CXLIII. A Country That Holds Up Its End

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My sons and I headed up the mountains on the Kii Peninsula, four days along the Kumano-Kodo trail. The hike ran along ridges with deep ravines, chopped and cut into the stone and dirt a thousand years ago, high enough that the rice terraces were small manicured squares and the cedars and pines blunted the extremely hot sun.

Damn, that first leg was hard. I scared my sons, stopping twice to slow my heart. The sweat of forgotten youth poured from my body. When we reached the top, it was a merciful dream. A small village that lived mostly off the land. There is a guesthouse run by a family with the proprietor dad named John. I found them the way most hikers on the Kumano Kodo find anything. Through a website built by a half public, half private tourism bureau in Tanabe City. Not Trivago, Booking, etc. The first of its kind in Japan, a community whose entire purpose is to put small operators onto one platform so that not one of them gets overrun or left behind.

Each day, after hours of up and down the mountain and pounding the water, we stayed in the guesthouses and people’s homes. We delighted in the various meals of fish, eel, beans, vegetables, and of course rice. Fresh spring water or cold beer was always available. We made use of the voluminous number of vending machines, curious to see what we would find next. Used the luggage shuttle service run by local families, as hiking up a mountain with extra weight is insane. On the lodging page, there in plain English, a line asked you to please travel responsibly by booking locally. Such a simple message.

Travel responsibly, purchase responsibly, think responsibly.

All worthy goals of being a human. All part of a shared culture.

Japan is experiencing one of its hottest summers on record. As one Aussie hiker muttered while passing us, it was baptism through bloody fucking fire.

But I loved every minute of it.

My body will certainly remember the two weeks across Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe and the Kumano-Kodo. But what I keep thinking about is what I experienced 35 years ago that is still there today.

The shared responsibility.

The rail system was efficient and clean. Ticket agents bowed at the door of the car when they finished walking through it. Citizens stopped to help if we looked puzzled or lost. Seats, stairwells, bathrooms; all maintained with reminders to consider the next person. Even the McDonald's was excellent, a sentence I did not expect to write anytime ever. There was no shoving in lines, no rushing for the elevator. People offered to help you take pictures.

The cities at night were bright and crowded, but safe. Every light of every sign worked. In the Kyoto’s Nishiki Market, long-running family businesses still worked the same stall they’d worked for generations. We ate Kobe beef and roasted chestnuts and drank bean tea and tried a few other things that wouldn’t normally reach my lips. Every host family, every business proprietor, greeted us as worthy guests.

Every store from Montbell (Japan’s REI) to Kith (clothes my son likes but too rich for me) and to the Pokemon Center (should require earplugs) answered questions with politeness and in careful second language English. And at the register, over and over, a bag was offered for an extra few yen, which is both good service and a quiet tax to reduce the use of plastic.

Nobody was performing. They were carrying the job with pride.

I asked our phenomenal guide in Kyoto about cultural differences. Born and raised in Kyoto, he also spent time in California, so he has both models to call upon. I asked him how Japan holds together after three decades of recession. His answer was not surprising. In Japan your station is a reflection of you and your country. Whether the garbage collector, the taxi driver, the utility worker, the police officer, all professionals I interacted with on this trip, they all modeled this mentality of service and pride. You do things well until the next opportunity comes.

I think it was this way at one time in America, or at least that’s my naïve feeling. But where did it go? Maybe that’s a question we don’t want to ask. Who is happy with their work? Who feels part of the company? Who thinks of the whole?

Here’s what I believe the difference to be.

It is far easier to ask a person to do their part when the arrangements above them are visibly holding up their end. Japan provides near-universal health insurance for its residents, while Americans must budget, get the right job, or gamble the risk to go without. Japan executive level pay is far lower than ours, which the Economic Policy Institute puts American CEOs at 281 times the typical worker.

You cannot preach shared sacrifice under these conditions. You cannot have shared values when it is only haves and have-nots.

Our guide did point out that a culture with shared values can also have a failure mode. When everyone rows together and nobody is willing to be the one who says stop, the whole boat goes over. Japan has been there, where conformity without dissent was disastrous.

What are America’s shared values? That was my thought as I left our daughter safely in Tokyo and headed to the mountains.

I was on the Shinkansen, one of Japan’s fast bullet trains, when I read about the factory in Eastlake, Ohio running its last shift. For 61 years this workplace made tubas, French horns and sousaphones, instruments that ended up in the Cleveland Orchestra and the Ohio State marching band.

A hundred and fifty people lost their jobs. Some of the work moved to a non-union plant in Indiana. The rest went to a new facility in Jiangsu Province in China. Peter Jamison spent that day inside, and the piece is a testament for how American values have been sacrificed.

Here’s a feature problem.

The plant's parent company belongs to the investment firm of John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who cleared four billion dollars by betting against American homeowners before the 2008 collapse. In September 2024, campaigning for tariffs on television as a Trump adviser, Paulson said we cannot have American producers closing American factories and offshoring. Twenty-two months later…his own company finished doing precisely that, to the only unionized plant it had left in this country.

Workers at the closing party wore stickers about him that I cannot print here but you can guess.

Read the workers' own account of what was lost, because it is not what you expect. They did not describe everything in glowing terms. The pace could be brutal, management pushed quantity over quality, and some of the machinery was dangerous.

But what they had was pride in their work and each other.

Men who stopped to look at a finished French horn. A union president who had started in shipping bays and hospital kitchens before he found the one place he wanted to retire from. A 64-year-old buffer whose parting gift was a lamp made from a trumpet, engraved with the number of years he gave to the company.

