When Respect Becomes Law: What Han Feizi (韓非子) Saw Coming 2,300 Years Ago

When Respect Becomes Law: What Han Feizi (韓非子) Saw Coming 2,300 Years Ago

A reflection on the limits of unspoken rules — and why the coldest philosopher in the East may be the one every globalizing society now needs

There is a Japanese phrase I grew up believing was a kind of strength: iwanakutemo wakaru — “you understand without being told.”

For most of my life, it was true. You did not need a sign in the park telling you to keep your voice down at night. You did not need a law telling you to lower your head slightly when an elder entered the room. You did not need a statute instructing you to treat a flag with care. These things lived in the air. We breathed them in as children and exhaled them as adults, and the whole arrangement held together without anyone writing it down.

This is a Japanese story, and I will tell it as one. But if you live in a society where the shared assumptions have thinned — where things that once went without saying now have to be spelled out, litigated, legislated — I suspect you will recognize the shape of it long before the end. The particulars are Japanese. The predicament is not.

I still believe in that world of the unspoken. I bow at shrines when no one is watching. I feel something when I see a flag — not only my country’s — treated carelessly, a small internal flinch I cannot fully explain. Respect, for me, is not a rule. It is closer to a reflex, or a form of attention.

Which is exactly why, a few days ago, I felt uneasy.

On June 30, 2026, Japan’s House of Representatives passed a bill creating a new crime: the desecration of the national flag. The penalty is up to two years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to 200,000 yen for anyone who publicly damages, removes, or defiles the flag “in a manner that causes significant discomfort or disgust.” The bill passed the upper house on July 17 — the same day this essay was published — and is now law.

The timing felt almost too precise. The question this essay asks — whether law can hold what virtue has lost — is no longer hypothetical.

And my unease was not political. It was philosophical. I found myself thinking: this is not something a law should hold. That the law now exists does not change the thought. If anything, it sharpens it.

Where the bill came from — a quarrel with no shared floor

To understand why this is happening, you need the small story underneath the large one.

In the summer of 2025, at campaign rallies for a rising nationalist party, protesters began holding up the Japanese flag marked with a large X. Images spread across social media and drew a great deal of attention. To the protesters, this was speech — a constitutionally protected act of objection, and lawyers confirmed that marking a flag you own is not, in itself, a crime. To those who revere the flag, it was desecration, a defilement of something close to sacred. The party’s leadership pointed to these images and said, in effect: this is why we need a law.

Notice what actually collided here. Not two laws. Two feelings — each sincere, each certain, and with no shared floor beneath them to resolve the difference. One side felt they were exercising a freedom. The other felt they were watching something holy be profaned. In an earlier Japan, a quarrel like this might have been absorbed by the atmosphere, settled by the pressure of shared assumption before it ever reached the Diet. But the atmosphere no longer held. And when the air can no longer settle a dispute, people reach for the written word.

There is an irony I cannot resist pointing out, because it is the whole essay in miniature. The specific act that started all this — holding up an X-marked flag — was quietly dropped from the bill during negotiations, deferred to a review three years after enactment. The law, in the end, could not even touch the thing that provoked it. It reached for the fire and closed its hand on smoke.

Han Feizi (韓非子) could have predicted that too.

The moment respect leaves the body and enters the statute book

I was not alone in my unease. Iwaya Takeshi, a former foreign minister and a member of the very party that drove the bill, walked out of the chamber and abstained. His reason, given to reporters, was almost exactly the sentence that had formed in my own chest: that reverence for the flag should grow naturally, and is not something to be forced by criminal punishment.

Here is what fascinates me, and what I want to sit inside for this essay. The bill itself seems to know it cannot do the thing it wants to do. Its stated protected interest is “the feelings of citizens who cherish the flag.” Yet the drafters were careful to say the law will not inquire into the offender’s inner intent — whether they meant to insult or not — and will judge only the outward act.

Read that again slowly, because it is one of the most quietly revealing sentences in recent Japanese lawmaking. The law wants to protect a feeling. But it promises to look only at behavior. It reaches for the heart and then, at the last moment, admits it can only touch the hands.

The law reaches for the heart, then admits it can only touch the hands.

This is not a flaw the drafters overlooked. It is the oldest problem in political philosophy, and 2,300 years ago a Chinese thinker named Han Feizi (韓非子) built his entire worldview on it.

