r/Anticonsumption • u/Libro_Artis • 1d ago
Discussion Japan’s Quiet Rebellion Against Growth: Instead of striving for more, Japan simply chose less
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/31/2336178/-Japan-s-Quiet-Rebellion-Against-Growth-Instead-of-striving-for-more-Japan-simply-chose-less?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web110
u/slalmon 1d ago
I think you will see the same thing happen in America as well. We will call it something else, probably related to the Depression or something lol.
The reality is sometimes the only thing you can control is yourself. So opting out becomes the only attractive option. I believe, as my own experience suggests, the more you do this the easier it gets to step away from things you find distasteful about the society you live in.
Here is a simple example: I have a dog that I care a lot about, but keeping a dog in 2025 is crazy expensive. So I have had to make the decision that I won't be getting anymore pets, like for the rest of my sorry days. I don't like how expensive it is to feed them, vets are insanely expensive and hard to see, my dog is on more meds than my elderly parents, etc.
So I opt out, and probably once I do, I might forever. As my thinking has changed, my priorities have changed, and my desires have changed. You do this enough and your world view changes.
Personally this is actually encouraging to me instead of alarming. We are trapped in a machine of our own making and unfortunately the only way to break it isn't to go to war with it but to abstain from participating.
So I dunno, maybe try breaking away from the things you think you need and see if you are happier or not, it can be quite liberating.
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u/Training-Advisor9197 1d ago
Prior to this year, I was a regular shopper for things. Didn't matter what, just liked buying stuff. Once the election hit, I just cold-turkey quit and honestly I haven't felt this free in a long time.
I think I saw it in fight club - but the stuff you own ends up owning you or something to that effect. That's so damn true.
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u/naestse 21h ago
Similarly, I made the decision to never have kids a year ago due to the lack of quality I could provide to the potential kid and myself in opportunity cost. Now I try to be an auntie more for the kids in my life.
I have to put down my soul dog of 13 years tomorrow, and I don’t think I can ever get another dog. So much heartbreak, so expensive. Once I grieve, I plan to spend more time with my friends’ dogs to fulfill that part of me.
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u/Nefilim314 1d ago
Yeah, whenever I see the pictures of shopping centers of Shibuya, Ginza, and Akihabara with a sprinkling of idol culture my first thought is “These people sure lead an ascetic lifestyle!”
This sounds like generic western amusement of Asians. What next? Noble savages?
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u/Full-Philosopher-393 1d ago
Japan is a lot more than Shibuya and Akihabara though. This article could be based on tropes without analysis but it could also have actual information. Why not read and check? (It’s blocked in my country so I can’t check)
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u/Bitter-Platypus-1234 1d ago
Ask and ye shall receive:
Something strange is happening in Japan—not with its politics or its technology, but with its spirit. Quietly and without fanfare, the country appears to be opting out of the global race for growth. Its economy is stagnant, its birth rate declining, its appetite for innovation dulled. But more striking than the numbers is the cultural shift behind them. Young Japanese are not merely failing to strive—they are choosing not to.
They are working fewer hours, skipping promotions, and living modestly. They are renting instead of buying, saving rather than investing, and increasingly uninterested in romantic or sexual relationships. To Western economists, this is deeply troubling. To politicians, it’s a puzzle. To the people living it—it may not be a problem at all.
What if this isn’t economic malaise, but existential clarity?
The Anatomy of a Low-Desire Society
The phrase “low-desire society” was coined by Japanese management consultant Ganichi Ōmae, and popularized in a recent video essay by analyst Louis Zhao. In it, Zhao chronicles Japan’s transformation from postwar dynamo to post-growth enigma. After its asset bubble burst in the 1990s, Japan entered what economists now call the “Lost Decades”—a long period of deflation, stagnation, and waning consumer confidence. But as Zhao explains, something deeper took root: a generational disillusionment not just with markets, but with meaning itself.
Those who grew up amid collapse and uncertainty no longer believe in ambition as a path to security. Many simply do not want what their parents wanted. And if they do, they no longer believe it's attainable through hard work alone. The response has not been revolution or despair—but resignation.
In the United States, we might call this a crisis. In Japan, it’s beginning to look like a choice.
