My Story

Captivated by Culture

I grew up moving between Japan and the United States. My father was a traveling salesman for a Japanese electronics firm, which took our family between major U.S. cities and Tokyo.

My mother, an elementary school teacher, was among the few women of her generation with a college education. She valued public education and wanted her children to be bilingual, so I attended an American public school during the week and a Japanese supplementary school on Saturdays.

Crossing the Pacific multiple times sparked my fascination with culture. Why do people in one country write from top to bottom and right to left, while in another they write from left to right? Why do some bow while others shake hands? These questions intrigued me.

When I encountered a Cultural Anthropology course at a small liberal arts college in Tokyo, I was excited to learn that studying culture could be a profession.

Differences are not always a result of culture

The role of policy

Anthropologists often discuss the nature-culture divide, yet rarely address the impact of policy in shaping both.

Japan was occupied by the Allied Forces from 1945 to 1952. The postwar period, especially the economic boom from the 1960s to the 1980s, was deeply influenced by occupation policies.

These policies shaped cultural narratives such as ‘Japanese collectivism vs. American individualism’ and ‘Japanese homogeneity vs. American diversity.’ Policy took the outcome of history and naturalized it as distinctions. It facilitated an international division of labor, reinforcing security while expanding economic influence.

Climate change as a clarion call to take nature seriously

Nature's Copernican Turn

Today, there is growing consensus that prioritizing economic growth above all else is unsustainable. Concepts like Gross Domestic Happiness were introduced to shift focus from wealth to well-being, but their success has been limited. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s concept of ecosystem services and the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA EA) are revolutionary steps in integrating nature into economic decision-making. These ideas influence all aspects of life, including culture and society.

Learning about ecosystem services, particularly cultural services, was an eye-opener for me in an era where culture is increasingly used as an economic instrument. As a graduate student, I taught Japanese pop culture simply because it was part of the curriculum. However, when teaching study-abroad students, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the course often functioned as an entertainment-driven, credit-earning mechanism rather than a meaningful educational experience.

There is nothing wrong with making money or enjoying entertainment, but when these motives overshadow education, we must reassess priorities. Capitalism’s consumerist mentality extends beyond goods—it commodifies knowledge and people. I became convinced that institutions should resist reducing education to mere transactions.

Culture as a service derived from nature

Body as Capital

In Japan, the phrase ‘my body is my capital’ (karada ga shihon) is commonly heard. It aligns with the idea that participation in sports fosters social connections, discipline, and teamwork—qualities valued in corporate and educational leadership. This suggests that success depends not just on social networks but also on physical fitness and resilience.

This concept also highlights how culture can be seen as a service derived from nature. Physical skills, whether in sports or the arts, cannot simply be bought or replicated by AI. They require years of embodied practice, reinforcing the connection between culture and nature.

Why study shutai?

As a graduate student, I was interested in machizukuri, which may be translated as ‘village-making.’ I thought machizukuri turned the traditional enterprise of Anthropology of ‘village-study’ inside-out.

If village-study was about anthropologists armed with European theories to study non-European cultures, then machizukuri was all about the practice of making cultures. Machizukuri does not discriminate the ‘expert’ anthropologist from the ‘lay’ locals. Machizukuri invites everybody to participate in the making of one’s village or city.

Graduate school trained me to become an anthropologist. While anthropological theories may have helped me write my dissertation, they didn’t help solve any social issues. And there are many social issues in Japan today like an aging population, declining birth rate, rising government debt, and a dwindling economy.

Soon I noticed that shutai was being used like a magical word that held the key to solving all the pressing social issues that we were collectively facing. Teachers want their students to become shutai, companies want their workers to become shutai, politicians want citizens to become shutai. Everybody wants others and themselves to become shutai, but I didn’t know what it meant.

If I don’t know what shutai means, then I can’t be or become a shutai. So I decided to take it upon myself to study shutai, and so began my adventure to become. . . .

Yuka Hasegawa