Introspection is Biological: The Genetic Fallacy of "Matcha"
“People are all different.” In today’s world, where everything is becoming individualized, each of us is being forced to consciously secure the time and space to reflect with ourselves and to engage with life on the basis of medium- to long-term plans. Introspection has already become one of the essential skills for surviving our harsh era, yet the world is not made of pretty ideals, and it is also true that there are always some people for whom it is inconvenient if others turn inward. Even if it sounds exaggerated to call this “awakening,” once you are pulled into the dopamine-addiction structure that underlies contemporary marketing, it becomes extremely difficult to escape, and your most important personal resources—your time (and your money)—are stripped away. This has now become a serious issue facing all of humanity.
Even for those who would like to turn toward “introspection,” many have already been absorbed into the structures of the contemporary world, and for people who do not know, and do not even try to know, what lies “outside” that structure, the dopamine world is simply reality itself. If the extreme polarization along this axis continues, one group will be those who, on the basis of introspection, redesign their lives and their possibilities and move into the future at an accelerating pace, while the other group will be those whose bodies and minds are dominated by chronic dopamine excess and who will end their lives without ever once reclaiming themselves. In such a situation, it is obvious that the point that links these two groups in the middle will become crucial, and although the names may differ, we are likely to see the successive rise of new kinds of philosophies and religions.
Of course, as everyone knows, merely saying “introspection” does not make it easy. Introspection is not a matter of momentary pleasure (dopamine bursts) but something that continues throughout a lifetime, constantly transforming. No matter how historically renowned a Buddhist monk or Shinto practitioner may have been, they, too, were buffeted by the trends of their times; yet by refusing to abandon introspection and by designing the future from within themselves, they became pioneers—and we should not forget this. Especially today, when neuroscience and related fields have advanced so dramatically, it is extremely difficult for individuals to break free from dopamine worlds built by exploiting that knowledge. From another angle, the various events taking place in the world today all have the effect of amplifying dopamine: they can trigger dopamine even in people who have no direct connection to those events, and we now live in a remarkable era in which the resources thus extracted (time and money) can be centrally collected.
This is why, at the micro level of everyday life, people keep insisting that we should quit social media or at least keep our distance from it. Social media is curious in that, for people like me who do not use Instagram, X, TikTok, and the like and who do not even have accounts, access is simply not granted in the first place. Yet for the majority, the world has become one in which they cannot live without social media. In fact, anyone who has traveled in Japan will know that in Japan—arguably at the forefront of the dopamine world—it is extremely difficult to find genuinely good food. Inhabitants of the dopamine world happily enjoy Japanese food, proud as the country is of having the largest “number” of restaurants in the world, without worrying about such things, but the reality is that the quality of food in Japan has extremely serious problems; in substance, it is an “overflow of crudity.”
If you try to find delicious treats in Japan that are gluten-free and made without dairy products, refined sugar, or additives, you generally cannot buy them in the big cities. In most cases they are produced by individuals living in rural areas who run small shops or sell from mobile stalls without permanent storefronts, so their business days and locations change frequently. Whenever I visit different regions, I make a point of going to such places as well, but what I sometimes find troublesome is that their business information is basically only available through Instagram. To me this structure feels strange: even when our goal is to maintain or improve health, there is a system in place that functions almost like an initiation ritual, requiring us to step into the dopamine world of Instagram, and even the people engaged in promoting health have, in fact, not yet escaped from the dopamine world. After about five years of traveling, I have come to feel that this is where we see the grim reality of so-called organic culture in Japan.
In today’s world, where 99% of humanity is dopamine-dependent to some degree, our top priority is not “introspection” itself but, before that, to reassess our diet and, over years, restore our health. Before we have reclaimed this physical and mental health, no matter how many meditation techniques we experiment with, we are not even prepared to remove the noise, and genuine introspection is impossible. Modern humans are saturated with toxins in their bodies—pesticides, additives, chemical compounds, and so on—so we must first regain our original ability to excrete them, and then, starting with our diet, rethink our entire way of living so as to minimize the amount of toxins we take in. In a sense, this is the contemporary form of shojin (精進), disciplined self-cultivation. At any time in history, to practice shojin is to resist and oppose the spirit of the age, and I cannot help but feel that continuing this discipline is the path that leads to introspection. Whether or not one is Japanese is not the issue here; rather, this should be located as a problem at the scale of humanity.
From yet another angle, the structure of today’s dopamine world feels very much like the system of Disneyland. In Japan, it has been about ten years since younger generations became addicted to Disneyland, but that addiction is not just simple escapism. For most young people, it is because Disneyland meshes extraordinarily well with the dopamine world that is their entire reality.