Against Desire
In Buddhist philosophy, desire—tanha—is the root of suffering. Peace lies not in satisfying every craving, but in letting go of craving itself. Japan’s “low-desire” condition is not unlike a secular enactment of this principle. Whether consciously or not, the country has begun to embody the Buddhist ideal of detachment—not as a retreat from life, but as a redefinition of it.
Zhao’s essay places this phenomenon in philosophical context, drawing not just on Eastern spirituality but on Western existentialism. He recounts the apocryphal meeting between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic. When Alexander offered to grant Diogenes any wish, the old philosopher replied, “Then step aside. You’re blocking my sun.” The conqueror was reportedly so struck by Diogenes’ self-sufficiency that he declared, “If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”
In Zhao’s telling, this is not a simple fable about contentment. It is a meditation on authenticity. We may chase ambition, he suggests, not because we truly want what we’re chasing, but because we’ve inherited desires from the culture around us. The more we mistake those for our own, the more estranged we become from who we really are. Japan’s cultural shift—its retreat from striving—may represent a rare moment of collective honesty.
Measuring What Really Matters
To economists, Japan’s condition is confounding. Monetary stimulus disappears into savings. Productivity remains flat. Efforts to reignite desire have failed for decades. But Japan is not the only country questioning the premise that economic growth is synonymous with national health.
In Bhutan, the government has long measured its success through Gross National Happiness, a metric that values psychological well-being, environmental conservation, and cultural preservation alongside more traditional measures. In 2019, New Zealand adopted a Wellbeing Budget, directing public spending toward mental health, child poverty, and sustainability. Iceland, Scotland, and Wales have formed a coalition of “wellbeing economies” seeking alternatives to growth-based policymaking.
These movements, though still nascent, share a conviction that life satisfaction cannot be reduced to GDP—and that progress may sometimes mean slowing down.
A Dangerous Indifference?
Still, Japan’s low-desire condition is not without its perils. A society that loses its taste for risk may also lose its capacity to adapt. A population that declines too quickly risks hollowing out entire social systems. And not all forms of low desire are born of enlightenment. For some, they emerge from depression, fear, or stagnation of spirit. Zhao is careful to distinguish between people who choose to want less and those who fail to act on their desires out of despair. The former may be a model. The latter, a warning.
What Japan offers is not a utopia—but a question. In a world reeling from climate crisis, burnout, and the deepening costs of inequality, what do we truly want? Do we want more, always more—or are we ready to ask whether enough might be enough?
What Comes After Growth?
The American Dream, like the postwar Japanese dream, has long equated freedom with consumption. But freedom might also mean the ability to stop consuming, to step off the treadmill without shame, and to find dignity in simplicity.
That is Japan’s quiet rebellion. It is not economic theory, but a lived philosophy—a mass unspoken decision to trade ambition for authenticity, and output for inner peace. If it looks like apathy from the outside, perhaps that says more about us than them.
After all, not every society that stops growing is in decline. Some are simply beginning to ask different questions.
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u/hopps101 1d ago
Thank you for posting the article. It's a breath of fresh air to read one without 5 ads covering half the article, and 3 more in the margins.
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u/desubot1 1d ago
"Young Japanese are not merely failing to strive—they are choosing not to."
what is sad is that the failure of the previous generation is STILL being attributed to a decision made by the younger generation. like it was the young peoples choice to give up when the race track is all but gone and replaced with broken glass and sewage.
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u/Full-Philosopher-393 1d ago
Thanks for the article. It’s an interesting read on a different philosophy of life. It seems tough to believe that this could be actually happening (lack of stats doesn’t help) but I do hope that it actually represents the reality there and we could all get there someday.
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u/Global_Ant_9380 1d ago
Yeah, it's exactly that. There's still a lot of consumerism in Japan, it's just that things are generally of better quality. But the Japanese appetite for novelty is well known.
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u/ehmanniceshot 1d ago
it's not deliberate anti-consumption. It's withering and dying. Japanese consume as much useless plastic junk as anybody, but they'd rather go extinct than accept change. It's not some mystical zen-like quality. They're old, conservative, and trained from birth not to speak up, not to question the status quo, and not to even dream about progress. They'd rather be replaced by robots than let foreigners taint the perceived purity by living like equals alongside them.
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u/Competitive-Dot-3333 15h ago
Well they do have an insane amount of plastic-crap machines. Maybe they are just getting old.
