Japan is one of the safest and wealthiest societies in human history.
People live long lives. Crime is rare. Infrastructure works.
And yet, by almost every international survey, Japan ranks near the bottom in happiness.
This paradox is usually explained away with cultural clichés:
Japanese people are modest, reserved, self-critical.
Or with economic anxieties: stagnation, aging, precarity.
But a recent neuroscience finding suggests something more unsettling — and more precise.
Happiness, it turns out, may not be about what a society provides, but about which parts of the brain it keeps constantly activated.
The Brain Area That Thinks Too Much
Researchers at *RIKEN in Japan recently identified a brain region closely linked to subjective happiness: the precuneus.
(*RIKEN — Japan’s leading national research institute, known globally for neuroscience, physics, and computational science — conducted a study that drew international attention earlier this year.)
The precuneus is not where pleasure happens.
It is where self-evaluation, rumination, and future anxiety occur.
When people replay past failures.
When they imagine worst-case futures.
When they quietly ask themselves, “Am I good enough?”
That is the precuneus at work.
The finding was simple and striking:
People who reported higher happiness showed less activity in this region.
Not more excitement.
Not stronger positive emotion.
Less internal noise.
Happiness correlated not with stimulation, but with mental quiet.
Philosophy Already Knew This
This is not new wisdom — only newly measured.
The Stoics argued that suffering comes not from events, but from judgments.
Buddhism traced suffering to attachment and mental proliferation.
Even Aristotle warned that excessive self-scrutiny corrodes flourishing.
Across traditions, the insight repeats:
The mind ruins happiness faster than reality ever could.
Neuroscience is now catching up, not by refuting philosophy, but by validating it at the level of neural circuits.
The problem is not that modern societies fail to give us pleasure.
The problem is that they train the brain to worry constantly about itself.
Why Safe Societies Can Still Be Miserable
Japan makes this painfully clear.
The country excels at reducing external risk: violence, disorder, material insecurity.
But it quietly amplifies internal risk: comparison, evaluation, self-monitoring.
From school onward, people are trained to:
- Anticipate judgment
- Minimize mistakes
- Stay ahead of invisible benchmarks
The result is a population whose brains are rarely at rest.
The precuneus never sleeps.
And no amount of safety compensates for a mind that cannot stop rehearsing its own inadequacy.
Happiness Is Not Solitary
Another part of the research matters just as much.
Higher happiness was associated not only with quieter self-evaluation, but with stronger coordination between the precuneus and the amygdala — the brain’s emotional center.
In plain terms:
People were happier when emotion flowed through relationships, not inward loops.
Gratitude. Relief. Being helped. Helping others.
These experiences anchor emotion outside the self.
They turn reflection into meaning instead of rumination.
This helps explain why newer global happiness studies increasingly rank countries like Indonesia or Mexico higher than Japan:
not because they are richer, but because social and communal bonds interrupt self-obsession.
The Dangerous Illusion of Optimization
Modern societies obsess over optimization:
- Productivity
- Performance
- Self-improvement
- Metrics of well-being itself
But optimization has a cost.
The more we measure happiness, the more the brain learns to monitor happiness — which paradoxically activates the very circuits that undermine it.
The pursuit of happiness becomes another source of anxiety.
We end up happier on paper, and emptier in practice.
A Different Question
The most important implication of this research is not medical.
It is political, educational, and moral.
If happiness depends on calming the brain’s anxiety machinery, then the real question is not:
How do we make people happier?
But rather:
What kind of society trains its citizens to be less afraid of themselves?
This shifts responsibility away from individuals and toward systems:
- How we educate
- How we evaluate
- How we lead
- How we define success
A society can be rich, safe, and long-lived — and still be mentally hostile.
Happiness as Subtraction
We often think happiness requires adding something:
more money, more freedom, more experiences.
But neuroscience suggests a harsher truth:
Happiness is often what remains after we stop assaulting the mind with fear.
Less comparison.
Less constant judgment.
Less rehearsal of imaginary futures.
Happiness may not be a peak state — but a baseline restored.
And perhaps this also helps explain Japan’s paradox.
A society can remove danger, disorder, and material insecurity — yet still keep the mind in a constant state of self-monitoring.
In such a place, the problem is not the absence of pleasure or success, but the presence of chronic internal fear.
If happiness is, in part, the quieting of that fear, then the real challenge for Japan — and for every advanced society beginning to resemble it — is not to make life richer or safer, but to make the inner life less hostile.
And perhaps the most radical idea is this:
We do not need happier people.
We just need quieter brains. ■
Reference:
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOSG054A00V01C25A2000000/?n_cid=SNSTW005&n_tw=1766197743