Tools: New Japan Is What Late-stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like 2026

One of the more bizarre and traumatic incidents in Japanese pop culture was when music group AKB48’s Minami Minegishi publicly shaved her head in penance for breaking a band rule.1

Public humiliation rituals are a typical punishment for the idol industry. So many aspiring pop stars are brutally ridiculed for normal adult woman behaviors. Minegishi’s shaming was just the first incident that was shocking enough to be reported on in the West. The idol industry’s machinery was revealed worldwide for how bestial it truly was: organizing itself on enforced sexual purity, parasocial entitlement, and female infantilization fetishes.

It was portrayed as a cultural quirk — Japan having this ultra-serious, ultra-discipline focused culture where cruelty is an accepted, common sense outcome for rule breaking. But this is essentialist thinking that exoticizes dysfunction simply for it being foreign.

Rather than culture, I believe that this “weirdness” is more attributable to Japan being one of the first nations to enter late-stage capitalist collapse.

The cultural stagnation seen in the US now, was actually predicted decades ago in Japan. Americans now exist under the same structural precarity and economic pressure that produced the “quirkiness” seen in Western perceptions of Japan.

The Japanese economy was decimated by World War 2. Major cities were firebombed, the population was traumatized, and food shortages ravaged the country. Prewar Zaibatsu (industrial conglomerates) were dismantled by U.S. occupation authorities to weaken militarism. Japan was on the brink of famine.

Post-war, the U.S. oversaw sweeping economic, political, and institutional reforms to rebuild Japan into a liberal capitalist nation. Land was redistributed to tenant farmers, unions were legalized, monopoly power was broken, and the Dodge Line (1949) stabilized the currency.

Then the Korean war began in 1950, and Japan became the premiere clientelist manufacturing hub for the Americans. This injection of demand kickstarted Japan’s industrial revival.

From that period into the 70s, Japan sustained double-digit GDP growth for nearly two decades and once the 80s hit, Japan became the world’s second-largest economy.

Rapid growth and deregulation led to massive speculation in the stock market, and the Yen appreciated massively. Nikkei stock quintupled and real estate soared — households borrowed aggressively against inflated assets and the country grew comfortable on a sense of economic invinc

Source: HackerNews