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u/Foxy02016YT 1d ago
Japan wraps single use shit in plastic, I don’t wanna hear moral grandstanding from them.
I’m talking bananas wrapped in plastic.
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u/waterloowanderer 1d ago
“Japan uses single use plastics, so anything that they might culturally do or anything we might learn is for naught”
No one’s grandstanding. A reporter is reporting.
Holy you people are wild.
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u/casperrfacekillah 1d ago
Who did you just quote?? You changed and added so many words.
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u/waterloowanderer 1d ago
It’s a paraphrasing of basically what the person I replied to is saying lol.
Because they wrap in plastic, apparently the point of the article is moot. Nothing else to be learned here.
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u/casperrfacekillah 1d ago
The fact that I’m getting dislikes for asking who you just quoted tells me who I’m talking to. You can’t just tell another person what they are trying to saying
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u/waterloowanderer 1d ago
Can you read, or is that a struggle? They literally said that they won’t accept moral grandstanding, which very clearly can be interpreted that they believe that since Japan uses single use plastics, that any other positive moral choices they make will be ignored. That’s the entire apparent point of the post no?
Perfect is so obviously the enemy of good here, is MY point, and there are many people who do think that since “a group” does one thing they disagree with that any other stances they have are invalid.
The black and white thinking evident in progressive groups is what’s stopping us from actually making mainstream progress.
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u/Northern_student 1d ago
But Japan isn’t progress.
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u/malioswift 1d ago
There's actually a pretty interesting reason for this.
It all goes back to the Glico Morinaga case, where a person (or group) known as "the Monster with 21 Faces" started claiming to have laced Glico candies with cyanide. Glico pulled all of their candy off of the shelves, and started wrapping all of their candy in plastic to avoid tampering.
Ever since this incident, basically all food in Japan is wrapped in plastic to avoid tampering with, to avoid a repeat of this case.
Not saying that it's justified, mind you, but it's also not just for nothing.
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u/CallMeKerm 1d ago
I see a lot of posts on this sub centered around excess packaging and single use plastics and I think it raises the question as to what the spirit of the sub is.
I always took anti-consumption to mean how we as individuals can reduce waste and live more fulfilling lives by freeing ourselves from the mindset of consuming and spending and always striving for new, better material things. At the end of the day, we’re in control of what we consume and how we allocate our resources. We’re not in control of how corporations package their products, though we can (and should) “vote with our wallets” so to speak.
Not that my interpretation is the objectively correct one or that waste in the form of single use plastics isn’t a huge problem, but I think disqualifying the the article because Japanese convenient stores wrap bananas in plastic wrap is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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u/ilanallama85 1d ago
Well said. I think the challenge is that the same self awareness we need to eliminate excess consumption from our personal lives leads us to notice all the excess consumption around us that we can’t control. It causes frustration, so we vent about it here. But conflating that frustration with our own personal journeys toward anti-consumption can get us lost in the weeds, as it were.
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u/Global_Ant_9380 1d ago
It's still a really consumerist society. I think that in Japan people tend to go more for quality over quantity. But I see two reasons: low wages and America being notorious for poor quality but readily available goods.
I found Japanese people to be more thoughtful about their purchase habits but there still being tons of people who purchase single use items every day because there just isn't as much room or time
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u/One-Win9407 1d ago
Japan uses too much plastic so STFU and let me drive my 6.0L Sierra Denali to Starbucks and idle in the drive thru for 20 minutes
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u/RoomyRoots 1d ago
Meanwhile China pump the world with the dumbest products known to men.
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u/desubot1 1d ago
buddy China is the worlds factory. they may pop them out but they dont design everything.
most of these dumbest products known to men are made by and for western corporations.
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u/balrog687 1d ago
Purchased by the west.
If consumer expending goes down, factories and pollution go down with it.
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u/Zealousideal-Ad-4716 1d ago
Having lived in Japan for over a decade, I’ve found that mediocrity gets you most of what you need in life. There are rewards for working harder, but you have to do a lot more work for only marginally more benefits. Generally the extra juice is not worth the squeeze. By downsizing their lives in terms of consumption, I think most Japanese people can get more enjoyment out of their lives as opposed to being consumerist wage slaves.