Part 2 | A Reminder from Japan: Why Does a Highly Disciplined Society Still Pursue the Power of Repair?

Every time I go to Japan, a very particular feeling rises in me. It is not simple admiration, nor a traveler’s novelty. It is a very direct reminder: a highly mature society is certainly not only highly efficient; it must also be very good at repair. Many people’s first impression of Japan is clean, punctual, quiet, meticulous, precise — and none of it is wrong. You ride the Shinkansen and time seems measured by a ruler; you enter a meeting room and the other side’s materials, expressions, rhythm and sense of distance all sit at just the right position; you walk on the street and even the flow of the crowd seems maintained by some invisible order. This feeling was not trained by a single industry, nor could it be built up by policy in a short time; it is a whole set of civilizational habits sunk into the country’s daily life. But what truly interests me is not how precise this society is but that, despite being so precise, so meticulous and so demanding, it can still sustain itself for the long term and has even become one of the world-famous societies of longevity. That is worth deep thought, because if it were simply high pressure, people would break first; if it were simply self-discipline, people would dry up first; if it were simply the pursuit of efficiency, people in the end would often become not more complete but more exhausted. So what does Japan let us see? My own answer is: a truly mature civilization doesn’t only make demands; it also arranges repair. It doesn’t only know how to hold on; it also knows how to settle back — and this is especially important for us in the AI era.



1. When Doing Business in Japan, You Feel an Almost Silent Pressure

Japan’s pressure is different from that of many places. It is not a loud kind of pressure: no one keeps hurrying you, no one gives you a hard time emotionally, no one uses a big voice to tell you something is urgent. It is more like a quiet, high-density requirement that seeps into the air: time must be precise, replies must be clear, materials can’t be loose, processes can’t be chaotic, speech can’t lose its sense of proportion; even if you sit a little too loosely or your tone is a little too scattered, a very subtle sense of dissonance appears in the room. This pressure is very noticeable to outsiders, because it is not explicit; it is structural. You will find that much in Japan is built on the logic of “not causing trouble for others,” and once a society has internalized this logic deeply, efficiency is not shouted into being but comes from each person’s self-restraint. Such a society is formidable because it disperses the cost of order into each person’s daily habits; not everything needs someone watching, and many people themselves know what is appropriate, what is up to standard, what is just right. But precisely for that reason, such a society easily leads outsiders to think: they must be repressed, they must be tired, they must live very tightly. On the surface it does look like that, but if you look longer you find that what is formidable about Japan is not only that it can make requirements so fine but that it has not pushed the whole society to total collapse: there is some built-in, daily-life repair structure holding all this up.


2. Japanese People’s Daily Standards Are High — Why Is It Still a Society of Longevity?

Many people know that Japan is a society of longevity, but most people’s understanding of this stops at light diets, advanced medicine and strong health awareness. All true, but not enough, because what truly affects whether a society can stay healthy for the long term is not only whether its hospitals are good or its food is healthy; at a deeper level it is whether the society has built a rhythm that lets people live on for the long term. Japan’s sense of rhythm is strong. It shows in many places: in the moderation of daily diet, in walking habits, in sensitivity to the changing seasons, in bathing, rest, hot springs, slow eating and ritual, in the blank space in how people interact, even in the social understanding of “not disturbing others too much.” In other words, Japan is not without pressure, but beyond pressure it has many daily designs that let people slowly return to their own position. This is crucial, because what truly crushes a person is not that there is pressure in life — pressure is a part of life: work has pressure, relationships have pressure, responsibility has pressure, growth has pressure. The problem is not that pressure exists; the problem is whether you have the ability to switch the system back to repair mode. This is the biggest reminder Japan gave me: a society can be long-lived not only because it knows discipline but because it knows recovery; a person can go far not only because he can hold on but because he knows how to avoid always having to.



3. Self-Discipline Isn’t Self-Torment — Mature Societies Know to Arrange Recovery

Taiwanese people easily tie “self-discipline” to “gritting your teeth.” We often feel that the more self-disciplined a person is, the more he can bear hardship, suppress himself, sacrifice and endure. Over time, in many people’s imagination, self-discipline becomes something close to self-torment: as if only being pushed hard, tired, full and tight counts as being serious, as if a person who knows how to slow down, rest and adjust his rhythm will be suspected of not trying hard enough. This is in fact a very crude understanding. Truly advanced self-discipline has never been about driving yourself to death, and a truly mature system will not require every part to run at high RPM forever, because any system that is overloaded for long and not allowed to recover will in the end not grow stronger but break down. In a way, this showed me that when self-discipline matures it does not tighten all the way; it goes toward rhythm. It knows when to be precise, when to pull back, when to be in place, when to let things loosen naturally. This judgment is not laziness but a high-level design. What you seem to see is their meticulousness; what actually supports this meticulousness is a sense of rhythm that keeps the whole life system from going out of balance. This is especially worth learning for many high-pressure workers today, because the problem of many is not lack of discipline but having only discipline: only requirements, no settling back; only output, no repair. After a long time such a person looks strong on the outside but grows drier and drier inside.



