Exiting the Global Economic Superhighway

This book tackles global economic and social issues from a perspective that may seem obvious but which no author has yet taken: that we humans are living beings. In today’s artificially globalized world, we have increasingly lost sight of our original humanity. Despite the serious environmental, social, and political problems we are facing, we cannot stop focusing on economic growth, efficiency, and liberalization. In doing so, we continue to make the world “slicker” and more unstable. This book identifies these conventional values and ways of thinking as the root cause underlying many of today’s challenges, and it offers the perspective of a “bumpier” and more organic human existence that provides a greater sense of traction and stability.

The book begins with a discussion of global systems and structures, proposing a “world with two systems” to limit the effects of artificially constructed globalization. The second part examines the modern welfare state, outlining a process to revive democracy and social capital by making social issues the business of everyday citizens. The third and final part focuses on human well-being, emphasizing physicality and the Japanese concept of kata as keys to restoring our humanity.

Rather than searching for specific solutions through specialized knowledge, this book makes use of the author’s broad perspective acquired through many years of public policy research and reform. It asserts that knowledge should be acquired through hands-on experience and in studies based on real-world situations, involving people at the forefront of society’s challenges, whether politicians, businesspeople, scientists, craftspeople, or farmers.

In both its analysis of humanity’s problems and the solutions it offers, this book takes an entirely new yet utterly natural approach to steering humanity off the global economic superhighway.

When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, what we saw was a society distorted by globalism and an overemphasis on science and technology. If we continue on this path, our economies will stop functioning, and the ensuing financial crisis will cause human society to collapse. Mr. Kato, who as president of Japan Initiative has sharply criticized government policies, now proposes a remedy—a world with two systems, and a new model of society in which ‘humans as living beings’ are placed at the center.

In order to restore humanity to people caught in an immense global system weighed down by the trilemma of democracy, economic growth, and the welfare state, Mr. Kato focuses not on efficiency of production, but on the ‘process’ of work that has shaped customs and human relationships. He explains that comprehensive knowledge, rather than specialized knowledge, is necessary to solve today’s complex and intertwined problems, including environmental issues, widening disparities, and violence, and his proposal offers a path to a more sustainable world while striking a balance between culture, modern science and technology, and the wisdom accumulated through physical work and experience. When we envision a world based on such diverse ways of living, we will find a way to take back our humanity.

— Juichi Yamagiwa, Anthropologist and former president of Kyoto University

The history of humanity is reaching a major turning point as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To be more precise, the pandemic has taught us that we need to undertake a large-scale shift.

I have described this transition in various ways, such as a reversal from centralization to decentralization, a shift from urban life to nature, and an escape from a closed box. In this book, however, Mr. Kato uses a brilliant metaphor—the ‘slick world’ and the ‘bumpy world’—to elucidate the essence of this transition. His deep affection for the bumpy world is evident throughout the book, and along with his incisive analysis, draws readers into the discussion. In my architecture and spatial design work, I too have been trying to shift from a slick-world to a bumpy-world orientation, and so I read through this book with a deep feeling of agreement.

The cleverness of Mr. Kato’s metaphor lies in the fact that he differentiates between the two heterogeneous societies not by their structures, but by their textures. Western countries are good at structure-based social analysis, but when we are actually living in a society, explanations of structural differences are not easily felt in our reality. What we perceive day in and day out is the texture of society, and it is through this texture that Mr. Kato has shed light on the differences between the two societies. His Japanese background, I believe, is what made this possible.

Mr. Kato also refers to the concept of time, pointing out that the flow of time has a different quality in the slick world compared with the bumpy world. This is also a sharp criticism of the Western concept of time, or to put it another way, the Newtonian concept of time. Structural analysis looks at a society from the outside—in a sense looking down on it. But for those of us living in that society, the reality is perceived by the moment-to-moment flow of time, and this is a non-Newtonian time that is constantly expanding and contracting.

Mr. Kato analyzes our society using new devices like texture and time to show us our path forward. I believe these devices will impress readers and resonate with them. They are not hard and cold tools, but warm, humanistic devices that will help bring a new path into focus.

— Kengo Kuma, Architect and Professor at the University of Tokyo

In this book, Mr. Kato presents us with a philosophy of Japanese capitalism.

In the context of the slick-world-style capitalism that emphasizes low costs and efficiency, Japan once achieved rapid economic growth and created an economic bubble. But in the process, the country lost some of its ‘Japanese-ness,’ as well as its regional distinctions. For example, in exchange for easier postal delivery and clarity of mailing addresses, many time-honored place names going back over a thousand years were eliminated, and traditional expressions in regional dialects were simply replaced with common terms. Terraced rice fields that our ancestors worked so hard to maintain have been abandoned, and there is no one left who can use the tools for making Japanese-style boats tailored to individual rivers. As Japan has become slicker and slicker, regional cities have begun to follow in the footsteps of Tokyo. There is now only one benchmark for measuring the development of a town, and every town is evaluated by this benchmark.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the global movement to eliminate national borders and make the world slicker through free trade and comparative advantage was halted by the rise of dictatorships that sought to use economic power as a weapon. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dealt the final blow to this movement. Contrary to Mr. Kato’s desire to transform the slick world into a bumpy world, it seems to me that the overwhelming trend to make the world slicker by grinding down anything that gets in the way of maximizing efficiency is being supplanted by a new trend toward a bloc-oriented, disconnected world where safety and stability are prioritized over efficiency.

In this context, how can we carry out Mr. Kato’s proposal to focus on the restoration of our humanity? The only way to bring human-centered logic into our capitalist society, which has been driven by the logic of capitalism, is to democratically implement everyone’s ideas. Will the current era, in which those in power sit at the center, transform into a new era for people who want to live as human beings, even if their power is reduced and they are no longer at the center of society?

— Taro Kono, current Japanese Minister of Digital Affairs and former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense

Hideki Kato started his career at the Japanese Ministry of Finance, where he was involved in fiscal and monetary policy, taxation, and national macroeconomic management, as well as practical operations. Through his time at the Ministry he was able to grasp the essence of Japan’s political issues, which are described in detail in this book. At the Ministry’s Policy Research Institute, he conducted a comparative study on the political, administrative, and welfare systems of ten countries around the world, publishing the findings. He also published a book describing a range of environmental issues and measures to deal with them—a pioneering work at the time—and organized a study group comprised of scholars from the fields of history, anthropology, religion, and natural sciences, publishing several books on a theory of civilization that summarized the achievements of the study group.

As Founder and President of the policy think tank Japan Initiative, Mr. Kato has been involved in a variety of research and proposal activities regarding financial, monetary, welfare, educational, and political systems. He has placed particular emphasis on activities in the field of local government, where national policies are carried out.

Across hundreds of projects, Japan Initiative has engaged citizens and residents, chosen through random sampling, at both the local and national levels, and in many cases the results have become government policy. In addition, at the request of the Indonesian government, the same method has been adopted by local governments in that country, and is attracting attention as a new form of democracy originating from Japan.