Japanese cultural and ethical Ba (locus) as the place of new sources for technological and social innovation as well as for ethical discussions on robots and life in the information era

Abstract

In the first part of this paper, the author tries to analyze the crisis that Japanese people of today face, citing various statistical data provided by the Japanese government and the research groups interested in this problem including the author's research data themselves. This crisis means that Japan of today has to deal with a lot of serious situations such as the economic stagnation measured by the GDP growth, loss of export capacity of high-tech industries, the high suicide rate, the decline of the local economy and so on. The important thing regarding this Japan's decline is the fact that these serious situations have started to appear in that time of so-called 'informatization.' In the second part of this paper, the author attempts to find out the factors related to these serious situations in Japan of today. In the author's view, one of the most important factors affecting Japan's culture, society and industries might be a loss of 'depth' of Japanese culture and society, or (loss of) awareness of the place ( Ba ) from which people can extract various meanings of life coming from Japanese cultural traditions, senses of 'oneness' or the experiences in the past history. The phenomenon of loss of cultural depth or loss of awareness of Ba -related meanings is one of the most serious problems in Japan today and this leads to serious problems such as high suicide rate in Japan since 1998. But on the other hand, at least at a latent level, it was found through the author's own previous researches [11, 12, 13, 14, 15] that Japanese people still tend to show strong sympathy for the meanings related to Seken , i.e. the traditional aspect of Japanese culture and society or Ba with traditional cultural, ethical, existential meanings. And finally, the author wants to focus on 'another depth' which seems to be related to traditional ways of understanding of oneness( Ichinyo ) in Japan, i.e. the world view putting emphasis on the situations of undifferentiation of things, persons, events, nature. In addition to this kind of traditional oneness, we have to carefully see some sort of 'artificial oneness' including emergence of autonomous robots or phenomena related to 'rubber hand illusion,' 'mirror box therapy' and so on: 'artificial oneness' happening in the artificial environments in the information era. In this sense, the attempt the author tries in this paper might be regarded as the first one with the aim to (re) discover the 'depth' in Japan in the information era and at the same time the pioneer work to try to (re) gain the 'depth' in the fields of studies on information society and on the relation(s) between information technologies and the meanings of life with 'depth' and with 'width' beyond the differentiation of things and persons at the surface level too.