The Canary in East Asia's Coal Mine
Reading the Near Future Through Seoul
There is a passage in the Chinese I Ching that reads [観国之光 利用賓于王]. The East Asian word Kanko [観光] for sightseeing can be called its descendant. On a weekend visit to Seoul, I felt the depth of this passage anew.
The meaning of these words is to observe what shines in the country, the society, and the people one visits, and to learn as an outsider. What matters is carrying through the awareness of being an outsider. From there one steps into a foreign world calmly and neutrally and deepens one’s learning. To observe the light is at the same time to observe the shadow. Leaning too far toward either one makes the essence vanish from view. For this reason tourism is the moment when the daily discipline of the heart is laid bare and an occasion to examine one’s own inner reflection. Whether it ends as mere tourism for consumption or deepens into learning put to use for the future of one’s homeland and the future of the world is always left to the choice of each individual traveler.
Living in the West you would not feel it, but I sense that East Asia has recently begun to move greatly and rapidly. From my own perspective, in this article I want to peer a little into the near future I learned through Seoul.
To put the wave beginning in East Asia plainly, it is a movement to take distance from the United States and to search for a twenty-first century relationship with China. Until now Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were placed under American influence, so while treating China as an imagined enemy they were held to no more than economic cooperation. However, Korea grew distrustful of recent American conduct and passed the limit of its patience. It moved first to search for the next era. Of course no such statement is made officially. But once you set foot in Seoul, you can feel everywhere that the ground beneath Korea has already begun to shift.
On the other hand, Japan is not like this. It still cannot break free of dependence on the United States, and the government leadership hesitates and cannot bring itself to decide on distance. While Korea across the sea makes decisions with its survival at stake, Japan decides nothing and only mills about in confusion. This figure of Japan will mark an important turning point even in historical terms.
In fact, in just three days of walking through Seoul, you feel everywhere that Japan has been overtaken by Korea in every respect over a short period. The pace is fast. By my own sense Japan was overtaken within a single generation. To my eyes Korea forcibly overwrote the twentieth century framework of its cities with a twenty-first century one. That is, without greatly changing the hardware structure of the city itself, it kept upgrading the software to the latest version. Korea can be said to have succeeded brilliantly in rewriting the OS within the city of Seoul. Advancing a city to the twenty-first century type would demand development extensive enough to renew the conventional urban structure, and that costs enormous budget and time. So Korea carried out limited renewal of offline space while dramatically pushing forward the renewal of online space.
By contrast, Japan failed badly at this latest OS update. In Japan both the hardware and the software of the city remain fundamentally twentieth century, and it has become a world with the déjà vu of an old OS still running. There is no will there to boldly build a twenty-first century city. I see behind these bold Korean decisions a driver that is rarely considered.
First, in 2022 Korea surpassed Japan in nominal GDP per capita for the first time, and over these past few years state led digitalization has accelerated through society. In purchasing power parity GDP per capita as well, Korea overtook Japan in the late 2010s, and the gap widens year by year. At the same time, in 2024 Japan was overtaken in nominal GDP per capita by Taiwan as well. While the countries of East Asia leap toward the near future, Japan alone is accelerating its relative decline. This is data borne out by the many Korean and Taiwanese travelers you see when you visit Japan’s tourist sites.
Looking at passport ownership rates among citizens, as of the end of 2025 Japan stands very low at 18.4 percent, while Korea is very high at about 60 percent. The Japanese passport boasts some of the greatest strength in the world, yet in actual ownership only about one in five people holds one. Korea and Taiwan are both smaller nations than Japan, yet each exceeds 60 percent. Reading this data merely as enthusiasm for travel or study abroad misjudges the essence. Rather, the passport ownership figure reflects citizens searching for a future on the premise of a life that cannot be completed within the country alone, while also spreading risk across many directions.
In Korea’s case this owes to neighboring North Korea as a national imagined enemy. Taiwan likewise holds China as an imagined enemy, and there too the passport ownership rate is high. For people living in these countries, the choice to hold a passport is not merely a matter of overseas travel or overseas expansion. It can be reread as proof that citizens do not overlay the future of the nation with their own future. With this perspective, the true cause of why Japan alone keeps declining in East Asia surfaces.
The low passport ownership rate of the Japanese is by no means because people are “inward looking.” To my eyes it appears as proof that many citizens still depend on the late twentieth century illusion of “safe and secure Japan.” Japan uses its own era names based on the reign of the emperor, and each era name expresses a distinctive character of its time. For example, the present is Reiwa 8. Before it came Heisei (1989–2019), before that Showa (1926–1989), before that Taisho (1912–1926), and before that Meiji (1868–1912).
I was born in 1991, so in the Japanese reckoning I was born in Heisei 3. These thirty years are called “the lost thirty years.” They were an era when Japan steadily declined. This structure is hard to grasp, but in essence the illusion formed in the mid to late Showa period had supported Japan from the postwar years through the era of high economic growth. Over the thirty years of Heisei, Japan could not dispel that illusion, and as a result it spent those years prolonging the life of Showa. To put it more clearly, Japan remains caught in the structure of the Cold War era and has still not managed to escape it. On Japan’s timeline it is as though the Berlin Wall never fell and the Soviet Union never collapsed. As a result, when Reiwa began in 2019, the debt accumulated in Showa came to weigh heavily on the lives of citizens and drove an overall decline at an accelerating pace.
Because I reread the passport ownership rate as proof that citizens do not overlay the nation’s future with their own, in this context it becomes clear that the Japanese do overlay their own future with the nation’s future. When most people speak of “Japan’s future,” for example, they point to Japan as a bureaucratic system of state centered on the government. Certainly the future of Japan within this system is shrouded in dark clouds, and its eventual collapse is self evident. But there is no inherent need to overlay that onto one’s own life. Living for the future of one’s homeland may be necessary, but that does not equal protecting Japan’s bureaucratic system, and one should never fall into such a framing. The Japanese have strong patriotism to begin with, but troublingly they cannot make this distinction. In other words, their patriotism is basically nothing more than a convenient tool for the rulers who run the state, and it has drifted away from the essential heart that thinks of and loves the country.
On the other hand, the citizens of Korea and Taiwan divide this clearly.