruits. They now giddily employ the magic word salads of “incubators,” “ecosystems” and “unicorns” — incantations in the newly imported, and hopefully profitable, cargo cult.
In service to the “Stack” — the secret sauce of the vaunted digital product — they must dump the Old-Fogey seats of learning/babysitting roles and learn to “hyper-scale.” And in doing so, become the engines of a “new technology-driven nation” where science and technology provide economic growth and national security. The model is California’s lucrative fusion of pioneering lab work and entrepreneurship stripped for export.
This is a big ask for an institution whose principal role, until now, was an untaxing refuge for students lately overtaxed by Japan’s notorious entrance exams.
But the heart wants what the heart wants. So out must go the playground-cum-finishing school model applied to the young before they join the workforce. It is a system that makes them easy targets for job automation anyway.
“The moral and institutional habits formed by Japan’s lost decades are unlikely to evaporate at the urging of a few Tech Valley gurus.”
Research at the top universities is another matter entirely. World-class and innovative but sheltered from the worldly West Coast-style monetizing of know-how, they are an unlikely vehicle for commerce. But to the trendier, more tech-savvy of Tokyo’s mandarins, gifting academic researchers with money and startup blueprints must seem like a foolproof remedy for Japan’s economic woes.
The country’s economic emergency is real enough. Japan’s nominal GDP, which once ranked second in the world, fell to third place in 2010 and then to fourth place in 2023. The country’s share of global nominal GDP has fallen sharply, from approximately 18% in 1995 to approximately 3.8% in 2025. More worryingly, its nominal GDP per capita has also fallen from second in the world to 38th today.
Real wages have stagnated for 30 years; the yen has fallen to a low not seen for nearly 40 years.
Ingredients But No Recipe
But there are reasons for hope. After all, the country has all the ingredients to make it a supreme techno-state. Elite scientists, a magic-money spigot (take a bow, quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates) and world-class manufacturing chops.
But instead of impacting our world with its surprisingly useful research applications, the policies, as my tech writer friend pointed out, are only exposing an almighty clash of civilizations. It’s another institutional mismatch where Japanese universities, slow and hierarchical to their bones, repurpose poorly as startup factory incubators (which must be fast and unstable). The friction is almost palpable.
After decades of being left to their own insular devices — including, bizarrely, a reluctance to publish abroad — university-linked founders are now lining up to take grants for “global startups” while conveniently skipping the global part. No slogan has ever been emptier than “be global from the start,” as most of these founders don’t speak English.
But without the “go global!” declaration, they would be unlikely to qualify for funding. This makes Japan’s latest bid to race across borders, like all its other vaunted internationalization schemes, a sham.
Because Japan lingers in the bottom ranks of English proficiency tests and belatedly adopts international marketing practices, like pitching or self-promotion, its innovation remains mostly invisible to a broader public.
Without a sudden sea-change, conjuring national self-reliance, economic security and cutting-edge innovation out of Japan’s unbelievably stuffy, risk-averse and archaic institutions will be a miracle. Already, in critical fields like AI, semiconductors and defense tech, the chance to lead sailed away with the last of the country’s frustrated emigre innovators.
Enter The Zombies
But appealing fictions have a habit of overriding the stark facts. So universities take a substantial amount of government money to pump out startups despite being poorly equipped to produce global-ready startups as the state is requesting. Most of these universities focus on Japan’s stockpile of zombie enterprises — the kinds that have stayed alive thanks to cheap credit and government handouts rather than healthy, global market performance.
Japanese startups outside the blessed and coddled circle of academia fare no better. Lacking the swagger of Silicon Valley, Japan’s corporate culture is the antithesis of America’s individualistic, T-shirted tycoons. Japan’s corporate culture prioritizes conformist don’t-rock-the-boat mediocrity, uses generalists rather than specialists, and favors risk-aversion over disruptive ideas; monetizing innovation will remain a struggle. The Economist suggests Tokyo’s “startups first” growth plan looks woefully misguided.
Not that the country lacks the kind of Promethean chutzpah that could bring new light, energy and progress. But Japan has a habit of taking the role of an angry Zeus — chaining any unruly innovators to the nearest rock. Japan has a long list of disgruntled innovators who feel hard done by its corporate system. Even the chap who invented the white LED, Shuji Nakamura, was originally rewarded with a corporate bonus of just 20,000 yen (roughly $200 at the time).
Scapegoat
If there is one man famous for bringing raw, individualistic U.S.-style techno-capitalism to these shores and failing spectacularly, it is Takefumi Horie — AKA “Horiemon.” No fire-bearing Titan to mankind is he — more an ambitious internet provider — but instructive all the same was the treatment of this tech startup founder imprisoned for 21 months for his disruptive antics a couple of decades ago.
Horie’s style put him at the center of a culture clash between U.S. and Japanese business. He became the scourge of Japanese companies when his internet firm Livedoor launched a hostile bid for Nippon Broadcasting in 2005. Using a legal loophole in off-hours trading, it bought 29.6% of the radio broadcaster in one go, bringing its holding to around a third. It was an attempt to take control of the powerful Fuji TV. The move led the government to change the Securities and Exchange law to extend takeover rules to off-hours trading. The bid failed.