The philosopher we in the East prefer not to quote

Those of us who love East Asian thought have our favorites, and Han Feizi (韓非子) is usually not among them.

We quote Laozi (老子): the sage governs by doing nothing, and nothing is left undone. We quote the Zen masters, with their moon reflected in water and their fingers pointing away from themselves. We build our aesthetics on wu wei, on effortlessness, on the faith that if you cultivate a person’s inner nature, right action flows out of it like water finding its level.

Han Feizi (韓非子) is the cold water thrown on all of it.

He was a prince of the state of Han, a stutterer who wrote rather than spoke, and a student — this matters — of the Confucian Xunzi (荀子), the philosopher who argued that human nature is not good but bent, and must be straightened by effort. Han Feizi (韓非子) took his teacher’s pessimism and removed the comfort. Where Confucius said govern by virtue and the people will follow like grass bending in wind, Han Feizi (韓非子) said: no. People do not move reliably by virtue. They move by reward and punishment. Build your state on that, or watch it dissolve.

To a reader raised on Zen, this sounds monstrous — a philosophy for tyrants, and indeed it armed the ruler who became China’s first emperor. For most of my life I filed Han Feizi (韓非子) under “the villain,” the necessary dark that made the light of Laozi visible.

I have stopped reading him that way. And the flag bill is why.

What Han Feizi (韓非子) actually understood

Han Feizi’s central insight was not that people are evil. It was more precise, and more uncomfortable: that a system cannot run on the assumption that everyone shares the same inner feeling.

A village can. A family can. A dojo where everyone has trained together for ten years can. In those places, iwanakutemo wakaru works, because the “you” who understands without being told and the “I” who does not need to tell you have grown from the same soil. We share reflexes. The unspoken rule is real because it lives in both of us.

But Han Feizi (韓非子) was not writing for a village. He was writing for a state — a thing made of strangers, of people from different regions, different loyalties, different gods, who would never share a single reflex. For such a body, he argued, virtue is not a foundation. It is a hope. And you cannot run a country on the hope that the person beside you happens to feel what you feel.

Virtue is not a foundation. It is a hope. And you cannot run a country on the hope that the person beside you happens to feel what you feel.

So he proposed something that still sounds harsh: make the rule explicit. Write it down. Apply it to everyone the same way, minister and commoner alike. Do not ask what is in a person’s heart, because you cannot see it and cannot govern it. Ask only what they did.

Now return to the flag bill, which promises to judge only the outward act and not the inner intent. Whoever drafted that clause was, whether they knew it or not, thinking exactly like Han Feizi (韓非子). They wanted to protect a feeling, discovered they could not legislate a feeling, and retreated to the only ground law can actually stand on — behavior. Han Feizi (韓非子) could have told them that in 250 BCE. In a sense, he did.

This is not only a Japanese dilemma

If the problem were purely Japanese, it would be a curiosity. It is not.

A flag, a law, and the raw feelings around them are not a Japanese invention. Other countries have had their own versions of this exact quarrel — the United States among them, where the question of whether a flag may be defaced in protest reached the highest court in the land. I will not walk through the ruling or its reasoning here; the details differ, the political weather differs, and dragging them in would only turn this into a comparison of legal systems, which is not what I am after. What matters is simpler. The collision itself — a shared reverence on one side, a claimed freedom on the other, and no common ground left to settle it — is not ours alone. It shows up wherever the old assumptions have thinned.

So this is not a story about something peculiar to the Japanese. It is a story about what happens to any society when a feeling that used to be shared stops being universal — and someone reaches for the law to hold it in place. The West is not the teacher here and Japan the student, or the reverse. We are speaking two dialects of one predicament.

Why the law is leaking in now

So why is this happening in Japan specifically, now? Why, in a country famous for unspoken harmony, is respect suddenly being written into the criminal code?

My answer — and I offer it as personal observation, not sociological fact — is that the air is thinning.

Iwanakutemo wakaru was never magic. It was infrastructure. It ran on a shared upbringing, a relatively homogeneous society, and a sense of haji — of shame, of the eyes of others — that regulated behavior more powerfully than any police officer. That infrastructure is now under strain. Values have diversified. The society is opening to the world, and the old shared assumptions are thinning faster than new ones can form to replace them. The neighbor who “just knows” is increasingly standing beside a neighbor who genuinely does not — not out of malice, but because they were never breathed into the same air.