From my own critical standpoint, I see contemporary Japanese culture itself as moving within this dopamine-world structure. Strictly speaking, no such singular entity as “Japanese culture” has ever existed; rather, what existed was a restless mass of countless cultures, each nurtured in a specific place in its own pluralistic way—and at Shitsurae I repeatedly argue precisely this point. The greatest postwar thinker, Yoshimoto Takaaki, described this structure in terms of “自己幻想／self fantasy,” “対幻想／mutual fantasy,” and “共同幻想／collective fantasy” but he stopped short of fully systematizing it into theory. The person who took on the formidable task of theorizing these concepts was my most beloved philosopher, Yamamoto Tetsuji. I always maintain that there can be no genuine understanding of Japan without understanding this man. Even now, as he approaches the age of eighty, Yamamoto continues to sharpen his thought every day and publish one ambitious work after another in order to fulfill his mission. In this way, Yoshimoto’s The Theory of Collective Fantasy (共同幻想論) is being given theoretical form by Yamamoto, and as we enter an era in which people emerge who can make use of that theory, what is currently understood as “Japanese culture” will collapse, and an essential Japanese culture will come to the fore. This is the very realm in which I myself am constantly thinking and acting, and it will still require a good deal of time; but that essential Japanese culture has already begun to move.
From this perspective, there may never have been an era in which it was more crucial than now to avoid having one’s life damaged or squandered by being misled by the external dopamine world, and instead to turn inward and reflect on oneself. The intensity with which one confronts oneself and designs one’s life (one’s possibilities) from within is entirely different from the structure of a world that has been systematized to trigger dopamine in the masses all at once; put differently, what is at stake in each case is how we relate to our own uniquely individual dopamine profile. This is true of Japanese culture as discussed above as well: even if we speak of “the dopamine world” in the singular, dopamine metabolism differs from person to person. More than “individualization,” the basic rule of the dopamine world is not to let people become aware that they differ from one another in this way—but it is possible to break out of that rule. The reason is that the system’s architects have so far only been able to construct the dopamine world as a single, uniform framework, and the project of recapturing everyone into fully individualized dopamine worlds has not yet been completed. That completion, however, is only a matter of time. Before it is realized, the most important condition for surviving a future even more demanding than the present will be to deepen our understanding of these mechanisms as thoroughly as possible.
What we therefore need to understand in advance is our own dopamine metabolism. By understanding our own genes and becoming intimately familiar with how we metabolize dopamine, it becomes entirely possible to step away from and create distance from the dopamine world. As noted above, escaping from this dopamine world is at the same time an escape from “Japan,” “the Japanese,” and “Japanese culture” as they are conventionally framed, and it provides the basic foundation for looking at Japan, Japanese people, and Japanese culture in their true sense. This is the starting point, and it is here that the genuine greatness of Japanese culture unfolds without limit.
Seen from another angle, however, if the architects of the dopamine world were to obtain the genetic information of the people they have drawn into their world, they could update the system so that those people would never again be able to escape. In other words, before they complete such a system, we, at the level of individuals, need to prepare by thoroughly understanding our own genes and metabolism and deepening the kind of introspection that corresponds to them. The futures of those who undertake this preparation and those who do not will diverge at a level far beyond the “polarization” that is currently being discussed; the difference will extend to a dimension that touches on the very risk to life. If, in the coming years, the dopamine world is updated before individuals have had time to prepare, we will arrive at a near future in which it is no longer possible to step outside it.
Because this may still feel abstract, let us consider matcha (抹茶), which is generally regarded as a symbol of Japanese culture. Today matcha is consumed worldwide. When I was in Bangkok this month, I saw products with “matcha” on the label flooding the city, and visitors to Japan consume matcha to an extent that could fairly be called an addiction (it is not even widely known that Japanese people themselves do not drink nearly that much matcha). Over the past month my younger brother, who lives in Europe, has been back in Japan with his girlfriend, and she too, coming from Europe, drinks matcha on a daily basis and has become addicted.
Now that matcha is known around the globe as a representative of Japanese culture, have we ever really thought about what its substance is? What I want to ask is whether matcha truly had such a close relationship with Japanese people that it could be said to represent a Japanese culture that encompasses all Japanese.
In fact, in the historical research I have focused on so far, I have found no evidence that matcha was historically consumed nationwide in Japan; rather, it seems clear that it was a luxury enjoyed only by a very limited segment of the population. For this reason, I suspect that for most Japanese people matcha has not contributed all that much to health, and that in many cases it may actually have negative effects. Considering that the majority of Japanese people did not historically have the custom of drinking matcha, this is a hypothesis worth taking seriously. What I want to draw attention to here is EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate), which is abundant in green tea—the highest-level category that includes matcha. In recent years EGCG has attracted attention from many angles, including its antiviral properties, but the question is whether green tea, which contains far more EGCG than imported black tea or oolong tea, is really so beneficial for Japanese people (and for non-Japanese as well) within the context of Japan’s historical tea culture or “green tea culture” (緑茶文化). Today such claims are widespread, but there is a major pitfall here.