KAZE, March 2019
“Philosophy”- power of thinking for our sustainable future
Konoe FUJIMURA
Another sad and terrible case of child abuse last month! Despite her desperate efforts tocontact public channels and let them know her agony, our society, to our great shame, failed tosave the life of this 10-year-old from the parental child abuse!! Something seems to be wrong
with today’s Japanese society! As regards misconducts of public entities, we also saw in the pastmonths many shameful behavior of the national government; sloppy public surveys of company
employees work hours, years of fake employment rate report of the disabilities, an irresponsible
report on what is called “Technical Interns” from abroad. These repeated misconducts bitterly
ruined the credibility of Japan’s statistical data.
Why do we so often see governmental misconducts these days? As regards statistic data
errors, they may be caused, to some extent, by scarcity of allocated budget and staff because
the current government put more emphasis on short-term economic issues and do not pay muchattention to those basic and important (but unglamorous) role of government, namely, keeping
sound national data for policy making/assessment. Some blame the government culture, wherenobody, including government officials and politicians, takes responsibility of organizational
decisions that they were involved in. Others point out that the ways of life of current Japanesepeople have been critically changed, greedily seeking only for benefits and convenience that theycan enjoy while losing what is most important for human beings. It seems that people are busy
making money and do not have room to think of others or of their community. They pay evenless attention to the current crises of the environment, on which our very life is based.
In response to numerous shameful affairs happening in today’s Japanese society, somesensible persons consider that our society lacks “philosophy”. Exactly! In our current society,people are becoming more egoistic and they do not mind others so long as they themselves canget money to enjoy the present moment. The selfishness prevails in the society instead ofhealthy social philosophy of old days. The lack of philosophy will lead to various misconducts andmismanagement like above mentioned ones.
For Japanese people, the term “philosophy” sounds like something scholastic. In fact,
philosophy is the act of quest for basic principles of life, and it requires difficult book readings. On
the other hand, “philosophy” means in our daily life a belief that one gains from their experiencesof life, or a basic thinking penetrating through one’s life. If so, any adult may have their own

“philosophy” coming from their past experience whatever it is. If so, then how should wecultivate philosophical thinking in young people with shorter life experiences?
Unfortunately, Japanese school curriculums up to high school do not have Philosophy.
Instead, we have Ethics, but such esoteric themes like “What is life?” would not be discussed in
the classroom. Of course, some colleges and universities have Philosophy courses, buthumanities courses are not valued these days and we cannot expect much from school education.
As for myself, I learnt what I consider sensible ways of thinking through book stories, words anddeeds of my parents and other adults. When I grew up, I learnt a lot from my job and it helped
me develop my own “philosophy”. These days, some companies encourage discussion among
employees how they should behave as a human being. This may sound strange but thosecompanies fully realize that employee development is a key to the company success.
Philosophy is not for AI, but only possible for humans. In our effort of developing
sustainable decarbonized societies, we should put more emphasis on philosophy along withscience and technology. Recently, a scholar of robotics found out that university students today
tend to accept given information without questioning. She warned against the current educationand emphasized the importance of fostering creativity as well as abilities of critical thinking,which only humans could do. Decline of thinking power may have been caused in part by heavy
use of smart-phones. As people become more dependent on AI and smart-phones, the ability ofthinking may further decline. At a turning point of our society, we should be fully aware of thepower of thinking as a critical basis of human society.