Opinion: Why Living in a Dysfunctional Country Might Be Better For You

Comparing American individualism to Japanese collectivism

Photo byMike Chai on Pexels

In the midst of my first visit to Japan, I’ve had my deep-seated belief in American exceptionalism put to the test. I felt myself holding onto my patriotism on the basis of pure sentimentality, unable to justify how the U.S. could really be called “better” than a country like Japan.

I walk around feeling safer than I ever have before. Everyone is polite, healthy looking, and well-dressed. There’s no trash anywhere on the streets. In my two weeks, I didn’t see a single unhoused person. There are no potholes in the road; for that matter, it’s difficult to even find discoloration or mold or oil stains. The city gymnasium by my hotel was the size of a shopping mall in America.

Sumida City GymnasiumPhoto byAuthor

Coming from being carless in Miami, I’m in awe of how easy it is to get around here. The transportation infrastructure is so thoroughly developed that getting across the country is as simple and comfortable as it is to get from one ward to another. The overlapping rail infrastructure is so well developed it looks like colorful spaghetti when displayed on the map.

I got around for days on an elevated metro, not even realizing there was an entire underground subway as well. And when it came time for me to go on a trip from East Japan to West Japan, I hopped on the bullet train for the first time and made it there in less than a third of the time it would take by car. Everything is color coded and numbered; it’s so readily accessible a child could use it. You pay with a pass on your phone, and no matter where you go the way will be lined with vending machines and little convenience stores, so anything you need is always a minute or two away.

Anytime you approach an escalator, everyone neatly lines up single file on the left side to let those in a hurry rush up the right side. (And I know that’s supposed to happen everywhere, but it’s seldom adhered to in Miami.) If you venture beyond the busiest streets, there’s a quietness that alleviates some pressure that, as an American, I didn’t even realize I had been carrying. No sounds of cars in the distance, no one driving around blasting music or talking loudly — just peacefulness, which is all but impossible to come by in most American metropolises. And if you lose something on the streets, you can rely on the Japanese people to turn in it at a local police station for you. I learned this from personal experience, as well as by the many anecdotes I heard about it.

Not to go on ad infinitum, but the schools generate better outcomes for students, there’s no gun problem, there’s socialized medicine, the food is healthier, etc. Traveling to Japan felt like going into a world where everyone was logical and society was designed with intention. It’s something of a utopia. Why would anyone choose to live anywhere else?

Individuality

On a societal level, Japan is perfect. However, when you zoom in down to the cellular level — that is, the individual level — it becomes less so. You start to understand what sacrifices it takes to make a country function like this. You hear story after story of strict, unaccepting, and ever-demanding parents; of schools that are rigid and overbearing; of social pressures to conform and maintain a cultural homogeneity; and a toxic work culture that seems to be pushing people to the point of imploding.

I felt a loneliness on my first day in Japan that I never felt before. You move through the throngs of people feeling like a worker ant. Single-file line here, single-file line there, no eye contact, no conversation, just rushing from one place to another. You get into an elevator with a stranger, and there’s no greeting. Casual conversation? Forget about it.

When there were people from other Asian countries going about that, at a glance, looked to my Western eyes as if they could be Japanese, I quickly became able to tell them apart by their smiles and the liveliness of their movements. The Japanese board onto a train and everyone of them looks like a shy outsider standing in the corner at a party — trying to take up as little space as possible, restraining their movement entirely, focusing their eyes solely on their phones.

In the U.S., things don’t run nearly as smoothly. There’s very little efficiency to our society, but when you start to wonder why we’re so messy it becomes obvious. It boils down to a dichotomy between collectivism and individualism. Of course, the U.S. is never going to function with such laudable efficiency as Japan. For the most part, everyone in the U.S. just does whatever they want. We’re loud in public, rule breakers, entitled, and outgoing. We’re less of a cohesive society than we are a mass of individuals that just happen to occupy the same area.

Which system is the better of the two? I can’t say. I’d love to live in Japan for a while, but I would still be a foreigner and working as a writer, so I would be insulated from a lot of the expectations forced on the average citizen of Japan. If I had to be fully immersed in it, I’d likely choose my messy, unsafe, and sometimes embarrassing home country. I remember a month or two ago when I looked on the presidential debate between Biden and Trump with horror. Like many Americans, I wondered: “How the hell did we end up here?”

Japan has shown me why things in the U.S. are so messed up and why that might actually be a good thing. We’re like that ragtag bunch of misfits that goes about things their own way but has fun doing it. Yet, when all is said and done, Americans do seem to show up to reach the finish line when the clock is running out. This hints at some advantages we might have, even at a societal level.

Individualism at Scale

There is another interesting handle by which to compare the two social systems. Even on a societal scale, there are advantages to being oriented towards individualism. This is perhaps clearest with US military doctrine.

For those who don’t know, one of the things that separates the U.S. military from others around the world is that it’s not as top-down in its decision-making processes. Soldiers are empowered to take initiative and make choices. In one of my favorite books on leadership, Call Sign Chaos by James Mattis, the former four-star general, Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation of NATO, and Secretary of Defense talks about how he went about being in command, and his approach was inherently American. He, in fact, gave very little in the way of instruction.

