The Goldilocks zone of messiness

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":4.95,"text":"Shinto, sashimi, Shibuya Crossing and shunga are all very well but it’s getting harder to escape the conclusion that what tourists really cross the world to Japan for is the relaxing caress of a functional society. "}],[{"start":17.8,"text":"Holidays are about escape and orderliness amid global disorder feels increasingly like freedom. There is genuine, cross-generational allure these days, in the promise of refuge from messiness — both actual and abstract. But is Japan offering too much of a good thing?"}],[{"start":37.05,"text":"Japan, of course, loves to play the antithesis of disorder and mess. Both superficially and to quite an impressive depth, stuff works and runs on time; service feels uncynical and non-venal; the whole place seems clean and unthreatening — all in ways that suggest (accurately) that these are achieved through a constant societal push in that direction. Fantasy-scape functionality, for those who don’t have all that, can hardly get more enchanting."}],[{"start":66.65,"text":"And it is easy to see why Japan, as the host of this wellness retreat from messiness, might well feel vindicated by its choices. Its visitor arrivals have ballooned from less than 4mn a year in the mid-1990s to just under 20mn a decade ago, to more than 40mn in 2025, with the weak yen no more than a partial propellant. At a national level last year, according to surveys, 96 per cent of these tourists left either “satisfied” or “very satisfied”."}],[{"start":95.65,"text":"By what? An annual survey conducted by the government of Tokyo (a city through which more than 50 per cent of all visitors to Japan pass) showed that, in 2025 and by a sizeable margin, the top three things that foreign visitors found most attractive about the capital were: “kind people”, “cleanliness” and “safety”. A bit disappointing for the supposedly flagship “pop culture”, languishing down in 12th place."}],[{"start":121.65,"text":"But this has inevitably come at a cost. Global surveys of happiness, of satisfaction with life and optimism find Japanese far less cheerful than the publics of the messier countries who arrive as tourists and delight in Japan’s orderliness. "}],[{"start":138.05,"text":"The quest for self-sustaining order has its side effects. Where it has worked well (low crime) it deserves high praise, where it has gone too far (absurdly high conviction rates and grotesque miscarriages of justice) it invites the conclusion that the premium on tidiness is excessive."}],[{"start":157.60000000000002,"text":"But the anti-messiness instinct has left deeper imprints in areas where Japan must address shortcomings with even greater urgency. In business, anti-messiness has manifested as endemic risk aversion, a visceral distaste for disruption and bias against the ravages of creative destruction: a trio of innovation suppressants. Large-scale unemployment is, in messiness terms, a nightmarish prospect and companies were tacitly charged with sparing the country that. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":185.3,"text":"At the fledgling end, Japanese risk capital has eschewed the messiness of failure, avoiding the sort of hit-to-miss calculus on which the venture capital industry thrives and makes its bets. At the larger end, an aversion to the messiness of mergers has perilously delayed the creation of national champions in a world where bigger is better."}],[{"start":205.95000000000002,"text":"On the political front, the anti-mess instinct has helped entrench decades of what Yoichi Funabashi, a public intellectual, describes as “peace-of-mind populism” — the tendency to tidy up public debate whenever it risks straying into the messy business of big ideological clashes."}],[{"start":223.8,"text":"Clearly, though one can argue for Japan allowing itself a redemptive spasm of messiness, it is both a madness and a luxury to wish disorder on Japan or anywhere else. And equally clearly, there are places including the US and UK that have let messiness run into significant excess, overrating, among other things, the value of disruption and creative destruction to the point where they are disruptive and destructive without redemption."}],[{"start":249.3,"text":"Much as central bankers see a desirable rate of inflation or football referees turn a blind eye to a certain quantum of shirt-pulling to keep the game flowing, there must be, in theory, a Goldilocks zone of messiness that delivers what a country as big and industrially important as Japan needs to remain safe, kind and clean while also being aggressively innovative and a confident risk-taker. "}],[{"start":272.85,"text":"It is perhaps no coincidence that Japan’s most prolonged period of de-messification occurred during its protracted episode of deflation and that the drawbacks of too little messiness are now becoming more obvious just as inflation is taking hold. It is time for Japan to embrace a little bit of mess-flation."}],[{"start":293.95000000000005,"text":"Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief"}],[{"start":297.25000000000006,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":313.8500000000001,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783772792_4171.mp3"}