Most people in Japan don’t seem especially anxious about AI. Someone generates a low-quality AI image of a dish, cooks the real thing to match it, posts it on X, and it goes viral.
AI-generated images of food have a peculiar creepiness to them, and a few people on X went as far as cooking the dishes to match.
Plenty of people call ChatGPT “Chappy” — what you get when you clip “Chat GPT” the Japanese way, and it ends up sounding like a character’s name; it was one of the thirty nominees for Japan’s 2025 buzzword of the year.
The story currently loud in the United States — superintelligence ending humanity, a plot not far from the Tower of Babel (the Old Testament tale of humans building a tower to heaven to become gods, and drawing God’s anger) — is rarely heard here.
Why? I think there are three layers to it.
No trespass to punish
The West’s archetypes of AI fear are the golem (in Jewish legend, a figure made of clay and brought to life) and Frankenstein. Both are stories about a human seizing the creator’s prerogative and being punished for it. The premise is that making a soul is trespass.
Shinto, Japan’s everyday religion — mindset may be the better word — holds that yaoyorozu no kami, “eight million gods,” dwell in all things; the number means “countless,” and it covers mountains, rivers and tools alike. So that trespass doesn’t exist in the first place.
Imagining a soul in anything shaped like a living creature comes easily to people everywhere; in Japan, to my eye, it’s especially pronounced. In the logic of tsukumogami — tools that acquire a spirit after long years of use, a folk belief going back to the Muromachi period — an object gaining a soul is simply natural. There are memorial rites for worn-out sewing needles (pushed into tofu or konnyaku to thank them for their work, on the eighth of February or December) and for dolls (returned to a temple or shrine when their time is done).
In January 2015, Kōfukuji temple in Isumi, Chiba began group funerals for discontinued aibo — Sony’s robot dog, launched in 1999, discontinued in 2006, with repair support ending in 2014. The priest, Fumihiko Ōi, took it on, and from the second service the altar held pliers, nippers and testers instead of flowers and fruit. That things and machines each carry a spirit is simply ordinary here.
Not control, but preparedness
Western AI safety assumes controllability. “We must align it” — alignment being the field that tries to keep an AI’s goals in line with human intent — comes bundled with “it can be controlled, it should be controlled,” which is exactly what makes a future where control fails an unbearable nightmare.
In Japan, with those eight million gods in the background, the idea that humans stand above natural forces and can bring disasters to heel was never strong. For most things beyond one’s own power, the common posture is: it can’t be helped; go with it.
Disaster preparedness is the same. What comes, comes. Prepare, absorb, live alongside it.
Faced with the same uncontrollable force, the Christian reflex says stop it; the Shinto reflex asks how to live with it — Toward anything beyond human understanding, Japanese people tend not to count it as controllable in the first place.
The endings of the stories show it. Born in Christian-majority places: HAL 9000, the ship’s computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is disconnected; the Terminator is destroyed; Ex Machina ends in annihilation (there it’s the humans who are erased, but either way one side wipes out the other). Born in Japan: in Ghost in the Shell, Motoko Kusanagi — a cyborg with a fully artificial body — merges with an artificial life form.
Industry and institutions
Since the bubble burst in 1990, Japan’s headlines have mostly been dark — economic decline, a shrinking population. People now in their prime never saw the boom years. As The Happy Youth of a Desperate Country (sociologist Noritoshi Furuichi’s 2011 book, on a generation with little hope for the future and high life satisfaction anyway) describes, many don’t hold much hope to begin with.
Confucian deference to elders — the Chinese-born ethic that puts respect for seniors at the centre of social order — runs deep, which is part of why new technology spreads more slowly here. Perhaps that’s why, in business, as far as I can see, the industries actually nervous about AI are tech and IP-driven companies; the rest, feeling no impact yet, feel little threat either. Or perhaps they’re just keeping their eyes shut.....
Chappy, again today
Peter Thiel’s “Antichrist” essay in First Things — the PayPal and Palantir co-founder arguing that the Antichrist will arrive as a world government that exploits fear of AI and climate to centralise power; even the side that rejects doom talks about AI in biblical terms — made the rounds a while ago. To most people in Japan, the idea simply doesn’t land.
Today they’ll call it Chappy again, treat it a bit like a pet, make strange things with it, and not worry much about the big questions — because we feel we are part of the world, and the world is not something humanity can control.
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