Starting ZōVillage - Part Two

In this piece, I want to go further than what I've shared before - while also deliberately holding a more critical eye toward my own intentions, and letting that tension sit alongside everything else.

What is a country? What is culture? What is a human being?

This planet holds an extraordinary number of nations, each carrying its own history, religion, language, institutions, climate, economy, family values, ways of working - its own meaning of silence, its own meaning of a smile, its own meaning of an apology.

That’s simply true.

And yet people often mistake the common sense of their own country for something universal - as if the way they were raised is the way human beings naturally are.

What I’ve come to feel is this: most of what we experience as instinctive behavior is actually learned - social protocol, shaped by the culture we were born into.

Culture, in other words, is the invisible communication protocol that human beings invented in order to cooperate, share meaning, and avoid destroying each other.

That’s what I want to try to touch on here.

The short version: most of the world’s conflicts aren’t simple clashes between good and evil. They’re misreadings - different cultural protocols failing to translate each other.

In one society, speaking directly is honesty. In another, leaving space for the other person to receive what you’re saying is the honesty.

In one society, asserting your rights is a sign of maturity. In another, not disrupting the whole room is.

Both are human wisdom.

The problem comes when only one of them gets to be the center of the world.

A map for reading world cultures

To understand world cultures, you can’t describe each country as if it had a single personality. You need to look along several axes.

The important ones: individual versus collective, freedom versus order, directness versus consideration, short-term versus long-term, competition versus coexistence, and tolerance for uncertainty.

These axes run deep - into business, politics, education, family, love, religion, and diplomacy.

American culture tends to be characterized by phrases like:

“This is what I think.” “This is my right.” “I’m following my dream.”

That’s not simply selfishness. It’s the hard-won wisdom of a nation built by immigrants — a society of people from vastly different backgrounds, where relying on unspoken understanding too heavily creates unfairness. So contracts, rights, explicit explanation, and self-expression become essential.

Japanese culture, on the other hand, tends to be characterized by something closer to:

“What does the other person think?” “How is the room feeling?” “Will they understand without me saying it?” “Am I being a burden?”

That’s not simply conformity either. It’s the accumulated wisdom of a society with high population density and deep long-term interdependence — people learning to live together without collision.

The Japanese word ma (間) is not just silence. It’s the space you leave in order to read another person’s emotions, the flow of the room, what hasn’t been said yet.

Without understanding this, Americans read Japanese people as evasive or indecisive. Japanese people read Americans as pushy or self-centered.

But in reality, both are protecting different virtues.

America protects the self. Japan protects the relationship.

Both are things human beings need.

What is business? What is a startup?

Business is not simply the act of making money.

At its core, business is a protocol for exchanging value. It’s the process of reading someone’s difficulty, desire, anxiety, hope, time, or ability — and offering something in return. Making trust and exchange possible.

The more professional you are, the more you can move people, or genuinely help them.

A market is not only where human desire flows. It’s where human anxiety, loneliness, hope, and dignity take the form of prices and contracts.

Startups occupy a special place within that.

In the formal language of Lean Startup, a startup is “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” I think this is a remarkably important definition.

A startup is not simply a young company, or a fast-growing one. It’s an organization that forms hypotheses about problems society hasn’t yet found language for - then tests them, learns, fails, and tries again.

And it doesn’t stop at business. It’s a way of living - one that refuses to accept existing frameworks as permanent, and tries to build something better with its own hands.

Lean Startup attempts to turn the chaos of uncertainty into a learnable process through Build-Measure-Learn cycles, Validated Learning, and the MVP.

In that sense, a startup is the modern world’s machine for asking questions.

What are people actually struggling with? What makes them feel alive? What inconveniences are they quietly tolerating? What kind of future would they genuinely want to be part of?

Startups run these questions as market experiments.

But here, too, culture makes a difference. American startup culture is built on individual vision, speed, risk-taking, capital markets, and the tolerance of failure. Japanese business culture is built on quality, trust, attention to detail, long-term relationships, and social responsibility.

The American model alone can miss human fragility. The Japanese model alone can slow the pace of experimentation through too much pre-alignment.

What future business needs is an integration of both: the American capacity for self-expression combined with the Japanese capacity for creating spaces where others feel safe to participate. The ability to articulate your own dream alongside the ability to design for others’ genuine belonging.

What does it mean to be alive?

“Living” is not simply maintaining biological existence.

For human beings, to live is to inhabit a body, to be in relationship with others, to search for meaning, to find a role within society - and to be wounded, again and again, while still reaching toward connection.

