In my previous essay, "Do Countries with Many Middlemen Suffer from Low Labor Productivity?", I proposed a hypothesis: Japan is a society inherently incapable of evaluating true value. At the time, I could not fully explain the root cause of this phenomenon. However, as I re-examined Japan's historical background and its post-war institutional design, it became clear that this hypothesis serves as a remarkably powerful key to unlocking a vast array of seemingly disconnected societal issues.
As I noted in another previous post, "How to Effectively Explain Phenomena Unique to Japan," post-war Japan was faced with a domestic rebuilding task of such staggering magnitude that it could not afford to design institutions based on a cynical, distrust-driven view of human nature (seigen-setsu). Instead, the nation hardcoded a "goodwill-based" model (seizen-setsu—the hypothesis of inherent human goodness) into its foundational social operating system. In short, Japan became a society that cannot function unless it relies on the baseline assumption that "people will act out of pure goodwill."
This "goodwill-based OS" remains deeply embedded in modern corporate culture and daily shop-floor operations. Take, for example, manufacturing manuals. In Western countries, working strictly according to a manual is a given, and the existence of a finalized, comprehensive manual is legally and operationally essential. In Japan, however, shockingly few "complete manuals" actually exist. In fact, the corporations I worked for had nothing of the sort.
Why is this?
It makes perfect sense if you realize that before these corporations could ever formalize processes into institutional manuals, the work was already getting done through the sheer goodwill and tacit knowledge of the workers on the ground. Once a system begins running smoothly on this informal basis, the lack of a manual ceases to be a problem. Consequently, no one receives professional credit or recognition for creating or optimizing a manual; both management and frontline workers know this intuitively. As a result, the value of standardizing processes or building robust systems is chronically underestimated, locking society into a structure where continuous, systemic improvement goes unrewarded.
This structural flaw perfectly explains a profound sense of dissonance I experienced during my corporate career. At one company, I happened to work alongside an engineer who had authored a patent that I found genuinely brilliant. He was originally from the research labs—someone whose talents belonged in cutting-edge R&D, not routine factory management. Yet, he had been reassigned to a mundane factory floor position.
Why would a society reassign a proven value creator to a department that doesn't generate new value?
In a society running on a "goodwill OS," any action that disrupts an existing system—even if that system is running purely on precarious, unwritten tacit knowledge—is treated not as "value," but as "disruption." In a society incapable of measuring true value, innovation and systemic improvement cease to be metrics for evaluation; instead, they are branded as "risks." Consequently, the individuals most capable of creating value are often the first to be politically marginalized. To those who have built their careers by safely walking the predetermined path, genuine innovation is a threat, a nuisance, and an object to be eliminated. If Japan were a society capable of accurately measuring value, such absurd misallocations of human capital would not occur. But in a culture where value is systematically discounted, value creators are pushed aside.
As an engineer, I cannot speak authoritatively on how this exploitation of goodwill plays out in other professions. However, within engineering, there is a constant, unspoken demand to surrender one's goodwill to the company. In a society where goodwill is the baseline expectation, actions originally performed out of personal dedication are gradually institutionalized as "mandatory duties." Through this process, goodwill is exploited and mutated into a rigid obligation—a pathology that stripped away its mask and exposed itself as the toxic "black company" (burakku kigyō) culture following the collapse of the asset price bubble.
Furthermore, this hypothesis elegantly accounts for the phenomenon of unproductive older workers (the so-called "hatarakanai ojisan"), as well as contemporary trends like "quiet quitting" and the growing desire for semi-retirement.
Middle-aged and older workers, having already had their goodwill thoroughly drained over decades, find themselves unable to adapt to tasks that lack clear manuals or standardized systems. The result is their retreat into becoming "unproductive older workers." Meanwhile, younger generations, realizing that no amount of goodwill will ever be genuinely evaluated or rewarded, choose to transition into a state where they can no longer be exploited—this is "quiet quitting." Others choose to physically distance themselves from the corporate machine altogether—this is the drive toward semi-retirement.
Every single one of these trends stems from the exact same structural dynamic: individuals taking defensive measures to protect themselves after being chronically exploited for their goodwill in a society that refuses to measure their true value.
All of these pathologies can be understood as the inescapable, logical conclusions of a Japanese society that adopted a "goodwill-based OS" while leaving the deep internal accounts of the World War completely unsettled.
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