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For perhaps the first time in years, a truly interesting thing happened the other day on X. The platform began automatically translating Japanese tweets to English, and recommending them to English-speaking users. Japanese people use X at much higher rates than people in other countries, mostly because the platform’s pseudonymity offers them a chance to comment publicly on their personal lives without revealing their real identities. Because it’s mostly a platform for personal use, it’s much less toxic than the English-speaking version, which is mostly used for political arguments.
English-speaking X users were naturally delighted at the influx of sanity and normalcy, not to mention the delights of quirky Japanese online culture. I predict this honeymoon will last only a short time, until Anglosphere culture wars infect and overwhelm Japanese-speaking X. This will be the digital version of the tourism boom, in which international delight at being able to travel cheaply and easily to Japan has resulted in an epidemic of bad behavior and the complete overrunning of tourist hotspots like Kyoto and the west side of Tokyo.
But glum predictions aside, it is pretty magical for people in other countries to get a taste of Japanese culture without having to learn the language. Yes, many of the stereotypes of Japan are either exaggerated or just plain wrong — it’s not very conformist or collectivist, people behave well much more out of internalized “guilt” than externalized “shame”, and so on. But there really are quite a lot of unique and interesting things about Japanese culture, most of which developed behind the barrier of linguistic and geographic isolation. Now that those barriers are falling, a lot of people will get to experience the wonder before it, too, is subsumed by the homogenization of global online culture and ruined by flame wars between rightists and leftists.
But anyway, in honor of this moment of cultural exchange, I thought I would share some of my own personal observations of how Japan has changed over the last two decades. I first moved to Japan almost 23 years ago, and even though I haven’t lived there for a while, I try to spend at least a month out of every year in the country if I can.
Over that time I’ve seen a few things remain startlingly constant — my favorite neighborhood sushi shop from 2004 still serves the same excellent crab salad. But a whole lot has changed; though many people overseas (and even a few unobservant long-term residents) tend to think of Japan as a static, unchanging society, the truth is that in some ways, the country feels unrecognizable.
Three years ago, I wrote a post about some of these changes:
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In fact, this post only scratches the surface, so I thought I should write a deeper dive. Here’s a list of some changes I’ve noticed in Japan’s society and its built environment since the mid-2000s. Keep in mind that I’ve spent most of my time in Japan in Tokyo and Osaka, so this account will leave out many of the changes that have happened in smaller cities and rural areas.
If there’s one way to summarize these changes, it’s that Japan is becoming a much more normal country than it was when I lived there. The quirky art culture, vibrant street scenes, and mosaic of small independent businesses that defined 2000s Japan are vanishing under the relentless assault of aging, economic stagnation, and social media. Japanese people have started dressing down, and their waistlines have begun to expand. But at the same time, Tokyo has become a sort of enchanted spaceship of a city, with world-beating food scenes and architecture. And Japan as a whole has become more international and open, less sexist, and less soul-crushing of a place to work.
The whole country feels poorer, even though it isn’t
Japan feels like a poorer country than it did when I lived there, but this is actually an illusion; it’s actually slightly richer:
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