We cannot live as purely isolated individuals. But we cannot live as purely dissolved members of a collective either.

What’s essential about being human is the contradiction: we want autonomy, and we want to be recognized. Both at once.

And it’s precisely that contradiction that has generated the world’s cultures.

Cultures built around freedom protect human autonomy. Cultures built around shame protect human relationships. Religion gives meaning to our finitude and our fear of death. Markets make human desire and creativity exchangeable. Nation-states suppress violence and manage the boundaries of community. Technology extends human capacity.

But any of these, taken too far, becomes a source of suffering.

That’s why social design can’t rely on a single correct answer. What it needs is the ability to restore balance.

In the language of yin and yang: the world cannot sustain itself on one side alone.

Self and other. Freedom and order. Competition and cooperation. Spirit and technology. Tradition and innovation.

When one side grows too strong, the other will push back.

And trying to force everything back to center all at once only causes greater disruption.

What’s needed isn’t revolutionary recalibration. It’s gradual, patient movement toward the middle.

Self-sufficiency: evolution or regression? A time to redefine abundance

In recent years, something has been quietly growing: interest in self-sufficient living. Rural migration, backyard gardens, off-grid life, small-scale farming, handcraft, repair, fermentation, firewood, wells, the restoration of old farmhouses, community gardens.

I don’t think this is nostalgia. I read it as something else - a sign that modern society has become so frictionlessly convenient that people have lost the feeling of living by their own hands, and are now searching for a way back to it.

Is self-sufficiency right or wrong? Evolution or regression?

The answer isn’t simple.

If self-sufficiency means abandoning markets, medicine, education, and technology — trying to make everything complete within one individual or family - then it isn’t necessarily progress. Modern abundance depends on specialization, cities, logistics, medicine, science, education, infrastructure, law. Human beings cannot live in complete isolation. Complete self-sufficiency, however liberating it may sound, can concentrate labor, risk, illness, disaster, and loneliness onto a single person.

But if self-sufficiency means something different - not “doing everything alone,” but reclaiming a little of the foundation of living within one’s own body and local relationships - then it’s clearly a form of progress.

We now live in a world where it’s possible to have no idea where water comes from, how food grows, where electricity originates, where garbage goes. This is one of civilization’s genuine achievements. But it also makes the structure of dependence invisible.

The interest in self-sufficiency is an attempt to make that invisible dependence visible again.

Self-sufficiency isn’t about escaping civilization. It’s about reconnecting the body and senses - which have become over-dependent on civilization - back to the world.

 
What the self-sufficiency trend is signaling is that modern people are beginning to hit the limit of treating convenience and abundance as the same thing.

Convenience is the reduction of effort.

Abundance is not necessarily that.

Real human richness, I think, includes appropriate effort - the physical sensation of doing something yourself, time shared with others, the sensitivity to notice how nature changes, the feeling of being responsible for your own life.

Buying vegetables takes minutes.

Tilling soil, planting seeds, waiting for rain, fighting insects, harvesting - none of that is efficient.

But inside that inefficiency, there’s the feeling of actually being alive.

Making miso or pickles, mending clothes, caring for tools, exchanging things with neighbors - the same is true for all of it.

The market is faster.

But when you engage directly, an object stops being a commodity. It becomes something that carries time, relationship, and memory.

Is that truly abundance?

My answer: if it increases your freedom, deepens your relationships, and raises your sensitivity to life - yes, it is.

But if it becomes a new form of social pressure - “this is the right way to live” - and turns into judgment of others, drawing people away from medicine, education, or social support, then it isn’t.

Self-sufficiency, like culture, becomes a constraint when it hardens into dogma.

What matters isn’t making self-sufficiency absolute. It’s receiving the questions it teaches.

Those questions:

What am I dependent on in order to live? Whose labor supports my consumption? How much inconvenience can I actually accept? What is enough, for me? How do I reclaim the feeling of being alive without surrendering convenience?

These questions connect to business, to governance, to technology.

If a startup is an experiment in future value, then self-sufficiency is the re-examination of value at the ground level of daily life.

Abundance needs to be redefined.

Abundance is not owning more things. It’s not a higher GDP. It’s not infinite options.

Of course, poverty and hunger must never be romanticized. Safe shelter, healthcare, education, food, freedom, rights - these are non-negotiable to human dignity.

But beyond those foundations, abundance is determined not by more quantity, but by the quality of relationships, the quality of time, the quality of attention, the quality of bodily sensation, the connection to nature, and the space to try again.

The deepest thing self-sufficiency teaches is this: before we are consumers, we are inhabitants of life. We are living beings.

