Why is it said that Japan has a kind of strength that many people cannot see? Because its greatness does not lie in creating a sense of shock. Instead, it lies in: allowing an ordinary person to live with low cost. There is no overwhelming propaganda of high technology, no strong sense of the future, and even many devices look somewhat outdated. But you will find that this society operates exceptionally smoothly. The subway is orderly, the streets are quiet, checkout in supermarkets is highly efficient, delivery errors are minimal, and convenience stores still operate steadily at midnight.

An ordinary person does not need to spend a lot of energy every day fighting the environment, guessing rules, preventing risks, repeatedly confirming, or competing with the system. Many times, you might not even feel the existence of the “system.” But it has been supporting the entire society. Later, you will gradually realize that a truly advanced society is not necessarily about whether it can produce the most dazzling things, but whether it has the ability to reduce the “friction” in the operation of the entire society to a sufficiently low level.
Because distrust among people, conflicts between rules, uncertainties in processes, disorder in public systems, all essentially become long-term, hidden consumption of life. Many problems in countries are not due to a lack of technology, but because the entire society has a lot of ongoing friction: queue anxiety, information opacity, inefficient processes, adversarial services, unpredictability, and unexpected situations that can arise at any time.
In the end, ordinary people will find that most of their daily energy is not used for living, but for “dealing with the environment.” One of Japan’s strengths is that it has turned many things into infrastructure: punctuality, order, quietness, stability, default trustworthiness, and standardized collaboration.
These things do not create a sense of shock. But a truly long-term powerful society is precisely built on these “unremarkable” abilities. Because only when ordinary people are no longer continuously consumed by the environment will they have the capacity to accumulate skills, plan for the future, build trust, raise children, and maintain mental stability.
Sometimes, whether a society is strong or not is not about whether it can produce the most dazzling things. It’s about whether it can enable a large number of ordinary people to live with low cost and high quality.