A Japanese Tradition of Perfecting a Lifelong Skill Under Threat in a Disruptive World

The Japanese often attribute the country's high-quality manufactured products to Shokunin Damashii (職人魂) in action. A historical culture of craftsmen focusing on doing one thing and just one thing well in his or her life has led to a slew of artisanal success stories, from fabled swords from centuries ago to the aged sake rice wine taking over the world's palate. Despite modern manufacturing's reliance on automation and assembly lines, the country's electronics giants and carmakers continue to suggest that this culture of perfectionism over individual lifetimes is the secret ingredient to made in Japan's fine reputation.

Unfortunately, Shukonin Damashii suggests that perfectionism comes from training with masters and a dedication to craft that is often not compatible with disruptive innovation. While a blacksmith can claim to have inherited his technique for swordmaking from generations of masters who continually adapted to the changing needs of customers, the same cannot be said of drones or flying cars. In new industries with few long-time customers, there is little reference on what is good or bad. Without the benchmark, the perfection-seeking craftsman is completely lost.

Worse yet, an obsession with perfectionism based on ideals of the past risks prolonging obsolete products and technologies simply by glorifying them as tradition to be maintained. It might be quaint to document the meticulousness with which master woodworkers carve out personal seals with the bearer's last name. But that craft belongs in art fairs and museums, not in business settings where approvals are now quickly and remotely sought out with emails and e-signatures. A love of handcrafted seals should not become the reason for continuing to print out documents and stamping them for approval.

And as those printers and seals dominate business scenes, they crowd out innovation. A love for Shokunin Damashii, grounded in the Japanese-ness of their origins, translates into skepticism of potential replacements that come from the software and business protocols developed in distinctively non-Japanese contexts. So one is forced to change due to external circumstances, the disruption becomes not just a quick change in how day-to-day business operations are run, but an existential soul-searching on how to sustain supposedly outdated sociocultural identities.

Today is just such a time for forced adaptation. The emergence of AI threatens to democratize perfection. Its ability to dig into the success stories of the past provides a shortcut to how even novices are able to quickly build capacity for skills that in the past required someone decades of dedicated training. And as AI brains are combined with increasingly nimble arms and hands of humanoid robots, human craftsmen find themselves being outdone even in the perfection category. The day will come when robots can craft artisanal products with greater consistency and quality than humans can ever do.

Interestingly, the same kind of forced adaptation is coming to jobs that do not require making stuff with one's hands. Japanese politics of the recent decades often felt not so different from the world of handicrafts. Just like a master would train apprentices (often their own children) to perfect certain products, elder politicians would take younger ones (often their own children) under their wings, showing them the ropes on how to navigate the halls of power, perfecting the skills of hobnobbing with bureaucratic and business bigwigs.

That consistency is now being broken. The rise of rightwing populism as a political ideology has introduced what some may call "real" democracy in Japan, where one's pedigree in being mentored by the right people and coming from the right families matters less than the ideologies of how to fend off new existential threats of mass immigration. The latest evidence of this dramatic change is the election of Sanae Takaichi, the daughter of a mere salaryman with no political background, as the leader of the country's storied ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). 

Some will fight back against the turn away from moderate traditions, such as the Buddhist-backed Komeito is doing by quitting its ruling coalition with the LDP after a quarter of a century. Others will, more dangerously, try to make the new trend of xenophobia a new norm, arguing that, justifiably, it was in fact the true historical tradition of the country before the liberal aberration introduced by the Western influences of the Meiji Restoration and the American-led political reforms of the post-WWII era. Whether or not one claims continuation or disruption, Shokunin Damashii will remain a source of contention.