We seem to live by buying things. But in reality, we are sustained by water, soil, sunlight, microorganisms, logistics, farmers, craftspeople, institutions, family, and the labor of strangers we will never meet.

Self-sufficiency makes that sustenance visible. That’s why it isn’t a retreat into the past - it’s a re-grounding, making future societies more resilient.

The ideal isn’t for everyone to abandon cities and return to the countryside. It’s to stop treating cities and rural areas, technology and nature, specialization and self-sufficiency, global economies and local communities as opposites - and to combine them as needed.

Cities carry their own creative energy. Rural areas carry their own cycles of return.

AI and robotics don’t have to pull human beings further from nature. They can reduce overwork - and return to people the time to engage with soil, food, and each other.

The question that really matters for the societies we’re building isn’t “high-tech or low-tech?” It’s: which technologies, and which inconveniences, do we choose - in order to live as human beings, as living things, in health?

What is Plurality? The difference from majority rule, and Taiwan’s practice

Plurality is not simply “having diversity.”

As I’m using it here, Plurality means: without erasing difference, finding cooperative shared values between differences - and building the institutions and technologies to support them.

Majority rule, when opinions divide, makes the majority the winner.

That’s a necessary mechanism. But it’s not always sufficient.

When majority rule is all you have, 49% of people become “the losers.” Social resentment accumulates.

Taiwan’s vTaiwan is perhaps the most vivid example of Plurality put into practice.

Started in 2014, vTaiwan is a distributed, open deliberation process - combining online and offline engagement to bring citizens, government, experts, companies, and civil society into genuine discussion of national issues.

The platform Pol.is in particular doesn’t just tally votes. It clusters the views of participants and surfaces the opinions that bridge across different camps.

According to the Plurality Book, at its peak vTaiwan had roughly 200,000 users - about 1% of Taiwan’s population - and of 28 detailed deliberations, around 80% led to legislative action. Topics ranged from UberX regulation to FinTech sandboxes, non-consensual intimate imagery, and AI ethics.

What matters here is that Taiwan’s practice isn’t idealism. It doesn’t assume everyone will get along.

It assumes conflict. It makes conflict visible rather than hiding it. It doesn’t treat anger and anxiety as noise to be filtered out - it reads them as signals of which values are being threatened.

Plurality doesn’t aim for a society without conflict. It aims for a society where conflict becomes learning, not destruction.

Why Japan became safe. The culture of shame, ma, and the limits of the old model

Japan’s safety stands out in international comparisons.

World Bank data on intentional homicides per 100,000 people shows Japan at roughly 0.2 in 2023, and the United States at roughly 5.8.

Murder rates alone can’t tell the whole story - sexual violence, domestic abuse, bullying, suicide, psychological safety, and political freedom all require separate measures. But when it comes to low levels of physical violence, Japan’s relative safety is hard to dispute.

The reasons go beyond policing and economic development.

They include the culture of shame, the awareness of neighbors, school education, clean public spaces, the habit of punctuality, the ethic of not burdening others, the mutual trust that lets a dropped wallet come back to you, the precision of public transportation, the courtesy between staff and customer, the living memory of local communities - all of it layered together.

Shame culture can look, from the outside, like suppression.

But it has also functioned as an invisible sensor against violence and deviation within society. People ask not only “does this break the law?” but “would I be ashamed as a person?” and “am I being a burden to those around me?” This is not surveillance by the state. It’s an internalized social norm.

Then there’s ma - the gap, the pause, the interval.

The ma in conversation, in apology, in gift-giving, in silence, in physical distance. In Japanese culture, ma is the space for reading the other person - a buffer that keeps small frictions from becoming direct collisions. Most minor conflicts get absorbed before they reach the legal system.

But this old model has limits.

Shame culture can generate bullying, overwork, pressure to conform, fear of failure, silence about wrongdoing, and the invisibility of minorities.

A culture of reading between the lines functions within communities with shared context - but in a multilingual, multicultural, online, AI-accelerated world, it generates misunderstanding.

A society where things go unsaid is gentle to those who share the same background. To everyone else, it’s opaque.

To carry Japan’s safety into the future, it won’t be enough to rely on the old combination of shame and conformity. What’s needed is to reconnect that culture to transparency, dialogue, psychological safety, and the protection of rights.

Japan’s strength lies in consideration for others and in the art of formalization. But that strength must move from depending on individuals staying silent, to building institutions where everyone can speak safely.

Japanese culture as protocol. The capacity for formalization and its universal relevance

As I mentioned before: one of Japanese culture’s most distinctive features is its capacity for formalization.