By his own admission, he gave only end goals, but did not direct soldiers on how to achieve those goals. He decentralized command and made sure that every cog in the military machine was ready to seize whatever advantage became available to them. With speed and fury, the soldiers under his command would overwhelm the enemy. This approach has proven to be unstoppable. The adaptability demonstrated in this system is not just an inherent strength of Mattis’s approach but of American culture as a whole.

Another strength can be found in our brilliant outliers, which lead to leaps-and-bounds advancements. Conformity, by its nature, means decreased divergence from the mean. Japanese culture, with its strong determination to reach excellence, has achieved a very high mean. Japan is among the best in the world in terms of wealth, popular influence, military strength, cleanliness, safety, education, etc.

The social pressures will serve to draw lower performers up, but it may also restrain extraordinarily high-performers, drawing them down. This is especially true for the iconoclasts and trailblazers, who are naturally at odds with any form of commonality.

To illustrate this, I used a scatter plot generator. For the plot titled “U.S.”, I used 25 random numbers between 0 and 50. For the plot titled “Japan,” I used 25 random numbers between 20 and 45. (Obvious disclaimer: These charts have no direct connection to the reality for either country, and instead represent the theoretical difference being proposed between a high mean vs. a wider distribution.)

Photo byAuthor

Photo byAuthor

The chart for Japan has less variability and the total range of numbers has a higher average. We can see that the best-fit line (representing the average) on the Japan chart is higher, between 30 and 35, and, of course, there are no individual data points below 20. For the U.S., the best-fit line is lower, falling between 20 and 25. However, on the U.S. chart, two outliers were above 45, the upper limit on the Japan chart — granting the U.S. the two top performers. These are the results I’d anticipate from each system, visualized.

The dynamic is comparable to that at highly process-driven companies. Having processes in place can serve to make results better and more consistent. However, being forced into a process restricts capable thinkers from using their full capability. And once again, it also tends to make the system less adaptive.

It’s a problem I’ve often touched on in my articles. In medicine, we have developed a wide range of diagnostic procedures so that many doctors — some of the smartest people in our society — no longer have to think when triaging patients. In education, we have restrained curiosity to fit into defined courses of study, although all fields are inherently interconnected and the highest quality of thought and learning is found in the most expansive viewpoints.

This way of doing things can be summarized in a single sentence: It’s a boon for most but a limiter on some of the best. This is the exact dynamic that can sometimes let a discordant culture outperform a concordant one.

Disparate and Distributed

Empowering the individual doesn’t make for an efficient society on a day-to-day basis, but it does allow for rare but invaluable advancements. It allows people to be daring, audacious, and ambitious. Think about how hard it can be to innovate or blaze your own path when you have so many expectations set upon you by the society around you. Think of how unadaptable and rigid things can then become.

America is, in every way, a hodgepodge. We’re the world’s first constitutional democracy — a system of governance centered around individual choice. We’re the land of immigrants and have less of a homogenous culture than maybe anywhere else on the planet. Heck, even the country’s name is “The United States,” reflecting our composition of disparate parts, and our de facto national slogan is “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”).

It’s our parts, our individuality, that makes us what we are. We aren’t the fittest society on Earth; obesity rates are out of control here. However, our olympians took home the number one spot again. We don’t have the best public education system, but our top universities continue to rank as the best in the world. 34% of them are immigrants, but we have the largest number of Nobel Prize winners of any country in the world.

Things might be rough in a culture like that of the United States, but there are plenty of diamonds in that rough. And they wouldn’t be there if they were forced to be like everyone else. Free spirits and free thinkers will always be drawn to the land of the free, and when no one person (or one way of thinking) is at the helm, our route is sure to be a winding one, but there’s incredible possibility to be unleashed if you just introduce a little bit of chaos and take off the restricters.

Conclusion

I love Japan. It’s truly awe-inspiring. I’m grateful that the Japanese and American people continue to have such close ties. It’s beautiful that two countries that are so starkly different can maintain a mutual respect. We have so much to learn from one another, and there’s perhaps no right answer on how the world should look. The best outcome is very likely what we see: two closely allied nations offering us wildly different versions of what a society can look like.

I can definitely understand why many Japanese people want to keep Japan exactly how it is. I can also understand why many Americans are so proud to be American, myself included. But coming from an initial feeling of disappointment in my homeland, I want to remind all Americans that there’s something to that clumsy, powerful, mess of a country we call home.

If you asked me what traveling to the other side of the world taught me about my home country, I’d say the chaos is a feature not a bug, and it’s one that, quite frankly, is not ideal at a societal level but is likely better for the individual. It’s also a system that, at the societal level, is likely to underperform 80% of the time, but for the remaining 20%, allows us to reap the benefit of outliers and adaptability which has the potential to compensate greatly for the system’s natural lack of efficiency.