Wish someone would do a thinkpiece on how the rest of the world’s future is *not* like Japan’s present, because of the uniquely reductive aspects of using the Japanese historical experience as an analytic lens for the rest of us.
Conversation
One that struck me was that almost nowhere else in the world does a sense of life fulfillment rest to such an extreme degree on mastery of crafts and ritual aesthetics of doing. Like ikigai is a strong idea in a Japanese context but weak anywhere else.
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Another one is luck and risk. Seems like in Japan life was mostly hard historically, luck was mostly bad luck, and risks were mostly downside risks. Plus life bounded by a resource-poor archipelago. So life philosophies seem to underindex on serendipity, expansive growth etc.
Replying to
The Western experience is strongly shaped by “making your own luck” through expansion that the Japanese experience (modulo WW2 militarism) is not.
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Not sure how accurate this popular ikigai Venn diagram is but notice the absence of luck and risk in the equation. Thus is all prowess based. What in an American context looks like John Henryism.
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An American version would be:
Right class of birth
Right place
Right time
Right boom
Be born in the right class, then move to the right place at the right time and jump on the right boom (homesteading, gold rush, oil, various tech booms…)
American ikigai. Uskigai.
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