When the unspoken stops being shared, it stops being a rule and becomes a mere assumption. And into that gap, law seeps like water into a crack. The flag bill is one drop of that seepage. So, in a gentler register, are the “best-effort obligations” scattered through Japanese law — the bicycle helmet you are urged but not required to wear — those strange half-rules that assume you will do the right thing without being made to.

Japan is discovering, law by law, what Han Feizi (韓非子) knew: that when a society can no longer assume shared feeling, it must start writing things down.

“But Japan already had an insult law” — a necessary objection

Here a reader who knows Japan well will raise a hand, and rightly. Japan has had a crime of insult since 1907, they will say. Article 231 of the Penal Code. Respect has been written into your law for over a century. Why call this new?

It is a fair challenge, and answering it precisely is the fastest way to see what is actually happening. Because the insult law and the flag bill look like cousins and are, on closer inspection, strangers.

Consider what the old insult law protects: the honor of a specific person. There is a victim — someone named, someone injured — and, historically, they had to bring the complaint themselves. Its origin is telling. It was enacted in the Meiji era, just as the samurai class dissolved, and it reads almost as the state stepping into a role the sword had vacated: where a warrior might once have answered an insult to his honor privately, the modern state now said, let us handle it. The insult law is virtue’s replacement in the narrow domain of one person’s honor against another’s.

The flag bill protects something with no victim at all: “the feelings of citizens who cherish the flag.” Not a person — a mood. A diffuse, shared reverence that belongs to everyone and therefore to no one in particular. Nobody is named. Nobody files a complaint. The injury is to the atmosphere itself.

So the skeptic is right that respect has long been in our law, and wrong that this makes the flag bill unremarkable. One guards a concrete right; the other guards a feeling in the air. They come from different centuries and different instincts.

And yet — here is the turn I did not expect when I started writing — underneath, they are the same event.

Look at when the old insult law was last strengthened. In 2022, Japan sharply raised its penalties, adding imprisonment where before there had been only token fines. Why? Because of online abuse. Because in the anonymous spaces of the internet, haji — the shame that once regulated us through the eyes of others — stops working. When no one can see your face, the air that used to restrain you evaporates, and the old sense of “you understand without being told” restrains nothing at all. So the state reached, again, for the written rule.

Strengthening the insult law and inventing the flag crime are two vents of a single eruption: the shame that governed us is losing its grip, and law is rushing into the space it leaves.

That is the deeper unity. The insult law being sharpened and the flag law being born are not two separate stories. They are two places where the same underground pressure — the thinning of shared feeling — has broken the surface. One over a private injury, one over a public one. Han Feizi (韓非子) is not disproven by the 1907 law. He is confirmed twice.

The reframing I want to offer

Here is where I want to turn the cold philosopher into something other than a villain — and I want to be honest that this is my reading, not Han Feizi’s intent. He wrote to help a ruler control his subjects. I am borrowing his tool for a different purpose, and he would probably not approve.

We in Japan tend to dislike explicit rules. We find them yabo — crude, graceless, a little cold. To need a written rule between two people can feel like an admission of failure, as if the relationship were too thin to trust. This is why the flag bill unsettled me, and unsettled Iwaya: writing respect into law feels like a defeat of respect.

But consider the other side.

The unspoken rule is only warm if you are already inside it. To the person who did not grow up breathing the same air — the newcomer, the foreigner, the young person raised in a different world — the unspoken rule is not warmth. It is a trap. It is a standard they are being held to without ever being told it exists, judged by an atmosphere they cannot read. “You should have known” is a cruel sentence to say to someone who had no way to know.

Seen this way, writing the rule down is not coldness. It is a kind of hospitality. To make a rule explicit, transparent, and equal is to release people from the tyranny of reading the air — to let the stranger stand on the same ground as the native, knowing the same things, owed the same clarity. The explicit rule does not bind people together against their will. It frees them from a game whose rules were never shared.

Making a rule explicit is not distrust of the other person. It is how strangers become equals.

This is the ethic I think Han Feizi (韓非子) accidentally offers a globalizing world: not a cold instrument for doubting people, but a transparent, fair tool for those who do not yet share the same air to live together anyway.