“Japan’s corporate culture prioritizes conformist don’t-rock-the-boat mediocrity, uses generalists rather than specialists, and favors risk-aversion over disruptive ideas; monetizing innovation will remain a struggle.”
Authorities arrested Horie a year later on a separate issue. He faced charges that his company Livedoor falsified financial results to mislead investors. The company reported a pretax profit of about 5 billion yen, but prosecutors said it had actually made a loss of about 300 million yen. Horie was convicted of securities-law violations and sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison, serving about 21 months.
Such treatment shocked Japan’s startup community and signaled that non-consensus-driven, Anglo-Saxon, morally ambiguous capitalism bent on erasing cultural norms might be tolerated in the U.S. but punished in Japan. Japanese tech startups aiming to be the tallest poppy at the time quickly pulled up their roots. The startup revolution and rush to digitization were canceled.
In the face of Japan’s bureaucratic top-down planning, Japan’s elite universities, patient capital and strong manufacturing record count for little. Fast-moving, software-driven global tech trends simply move on — too quickly for a Japanese catch-up.
This, despite Japan actually sharing the passion for tech America does. In the field of AI in particular, Japan’s affair with machine intelligence is relatively long and productive. Computer scientist Noriko Arai sat me down in her office 15 years ago and explained how a “mad scientist” dream of humanoid robots placed Japan ahead in the AI race decades ago.
In the 1980s, while Western researchers were still skeptical of neural networks, Japanese scientists were diving deep into artificial neurons and machine learning. “We say Japan was ahead at the time,” AI researcher Yutaka Matsuo told me. “But perhaps that doesn’t mean a lot now.”
Japan fell behind, failing to catch the St. Vitus’s dance deemed necessary to animate a Silicon Valley-style digital resurrection. But perhaps we have been measuring the wrong thing. Yes, its institutions are often too conservative to change, but as we survey the damage that technology has inflicted upon us, were the plodders right to plod?
Fearlessness in the face of failure, rapid iteration, global self-confidence, impatience with hierarchy — are definitively not the country’s house style. But because of this, did Japan eventually dodge a bullet? My tech journalist friend and others like him increasingly feel so.
There are fears of a too-rapidly deployed foreign AI risk, fears over the erosion of social cohesion, fears that a gig economy will replace Japan’s cherished full employment. The call is also for more strategic autonomy from tech corporations who are outmaneuvering the locals.
Black Ships Redux
But the chatter is not just of another Black Ships “coup” or “digital colonialism” if Japan adopts the American model of rapid disruption. There’s a growing realization that the friction of the culture clash is perhaps a benefit. Japan’s plodding ways and institutions incompatible with hyper-capitalism offer a chance to install some kind of rugged technological sovereignty. They allow Japan to escape the technological determinism now infecting the West.
The appearance of a technology doesn’t mean that societies are suddenly forced to adapt to it. Societies should decide which technologies to adopt, how quickly, under what rules and for whose benefit. In 2021, UNESCO called for human oversight and demanded that we give societies a basis to accept or reject AI systems. A call now responded to belatedly by institutions and governments worldwide, mirroring people’s concerns over AI developments.
Coincidentally, Johnson’s ill-timed Fintech speech I attended at the embassy shines a light on the assumption that every problem has a technological solution, and that more technology necessarily means progress. A technological determinism and the myth of technological progressiveness Japan should be keen to avoid.
“We have to recognize that disruptive technology is simply inevitable and we cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle,” Johnson added to his contactless payments pitch. “Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, folks, that’s it.”
Inertia Is Not All Bad News
Do the Japanese need to become more Californian to be more capable, or should these old institutions and Japan’s inertia be left alone to create some breathing space? Bill Gates said recently there is “no plan to ease the entry into the AI era.” Perhaps Japan’s experience of friction at that very entry is telling us something. Despite its half-hearted attempts to mimic Silicon Valley values, the country’s deep inertia seems to be buffeting it from some of the ill effects of globalization and technological disruption.
For decades, Japanese companies have attempted to shield their workers from the insatiable demands of stockholders and capital as part of a “social responsibility” mindset to help create jobs and safeguard companies.
“As outdated and sluggish as the nation’s institutions might be, their limbic caution has preserved livelihoods.”
As outdated and sluggish as the nation’s institutions might be, their limbic caution has preserved livelihoods. Because, as it has often been said, Japan is a massive job creation scheme. Any introduction of American-style lean capitalism would threaten the labor policies aimed at creating overemployment, and the men I see guiding traffic around roadworks outside my house where a traffic light would do would all be out of a job. Making Japan a possible, and unlikely, last stand to our current reckoning with technological determinism.
Everywhere else the old rules are breaking, and some are heading for the exit laden with unicorn silver. West Coast billionaires are even reportedly seeking escape hatches or bunkers. Could tardy Japan be on their list of hideaways?
Exchange Tokyo for Vienna in this old joke and you’ll see what I mean. “If the world should ever come to an end — move to Vienna, because everything there happens 20 years later,” goes the quip used even today about the celestial city.
Japan is not unlike Vienna in this respect in its refusal to update. And its failure to do so, like the unabashed, unreconstructed British Embassy in Tokyo, may not be a disadvantage at all. On the contrary, it can remind us of what we value, and why.
