This writer recently came across an article about Japan’s international development aid—its partnerships, training programs, and cultural exchanges. Yet beneath the optimism lay a familiar unease: the tension between Japan’s global ambitions and its guarded domestic outlook.
When longtime Kanagawa resident Jigyan Kumar Thapa, a Nepali who has lived in Japan for twenty-five years, boarded a train one day wearing his traditional topi, he did not expect hostility. A Japanese passenger shouted, “Stop bringing foreign culture!” Thapa, who has spent decades promoting Japan-Nepal friendship, was left silent.
His story spread across social media but drew little sympathy. Instead, many blamed foreigners for Japan’s “social problems.” It was a revealing echo of a rising mood—one that cloaks anxiety in patriotism and uses “manners” as a mask for prejudice.
The irony is striking. Japan speaks of “coprosperity” through agencies like the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), while relying ever more on foreign labor to sustain its industries. Yet resentment festers toward the very people keeping its economy alive. An aging, shrinking Japan depends on outsiders for survival but struggles to see them as part of its community.
If Japan cannot reconcile its global image with its domestic attitudes, it must pause and reflect. A nation cannot preach “coprosperity” abroad while cultivating quiet suspicion at home. It cannot invite workers to share in its progress, then draw invisible lines when they arrive.
What Japan needs is not more programs or slogans, but honesty—an admission that beneath its outward warmth lies discomfort with difference. If that cannot be faced, then perhaps the old isolation of sakoku would at least be more consistent than a partnership built on half-truths.
To embrace the world while rejecting its presence is not diplomacy—it is theater. The danger lies not in closing one’s doors, but in pretending they are open while keeping them locked.
This contradiction is not new. Japan has long wrestled with the balance between imported modernity and native moral tradition. Thinkers like Ikki Kita and Yukio Mishima, though separated by time, shared the fear that Japan’s soul was being diluted by Western ideas. They called for a return to Shūgi—a moral discipline rooted in loyalty, sincerity, and labor.
Ironically, Shūgi once drew Western admiration. Commentators praised Japan’s “work ethic” as the secret of its postwar recovery, contrasting it with their own welfare systems. Yet this praise was hollow: the West desired the results of Shūgi—efficiency and productivity—without its spirit of duty and sacrifice. Work was reduced to transaction, hardship to “choice,” and inequality to morality.
That spirit of Shūgi built modern Japan’s work ethic. But global capitalism hollowed it out. The ethic remains, the soul is gone. Efficiency replaced empathy, hierarchy replaced dialogue, and discipline replaced understanding. Shūgi became a corporate slogan, stripped of moral depth.
So when society blames immigrants for its discomforts, perhaps the problem lies deeper—in the system that created them. The foreigner becomes a scapegoat for the machine that demands endless output and denies humanity. It is not Thapa, nor the Nepali worker, nor the Filipino entertainer who unravels Japan’s balance—but the relentless pursuit of efficiency that turns people into instruments.
There is bitter irony in Thapa’s experience. The Vedic-Buddhist ideals that once shaped Japan’s moral culture came from the same world Thapa represents—Nepal, India, the Himalayas. Yet in today’s Japan, that shared heritage is forgotten. The man who told Thapa to stop “bringing foreign culture” did not realize that Japan’s own ethical foundations trace back to that very source.
Modern capitalism turns ideals into slogans. Multiculturalism becomes a word without meaning; efficiency, a false god. When citizens tell foreigners to leave, the question should not be about the foreigners—but the system itself. Why does Japan depend on migrant labor instead of improving life for its citizens? Why invite others under the name of friendship, only to humiliate them? Why speak of “global cooperation” while tolerating quiet xenophobia?
If Japan truly believes in Shūgi, it should practice it honestly—not as propaganda, but as living philosophy: discipline balanced by compassion, pride tempered by humility. Shūgi without compassion becomes tyranny; “coprosperity” without sincerity, hypocrisy.
The West, too, hides its self-interest behind rhetoric of “development” and “democracy.” It preaches partnership but demands imitation; offers aid but ensures dependence. It celebrates work ethic not out of respect for labor, but to preserve hierarchy. It is easy to tell others to “work harder” when the system rewards ownership over toil.
Now, that contradiction grips all advanced economies. Societies that glorified effort are collapsing under the efficiency they worshiped. The shortage of workers in Europe, the U.S., and Japan is not just demographic—it is moral. The cultures that once praised sacrifice now refuse to bear it, outsourcing both labor and conscience, then blaming immigrants for the fractures that follow.
The West admired Shūgi only when it served convenience—a disciplined ethic without communal duty. But Shūgi, in its pure form, is not nationalism or capitalism. It is the moral dignity of labor, the belief that work carries meaning beyond wages or metrics. That is what both Japan and the West have lost in their chase for productivity.
So when Japan invokes “coprosperity,” one must ask: prosperity for whom? If the nation seeks a moral role, it must lead by example, not by slogans. Let Shūgi be practiced with sincerity, not performed for applause. Only then can Japan offer something more than aid or trade—perhaps a spiritual correction to a world that mistakes material growth for moral progress.
When Thapa quietly removed his topi on that train, it became a symbol of Japan’s crisis of identity—a nation that once drew from Asia’s spiritual breadth, now shrinking within its own fences. His silence spoke volumes: a society proud of its order, yet uncertain of its humanity.