Today’s story is about a book titled “Japan 2025 - The World’s Last Utopia”. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t worry—it’s not published yet. Its author, Felix Chan, plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund its publishing sometime this year, but I had the opportunity to read a work-in-progress manuscript.

The title is quite provocative and raises a few questions. Has the world ever had a utopia? Why would Japan be one, and why would it be the last? Why the emphasis on 2025?

I don’t have the answers to all of these questions, and I won’t spoil the book for you. What I will do is explore the context from which the book emerged, structured as it is, and how that context relates to the provocative title.

The Makings of a Book

In a previous article, I wrote about the author’s background and how he, a Chinese-Canadian, ended up in Japan and opened a hotel business called “My Home Inn”. It’s a good read, you should check it out, but the abbreviated version is that in visiting Japan many times, Felix experienced a certain “ease of existence” he could find nowhere else. He wanted to find out why Japan, and only Japan, is the way that it is, and chose a highly unusual method of finding that answer.

Which, in my personal opinion, is what makes this story interesting.

Eventually, the search for that answer led him to write a book. And as any writer can attest, especially in the realm of non-fiction, there is no writing without research.

That research was broad, covering a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, including history, anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, and more. It also included paying attention to what was going on around him in the average, everyday life of Japan; to what people were doing (and not doing), and why.

Questions led to more questions, research topics led to new ones, and the midnight oil continued to burn.

Proving a Utopia

In the end, Felix reached the conclusion that there are, in total, 10 main factors that explain why Japan, and only Japan, is the way that it is. In his book, he calls these “The Ten Pillars of the Utopia.” Pillars they are named, because they support daily life in and the social fabric of Japan.

But these pillars aren’t something you can find listed on a Wikipedia page or summarized by an AI. He had come up with them more or less from scratch, and so his claim needed support. And, of course, strong claims require strong evidence.

That evidence makes the bulk of the first part (out of two) of the book, and is divided into 4 tiers, which you can consider as categories of information.

The first tier is “The Philosophies”. These are facets of the Japanese mindset, mental frameworks governing the behavior of the Japanese people. An example of one is Gaman (我慢), which is the ability to suffer unpleasantness without complaining. If you’ve ever stood in an elevator with a smelly person but chose to suffer quietly in an effort not to make a fuss, you are in the right zip code of the concept.

The second tier is “The Origins”. These are events in Japan’s history that acted as historical pressures that gave rise to the Philosophies. If the latter are concentrated fragments of Japanese culture, the former are the context in which they arose. An example of one is the Meiji Restoration, an 1868 political event that led to the westernization of Japan alongside the dissolution of the samurai class—a unique combination that naturally came with cultural consequences. 

The third tier is “The Phenomena”. These are everyday observations anyone could make while in Japan that illustrate the practical application of the Philosophies. They are a sort of a living proof. An example of one is what the book calls “The Reverse Park”. Essentially, the observation that the vast majority of cars parked in Japan are parked in reverse, which indicates a broader cultural forethought of doing work now so that life later (in this case, getting out to the road) is easier.

If you’re noticing a prevalence of proper nouns, you are not wrong.

Lastly, the fourth part is “The Statistics”. Take a wild guess what this one is about. In a nutshell, the goal of presenting statistics is to showcase that beyond cute observations about arguably small things, the 10 Pillars are indeed working in making Japan a utopia not only in spirit but on paper. Hard proof for hard people, or something along those lines.

To sum up, the book posits that events in Japan’s history acted as pressures that shaped the mental frameworks governing Japanese behavior. Those frameworks can be observed in everyday phenomena and form the basis for “The Ten Pillars of the Utopia”. The efficacy of those Pillars can be proven by available statistics.

In very broad strokes, this is what “Japan 2025 - The World’s Last Utopia” is about. It’s thesis. But there is one additional element vital to the book’s identity that I believe cannot be ignored.

Two Modes of Thinking

In 2011, psychologist Daniel Kahneman published the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which went on to win the 2012 American National Academies Communication Award. In short, it is a very influential and successful book. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.

At its core, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is about two modes of thinking called System 1 and System 2.

System 1 thinking is fast, unconscious, and light on mental resources, but also emotional and stereotypic. We use it for things like knowing that something is roughly 3 feet away from us or immediately imagining a praying mantis eating a cookie when told not to imagine one.

System 2 thinking is slow, conscious, and demands mental resources, but also capable of logical reasoning and calculations. We use it whenever a mental process is too complicated for System 1 to solve by itself, such as translating a text into a different language or trying to remember the typing of each of the 1025 known Pokémon species (at time of writing).

Using this framework, any form of thinking (and by extension, decision making and behavior) can be considered as being either a System 1 process or a System 2 process.

With me so far? Good.

What Felix did with his book was incorporate this delineation of thinking into his study of every aspect of Japanese life. In other words, he looked at each fragment of the logic and behavior of the Japanese people and asked: “is this a System 1 or System 2 process?”

You may be inclined to assume that System 2 is inherently better and more representative of humanity than System 1. But as Kahneman himself explained, System 1 is the more prominent mode, doing most of the work.

Regardless, these two should not be viewed in opposition to one another, but as co-workers. It is their synergy and careful balance between mental resources needed and spent that is the ideal state for the brain to operate in.

Felix’s book posits that the Japan-specific balance between System 1 thinking and System 2 thinking is exactly that, and that it’s fundamental to its nature as a Utopia. Which, if you ask me, is a very System 2 kind of thing to say.

So, what does this balance look like in practice? That’s a story for another time.