Cultural Roots of Quality Manufacturing
There’s a motto well-known on shop floors in Japan: “5S.” The five “s” words denoted by the motto are seiri (make neat), seiton (arrange in order), seisō (keep tidy), seiketsu (clean and polish), and shitsuke (practice discipline and respect). These five principles guide everyday manufacturing throughout the Japanese business day.
But the 5S motto is not about the things denoted by the words themselves. The 5S principles guide the worker toward making good things that will provide value to the user. 5S leads to what is known in Japan as monozukuri, a way of working—and co-existing—with objects that is rooted deeply in Japanese culture. The “mono” in monozukuri can mean either “thing” or “person,” depending on how it is written in Chinese characters. “Monozukuri” is written without specifying which is meant, implying that the person doing monozukuri makes (zukuri) both the thing and himself at the same time.
“In Shintō, everything has a spirit (kami) residing in it. Things have a life (inochi) of their own.”
So says Okumura Shigeki as we sit and talk across a small table on a sweltering day in central Tokyo. We’re scrunched into a rental meeting room, the kind of nondescript, mass-produced room that has come to typify much of the capital city. It is the very opposite of monozukuri, which lavishes attention, love, care, and time on the crafting of things made with lifelong, multigenerational quality.
Okumura himself also embodies the dualistic nature of today’s Japan: late consumer-capitalist on the outside, but on the inside still animated by the monozukuri ways that have shaped generation after generation of life here.
“I work as a technical staff member at a company that manufactures aluminum materials used for beverage cans, automobile panels, construction materials, and other products,” Okumura tells me. “In April 2024, I also began working as a consultant at Reiwa Monozukuri Labo on the side.
“Initially, I began this work in the hope that my own experience could help small- and medium-sized manufacturers. However, I came to realize the need to address something more fundamental—changing the way young people think. So, I launched the ‘Nihon no Monozukuri Channel’ on YouTube in 2025.”
What started out as a fairly typical manufacturing career blossomed into a labor of love for the cultural roots, monozukuri, that feed the various manufacturing industries of Japan.
Getting Deeper than Politics
I ask if there was anything that spurred Okumura to shift gears, from involvement in the manufacturing industry to cultivating the civilizational fibers and human resources that support it.
“It was about 2023 that I started becoming involved in Sanseito,” Okumura replies, referring to the populist political party that has gained a tremendous following among average people in recent years.
“I knew from the data that Sanseito puts out that small- and medium-sized manufacturers were facing great pressures in Japan due to structural changes in the Japanese and global economy. But I also began to feel that politics could do only so much to help that problem. What is needed is young people who know the joy and reward of making good things with their own minds and hands. The only thing that can save Japanese industry is workers, and the only way to continue to make high-quality goods in Japan is through the tradition of monozukuri.
“I left Sanseito,” Okumura says, “and started the Reiwa Monozukuri Labo.”
Disappearing Culture, Disappearing Identity
The nerve of unease and discontent that Sanseito touched during its meteoric rise is real. Many people in Japan sense that the country they grew up in is being transformed into something unrecognizable. The storehouse of Japanese tradition and culture is being emptied out, and many here are feeling that their civilizational bearings are being lost.
One of the features of the postwar period in Japan, for example, has been increasing individuality, a trend that has only accelerated in the Reiwa era. But as the societal emphasis on kosei (individual expression) has waxed, the ability of young people to find greater meaning in their lives beyond the ephemeral fashions of mass-consumerist, mass-media Japan has markedly waned.
A colleague, John LaDue, produced a documentary in 2025, Yamato no sekishi (Children of Yamato), foregrounding the personal costs young Japanese people have borne in a world lacking cultural ballast and the thick human relationships that a traditional culture such as Japan’s has long engendered. Losing cultural treasures like monozukuri can have devastating real-world consequences, especially for the young.
But while unease has driven political challengers, politics has proven unequal to the task of reversing Japan’s cultural disintegration. Many of the societal ills that Sanseito and other political parties highlight in stump speeches come, not from politics, but from a much more profound rupture in Japanese cultural life. Okumura himself left Sanseito when he realized that the problems in Japan were much more serious than he had initially grasped.
Artisans vs. Throwaway Convenience
The limits of politics become clear as Okumura explains to me what monozukuri means to him.
“Monozukuri is providing high-quality goods to the user, but it’s more than that. It’s about how the product looks, the care that goes into making it. It’s also about connecting the maker and the user through the value-providing object. It’s connections among people and things for the betterment of all.”
When I ask about how making things in foreign countries, and monozukuri as a part of Japanese culture, can be so different, Okumura replies that the Shintō understanding of a world alive with deities, and the cycle of gratitude that arises from that understanding, are what set monozukuri apart from manufacturing.
And yet, despite the richness of monozukuri and the culture that buoys it, mass consumption of mass-made items has swamped twentieth-century Japan.