Tea ceremony, martial arts, Noh, Kabuki, haiku, gardens, Japanese cuisine, architecture, gift-giving, hospitality, packaging, greetings, cleaning, queuing for trains, the flow of meetings, the exchange of business cards.

These are not mere formality.

They are protocols for reducing the friction of emotion, settling the body into alignment, and holding a safe distance between people.

Form doesn’t only constrain. Done well, form actually liberates.

Because when you know how to move in a situation, the anxiety falls away. A shared language of respect emerges — even between strangers.

The universal relevance of Japanese culture isn’t rooted in ethnicity. It lies in the capacity to make invisible relationships visible through form.

That matters for the world we’re building.

In online spaces, facial expression, physical proximity, and the atmosphere of a room are easily lost. In the age of AI, conversations speed up while the ability to notice another person’s pain quietly atrophies.

New forms of etiquette are needed for digital space. Response designs that don’t rush the other person. Protocols for reducing misunderstanding. Procedures for apology and repair. A sense of shared behavior for platforms as public spaces.

Japanese culture’s wisdom of formalization has things to offer here.

But form loses life when it hardens.

The kata - the form - is originally a vessel through which the heart moves.

When the heart disappears from the form, it becomes oppression.

To open Japanese culture to the world doesn’t mean exporting forms wholesale. It means sharing the capacity — the ability to ask: what kind of space design does it take to truly respect another person?

Japanese help win help versus international help win help

Let me define help win help as: a cycle where helping someone enables their victory, and their victory in turn helps you and the society around you. Not pure altruism, and not pure self-interest - a collaborative design where mutual success compounds.

Japanese help win help tends to be implicit, relational, and long-term.

You notice before someone has to ask.

You don’t announce that you helped.

You don’t position it as a favor owed.

You support quietly, in the background, so the whole room can work.

Help lives not in contracts but in trust, not in language but in attitude, not in short-term gain but in long-term relationship.

American-style help win help, by contrast, tends toward the explicit, the contractual, the networked.

You articulate what you need.

Mentorship, introductions, recommendations, investment, pitches, feedback - support is made visible.

Both the helper and the helped carry the relationship forward to the next opportunity.

This isn’t coldness. In a society of people with vastly different backgrounds, who can’t rely on shared unspoken assumptions, it’s a rational system for making cooperation possible.

The difference comes from what each society presupposes.

In Japan, where context has been relatively homogeneous, long-term employment has been standard, and local communities and school-based social order have been stable - “understanding without being told” could function.

In multicultural societies, where implicit assumptions don’t hold across backgrounds, you have to make explicit what you need and what you can offer.

What this teaches isn’t which is better.

Japan can learn to put support into language, make help visible, and stop treating the act of asking for help as shameful.

International cultures can learn to stop treating support as pure transaction — and develop the posture of reading another person’s context and emotion with real depth.

Future help win help will emerge from integrating Japanese depth of consideration with the openness and explicitness of international cultures.

Understanding conflict through cultural difference

Real conflicts involve resources, territory, military power, colonial history, religion, ethnicity, economic inequality, authoritarianism, information manipulation — many forces at once.

Culture alone can’t explain everything.

But culture frequently generates what I’d call failures of translation, even when it isn’t the primary fuel of conflict.

When reading conflict culturally, four layers matter.

The first is the security layer. When people feel physically or economically unsafe, survival values intensify and distrust of outsiders rises. The World Values Survey’s cultural map shows the relationship between economic and physical security and how values shift accordingly.

The second is the dignity layer. People react strongly not only when material things are taken from them — they react when they feel insulted.

The third is the memory layer. Narratives of historical harm or historical victory pass across generations.

The fourth is the protocol layer. What apology means, what negotiation means, what silence means, what compromise means, what declaring victory means — all of these vary by culture.

In many international conflicts, both sides genuinely believe they are the defenders. Both believe they are protecting justice. Both believe the other is the threat, the rude party, the one who doesn’t understand history.

When these perceptions amplify each other, every action by the other side gets read as hostile intent.

What’s needed here is not agreement with the other side’s position.

It’s understanding which value they are trying to protect.

This is where Plurality matters most.

Rather than forcing conflict into a win-lose frame, make visible which values are colliding - and search for words that can bridge across them.

AI and digital deliberation tools can support this work.

But technology alone isn’t enough. It takes the spiritual willingness to actually listen to another person’s pain, cultural rituals that allow face to be saved, and institutional transparency.