Back in Japan, your station reflects who you are. Whether you are the big boss or a maintenance worker, you are part of making Japan what it is. Each doing their part for the good of the whole.

Japan did not show me a perfect society. It has its own progress to make on difficult problems. But it did remind me what it looks like when the expectation of mutual obligation is a part of ordinary life. Kids raised healthy, in good schools, with good public services, and free to roam in safety.

Then they become good citizens.

It’s the same thing I thought when I read of these people in Ohio. They were modeling what a healthy culture is supposed to look like. They were trying to protect what is left of American shared values.

Nobody above them was holding up their end.

You do not get to shutter a plant in a town of nine thousand and rebuild it overseas while the pay package upstairs runs to eight figures.

You do not get to drop a data center behind somebody's house without showing on paper what it does for the people who will live next to the hum.

That is what a country does when it has shared values.

At this stage, every order from Amazon or Walmart or Temu, or public funds to Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Ellison, Walton, or Koch, is a vote for the empty mall, partial employment, and the missing good job.

I am not writing from a moral perch. I am writing because I saw a culture in Japan 35 years ago that remains committed to the whole, enough to work through a long recession, while we are facing a catastrophe.

We have too easily given up our values. The caliber of current leadership plays us against each other using social differences, instead of getting to the nuts and bolts of maintaining a healthy culture. Trains that look good, run on time, and run fast (35 years later and we still have no modern national alternative to cars). People covered by healthcare without going broke. Public services, public space, museums, and parks treated as investments rather than an afterthought or something to be DOGE’d.

Every spiritual belief system mentions the caring of the stranger and the poor. Communities scattered across the Japanese mountains worked out that the way to survive was to build a network of their own. To depend upon each other and share the riches of visiting hikers and tourists.

I’m telling you, it was beautiful.

We are going to have to learn, or re-learn, a vision of shared prosperity.

I’m not a fan of charter schools. I see them as tribalism killing a shared culture. However, I will accept models that are proven to work. Priscilla Chan opened The Primary School in East Palo Alto in 2016 with a genuinely good idea. Put schooling, pediatric care and family support under one roof, free, for families who could not buy any of it separately. Nearly $100 million of Chan Zuckerberg money went in. More than 400 kids, most of them Latino, 58 percent on individualized education plans.

This June it closed. No explanation was ever given. Over 100 people lost their jobs at the San Leandro campus alone.

The concept appeared sound, but what did we learn?

Sturgis Hospital in rural St. Joseph County, Michigan, closed on June 19 after more than a century. Staff got about a three-day notice. No hedge fund looted this one. Sturgis was independent and locally run, and it had already become Michigan's first federally designated rural emergency hospital, a status invented to keep places like it alive.

It closed anyway. Union members lost health coverage the day the doors shut. What used to be a two-mile ambulance run is now going to be closer to 25. More dissemination of the true costs from not having a shared universal health system.

Nobody decided to kill Sturgis, but cuts in federal reimbursements was the last nail.

Is this what great again looks like?

Lisa Gelobter is one of those pioneers you don’t normally here about. She made bank in the private sector but decided to go into the public. Twice. First under Obama, untangling the federal student loan machinery that had failed a generation of borrowers. Now she is becoming New York City's chief technology officer, running a crew of in-house engineers pointed at the types of fixes we are always wanting: making it so a working mother can renew a benefit on her phone instead of burning a work day in a waiting room. Making sure things are explained and efficient with simple language and few clicks.

DOGE treated government as something to smash with applause and contempt. Gelobter treats it as a hallmark of human decency.

If you work inside government, at any level, we want 200 words on what the job actually feels like this day or this week. The win nobody saw. The absurdity you can't say out loud at the meeting. The reason you almost quit and the reason you didn't. Sign your name or don't. We will protect you either way. Reply to this email.

A county eligibility caseworker. Name withheld.

Tuesday I approved benefits for a man who had been denied three times by a form that asks for a permanent address he does not have. The system was not built for him. It was built for the audit. I found a workaround that is technically a footnote in a manual nobody reads, and I used it, and a family eats this month.

Nobody will ever know. There is no metric for it. My dashboard still shows me as behind.

People think we are the wall. Most of us spend our days quietly digging tunnels under it. We are tired in a way that sleep does not fix, but we come back Monday anyway.

Ever wonder why a permit may take months, what a comptroller actually does all day, or why the DMV website looks like it was built during an administration you don’t remember? Ask. We will reply with an answer in a future issue.

Q: Why does everything in government take so long?

Public servants feel your pain on this one. Most likely, at some point in the past, something went wrong, and the fix became a rule. For everyone. Then something else went wrong, and that fix was another rule. For everyone.

You can partially blame a system that works to ensure changes in administration are not disruptive, but you can also measure inertia by the creeping level of liability that has inched its way into every facet of public life.

Nobody ever removes the old rules, so they just stack the new ones on top. What you experience as slowness is really thirty years of public servant scar tissue.

Here is the part that will make you angrier and then, oddly, more hopeful. Most of those steps are not the law. They are habits that hardened into policy. A rule born of fear can be un-born by courage. That is exactly what the good ones are doing right now, quietly, one form at a time, in ways you never see. The line at the counter is not proof that government cannot move fast. It is proof that nobody with the authority has yet decided it is worth the fight.

Some are deciding.

Before you go

Keep reading widely. Keep noticing who is holding up their end. Keep spending your money and your attention where they are still building things that matter.

Always strive to be a good human.