“Cheap, fast, serviceable—these have become the criteria for many of the things we use,” Okumura says with a note of regret. “From the early Meiji period we in Japan have often looked to the West for civilizational standards, and as a result have forgotten that good things are made by human hands and human minds.
“The Japanese shokunin (craftsperson), once a mainstay of material culture here, has faded into obscurity in many ways. The situation has reached a crisis. The men and women who dedicated their lives to making just one or a few kinds of high-quality, high-value goods have no one to learn their craft. Their art and skills will disappear when the aging generation of craftspeople is gone.”
Hearing Okumura say this, I think of the lacquerware artisans in Ishikawa Prefecture whose livelihoods, and lives, were devastated by the New Year’s Day earthquake in 2024. I think also of the potters in Fukushima displaced by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of 2011. I think of the swordsmiths, umbrella makers, salt refiners, carpenters, fishermen, confectioners, and others who have a lifetime of Japan-specific work-wisdom—fifty, sixty, seventy years or more of monozukuri experience—fused deep in their minds, hands, and hearts. I wonder who will take on and carry forward what those men and women have won with decades of focused labor.
Rice Farming as Monozukuri
Most pressing of all may be rice farming, a profession the fruits of which most young people in Japan enjoy, but a job that almost no young person wants to do.
Okumura says that he thinks, in a broad sense, that rice farming is monozukuri.
“Rice farmers use their hands to bring forth good things,” Okumura explains.
If rice farming is monozukuri, then it may also be the most threatened monozukuri of all. An acquaintance in Mie Prefecture, Araya Takashi, runs a rice farm-cum-cultural immersion workshop, Musubi no Sato, aimed at rebuilding rice cultivation as a cultural bedrock in Japan. But as farmers nationwide age, and as the shrinking population becomes ever more concentrated in big cities, the road ahead for rice farming seems hard and steep.
Iron, Silk, and Cultural Rejuvenation
Perhaps it is best to start small. Okumura tells me that he knows of a group of fathers of young children who are teaching them how to make taketombo whirligigs out of bamboo and other such handmade toys enjoyed by countless young people in Japan’s past.
“Kids today know only completed products bought in stores,” Okumura says. “What’s important is to get them using their hands to make something from scratch, anything at all.”
Okumura’s vision spreads far beyond simple playthings, however.
“I want young people to learn, through the origins and history of the things around them, about the hardships endured by earlier generations and the thoughts and aspirations they poured into their work,” Okumura says.
“This April, I organized a lecture on the theme of iron, inviting Mogi Makoto as the speaker. When people think of traditional Japanese ironmaking, tatara smelting is probably the best-known example. However, we also heard from Mogi-sensei a fascinating account of how iron was produced in Japan before the development of the tatara method.”
Monozukuri goes farther back in Japan than even the iron working Mogi-sensei describes.
“I believe it is important for young Japanese people to develop a strong sense of their own identity,” Okumura continues. “For that reason, I select themes that are deeply connected with Japanese mythology. The subject of our next lecture in September, silk, is another particularly meaningful way of connecting people today with the generations of ancestors who shaped our way of life and our understanding of the world.”
For those looking for identity in the workways of Japanese history, there is almost infinite material for inspiration.
“Running one’s own business has long been a given in Japan,” Okumura says. “Take terakoya, for instance, the Edo period schools run at Buddhist temples by local educators. Finding a need in one’s own community and taking the initiative to meet it, thereby improving society as a whole, is a tradition—a living one.”
Winning New Monozukuri Practitioners in an AI Age
Living, but in many cases far from thriving. In surprising areas, Japan’s once-flourishing traditions are near death.
“Tatami are quickly becoming a rarity in Japan,” Okumura explains. “The people who grow the rush reeds used in tatami are facing a very difficult business situation. The industry is nearing extinction.”
One of the most instantly recognizable, and universally appreciated, elements of Japanese culture, the dried reed mats that smell wonderfully clean in the sunlight and feel fresh and cool under the feet and body, are disappearing from the land that has nurtured them.
A Japan without tatami may be the dystopian vision that spurs the revival. Many in Japan see the crisis of monozukuri and are speaking out.
“In 2025 a filmmaker named Sawada Shin’ichi made a film, Tsurugi, about monozukuri,” Okumura continues. “There are explorations of the work and lives of swordsmiths, aozome dye artisans, weavers, tatami makers, and more. What is the shokunindamashii, the soul of the artisan? This is Sawada’s question in the film. The answer is the people he features, the human beings whose crafts are woven tightly into their lives.”
Monozukuri may be a way to help recover the craftmaking soul of Japan, but there are new workways intruding here. I ask Okumura, finally, about AI.
“One’s own judgment gets blocked out if one lets AI do everything,” Okumura replies. “AI is very good for information processing, but the point is to make up one’s own mind, to follow one’s own ideas.
“I use AI. But I don’t rely on it. The human person is the key. What do humans do, how do they build, who do they become through the building? That is what monozukuri asks and answers, regardless of how technology changes.”