Design principles for a more decent society

A more decent society isn’t one where everyone shares the same values.

Different countries are fine. Different forms of happiness are fine.

What matters is that wherever a person is born, they don’t lose their dignity, they can connect with others, they can speak, they can learn, they can try again, and they can help each other.

For that, social design needs at least eight principles.

1. Holding self and other together Don’t frame caring for yourself and caring for others as opposites. Teach both rights education and empathy education.

2. Integrating explicitness and space Make agreements and rules clear, while still leaving room in relationships. In multicultural organizations: written agreements and time for actual dialogue.

3. Plurality-based decision-making Before voting, make the distribution of views and the bridging opinions visible. Tools like Polis, participatory budgeting, AI-assisted deliberation.

4. Safety to fail Don’t turn failure into an indictment of character. Startup education, second-chance systems.

5. From shame to repair Rather than silencing people with shame, design for accountability and restoration. Restorative justice, dialogue about bullying, whistleblower protection.

6. Formalized kindness Don’t leave kindness entirely to individual goodwill — build it into systems and etiquette. Universal design in public spaces.

7. Humanizing technology Build technology that protects dignity and relationship, not just efficiency. Explainable AI, deliberation-support AI, transparent recommendation algorithms.

8. Gradual return to center Don’t try to pull from extremes back to middle all at once. Policy experiments, sandboxes, decentralization.

 
From a spiritual perspective: human beings carry a wish to be kind — to the world, to each other.

And yet human beings also want to protect themselves, to be recognized, to not lose, to not be hurt.

So you can’t rely on spirit alone. You need institutions that make kindness structurally possible.

From a technological perspective: AI, social media, blockchain, digital identity, deliberation platforms can either fracture societies or enable collaboration. What matters is designing them not as machines for capturing human attention, but as machines for deepening human understanding.

From a cultural perspective: the differences between countries are not things to be erased. They are humanity’s distributed archive of wisdom.

America teaches the power of the self. Japan teaches the power of relationship. The Nordic countries teach how autonomy and welfare can coexist. Taiwan teaches digital democracy and Plurality. Singapore teaches multicultural management and institutional design. Latin cultures teach emotion and family connection.

Every country carries its own shape of happiness.

Toward the center - but without rushing

America sometimes thinks about itself too much. Japan sometimes thinks about others too much.

But neither is wrong.

American self-respect is the force that protects human dignity. Japanese consideration for others is the force that protects human relationships.

The problem is when either one becomes excessive.

Like yin and yang: the world needs opposing forces. If one country tilts toward the self, another holds the relationship. If one tilts toward speed, another holds caution. If one tilts toward freedom, another holds order.

Humanity as a whole has perhaps only barely maintained balance through this aggregate of different leanings.

But I don’t think what we need going forward is simply a world where lopsided countries cancel each other out.

Little by little, each country moving toward the center - without losing what it’s best at.

America adding consideration for others to its freedom of self. Japan adding its own voice to its consideration for others. Majority rule deepened by Plurality. Shame culture updated into repair and psychological safety. Business asking not just about profit, but about human flourishing. Startups experimenting not just with technology, but with social meaning.

A country is not a fixed container. Culture is a protocol inherited from the past - and a design that can be updated toward the future. A human being is someone who wants to be themselves, while also wanting to be with someone.

What a more decent society needs isn’t a perfect system.

. . .

To care for yourself and for others at the same time. To turn difference into learning rather than competition. To make kindness a design rather than a mood. To use technology for understanding rather than control. And to embed, in the daily texture of culture and institution, the spirit that wants to be kind - to the world, and to each other.

And that society must not be one that only multiplies convenience, but one that can still remember the dependencies and cycles at the foundation of living.

The trend toward self-sufficiency isn’t simply a wish to return to the past. It’s a sign - that in the midst of excessive specialization and excessive consumption, people are reaching for the feeling of being alive that’s been lost.

Abundance isn’t only being able to buy anything immediately. Growing something with your own hands, repairing it, sharing it, waiting for it, being grateful for it - that, too, is abundance.

The world doesn’t need to become one.

But the world needs to understand itself.

Many countries are fine. Many forms of happiness are fine. To get there, we have to ask again: what is culture? What is a country? What is a human being? What does it mean to live richly?

That first step is Zō Village - and the future I want to walk, together.

Thank you for being here today.

References: World Values Survey Association - Findings and Insights; Geert Hofstede - The 6-D Model of National Culture; The Lean Startup - Principles; vTaiwan - An Open Consultation Process; Plurality Book - The Life of a Digital Democracy; World Bank - Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people)