How a culture of the unspoken shaped us — and what it costs now

I said I would ask, in each of these essays, how a cultural inheritance shapes the way we think and act. So let me be direct about this one.

Centuries of governance-by-virtue, of iwanakutemo wakaru, gave the Japanese a genuine and rare gift: the capacity to sense — to read a room, to anticipate a need before it is spoken, to hold a harmony so fine it needs no enforcement. This is real. Anyone who has been cared for by that sensitivity knows it is not a myth.

But the same inheritance planted something else in us: the feeling that needing a rule is a kind of loss. We were shaped to experience the explicit, the written, the contractual as slightly shameful — mizu kusai, we say, “smelling of water,” meaning a coldness where there should be warmth. We do not dislike law because we are lawless. We dislike it because we were formed to feel that a relationship requiring law has already failed.

That formation served a village beautifully. It serves a globalizing society poorly. And the discomfort I felt reading about the flag bill — the discomfort Iwaya felt walking out of the chamber — is, I now think, the sound of that old formation grinding against a new world. If you come from a culture that writes everything down by instinct, you may find this hard to feel from the inside. But you have your own version of it: the moment a handshake stops being enough and someone asks for it in writing, and something in the room goes cold. That cold is what we feel at the scale of a whole society.

What I am not saying

I am not saying Japan should legislate every unspoken rule. The opposite. A society that must write down “respect the flag” has already lost the thing the law is trying to protect, and no punishment will grow it back. Han Feizi’s tool controls the hand, never the heart, and we should be honest that a flag protected by fear of imprisonment is not a flag that is loved.

Nor am I saying the warm world of the unspoken should be discarded. The sensitivity it gave us is one of the most beautiful things about this culture, and I would not trade it away.

What I am saying is smaller, and I hope more useful. There is governance by virtue, the lubricant of human relationships — invisible, warm, and irreplaceable between people who share the same air. And there is the explicit rule, the architecture strangers need to stand beside one another as equals. A mature society does not choose one and reject the other. It learns which is which, and when to reach for each — and it stops mistaking the second for a betrayal of the first.

And yet — a confession I cannot resolve

I have argued that writing rules down is a hospitality, and I believe it. But I would be dishonest if I ended there, because there is a second feeling in me that will not lie down next to the first.

Japan may be one of the last places on earth where a vast web of rules with no punishment attached still, mostly, works — where millions of people do the right thing not because they will be caught, but because it does not occur to them to do otherwise. That is not nothing. It is, I think, something close to a miracle, and it is disappearing everywhere, including here. If you have spent time in Japan, you have felt it: the quiet of a city that runs on trust you did not have to negotiate. That quiet is the thing I am afraid of losing.

And so I find myself unable to fully celebrate the tool I have just defended. Yes — the explicit rule welcomes the stranger. Yes — it frees people from an atmosphere they cannot read. But I wonder whether the day iwanakutemo wakaru stops working entirely is also the day Japan stops being Japan. Not a political Japan. A Japan of a certain quality of attention between people, a quality that cannot be legislated into existence and cannot survive being replaced by law.

Every society that has industrialized, diversified, and connected itself to everyone else has felt some version of this loss — the handshake replaced by the contract, the nod replaced by the terms of service, the neighbor replaced by the notice on the door. Japan is simply meeting it later, and therefore more visibly, than most. Which may make it a useful place to watch the thing happen. What we lose when we finally write it down is not always small, and it is worth knowing the name of what we are trading away.

I do not know how to hold both of these truths at once. The hospitable rule and the vanishing air. I suspect I am not supposed to resolve it — that the honest position is to keep both in my hands and feel their weight.

So I will leave you the way the question leaves me. The next time you feel that flinch of yabo at a written rule — that instinct that says this should not need saying — I would ask you to hold it a moment longer than usual. Wonder whether the rule is there to bind you, or to let someone who was never told finally come in from the cold. And then wonder, as I do, what quiet thing we lose on the day we finally need it written down.

Something may shift in the holding. It did in me. It has not yet stopped.

Takeshi Kitagawa writes on Japanese thought, aesthetics, and their uses in contemporary life for the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT. Born in Kobe in 1965, he lives in Osaka.