4. Diet, Walking, Regularity, Moderation and Etiquette: How They Become Part of Long-Termism

Truly deep civilization doesn’t exist only in thought; it seeps into life. One very impressive thing about Japan is that many seemingly ordinary things are in fact helping a person return to a steadier mind-body state. Take diet: it is not necessarily the most luxurious, but it is usually restrained, clean and bounded, with a sense of portion, combination and season in it. A culture that can keep its dietary rhythm over the long term is in itself doing foundational governance of its citizens’ bodies. Take walking: in many cities walking is not exercise but simply part of life, yet this daily movement slowly maintains people’s metabolism, rhythm and stability. Many people always think health must rely on big reforms, but what is truly effective is often those small, steady structures in daily life. Then there are regularity and etiquette: many people dislike etiquette, finding it troublesome, but to some extent etiquette is also a design that lowers social friction and ineffective drain; when everyone roughly knows where the boundaries are, the whole society avoids a great deal of sudden loss of energy. This is what I mean by saying that repair is not only meditation, not only sitting, not only sitting quietly for twenty minutes: repair is a whole way of life — your dietary structure, how you move, your rhythm design, how you arrange day and night, how you avoid having to remain in wartime mode forever. This angle matters, because if we understand repair only as “remedying once tired,” it is too late. Truly advanced repair is when life itself doesn’t keep draining you dry.



5. Pressure Isn’t the Problem — Lacking the Power of Repair Is

I think this sentence can serve as the core judgment of this piece. Many people keep pursuing a life without pressure, but that is almost impossible: if you have a career, you have pressure; if you have a family, you have pressure; if you have responsibility, you have pressure; if you want to grow, you have pressure; if you want to do bigger things than others, you will certainly have pressure. So truly mature people don’t keep fantasizing about how to eliminate pressure; they ask: do I have the power of repair? What is the power of repair? It is whether, after bearing pressure, you can come back, can sleep your way back, can quiet down, can switch your nervous system from over-alertness back to stability, can keep the matter from continuing to live in your body, your head and your emotions after it is over. Many people have not “had an incident” on the surface, but in reality their whole person is long in a state of unfinished stress: yesterday’s anxiety is still there, the day before’s grievance is still there, last week’s conflict is still there, last month’s fatigue is still there; on the surface the body has already moved on to the next thing, but inside nothing has truly been digested. A person like this will certainly have problems after a long time. So you will find that the higher-level a life, the less it is about having less pressure and the more it is about repair being important — and what Japan let me see is that a highly demanding society, if it is not to collapse, must have a very deep repair structure supporting it from below. That structure is not necessarily the explicit “healing” people talk about. It is often quieter and more invisible, but very effective.



6. The AI Era Needs Even More This Rhythm Design of “High Efficiency Without Collapse”

Today we are discussing Japan not only for Japan; what we really want to talk about is the future, because the AI era will push up everyone’s efficiency requirements, pull forward the rhythm of every industry, make it easier for you to reach the world and also easier for the world to swallow you. In the past you were busy because there were many things; in the future you may be busy because there are many things, more information, faster updates, higher expectations and denser comparison. In such an environment, if a person lacks the ability of “high efficiency without collapse,” sooner or later there will be problems: if not the body first, then emotions first; if not emotions first, then judgment first; if not judgment first, then relationships first. So the truly advanced competitiveness of the future is not only whether you can use AI but whether, while using AI, you can still keep your rhythm; whether, while outputting at high density, you still have the capacity to recover; whether, while being pulled faster by the world, you avoid living yourself into an overheating machine. This is also why I increasingly feel that meditation, sitting, mindfulness, autonomic-nervous-system balance, a sense of rhythm and the power of life repair are no longer just personal cultivation; they will become foundational capabilities of senior workers, senior managers and senior leaders. However fast you do things, if you are always out of balance inside, you only use yourself up faster in the end; however high you stand, if you lack the power of repair, it is hard to carry that position for the long term.



7. A Reminder for Taiwan: Not Pushing Harder but Settling Back Better

Taiwanese people don’t lack drive; honestly, we have often pushed too far: too good at carrying, too good at enduring, too good at gritting our teeth, too used to pushing ourselves to the limit and calling it effort. This culture has its admirable side, but after entering the AI era, if we don’t upgrade this way of surviving, we will lose out badly, because the future is not won by whoever endures the most, and whoever is busiest isn’t the most valuable. What will be truly valuable are those who know how to integrate tools, systems, rhythm and repair — that is, what we must practice next is not only pushing harder but settling back better. A person who can settle back can run a long race; a team that can settle back can output over the long term; a company that can settle back will not rely on a few people at the front burning their lives. The reminder Japan gave me is not telling us to become Japan, nor to blindly worship some surface sense of order; what it really reminds us is: high efficiency without a foundation of repair ends up in high wear; high demands without a foundation of rhythm end up in collapse under pressure; high standards without a foundation of life civilization are in the end just another form of self-torment.


So for Part 2, I want to leave one sentence: true advanced self-discipline is not staying tight forever but being precise when precision is needed and recovering when recovery is needed. This is not slowing down; it is maturity — and only mature people truly deserve to enter the next round of competition in the AI era.