How a 1,400-year-old constitution, born out of civil war and religious violence, still has something to say to a world that has forgotten how to disagree?
A Familiar Kind of Exhaustion
I’m writing this in the summer of 2026, and I don’t think I need to convince anyone that the world feels unusually combustible right now. In the United States, a fragile ceasefire with Iran hasn’t done much to calm a domestic climate where political violence keeps returning to the headlines. In Japan, we have our own versions of the same fever: heated arguments online about immigration and the so-called “great replacement,” bitter fights over gender roles, and a quieter, slower-burning resentment between generations who feel they inherited very different economies.
None of this is unique to any one country. But I’ve noticed something specific in how Westerners often talk about Japan in the middle of all this. There’s a common assumption — usually offered as a compliment — that Japan is peaceful because it’s homogeneous. One people, one language, one culture, therefore less to fight about.
I understand why the idea is appealing. I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think it was ever true. Japan’s reputation for social harmony wasn’t the absence of conflict. It was built, quite literally, on top of one of the most violent identity crises in its early history — and the phrase most associated with that harmony was written specifically because the alternative had already been tried, and it had failed catastrophically.
I want to tell you about that war, because I think the myth of a naturally peaceful Japan is doing us a disservice. The real story is more useful than the myth.
Before “Wa,” There Was a Civil War
Here is what most people outside Japan don’t know: in the 5th and 6th centuries, Japan was not a unified nation. It was closer to what we might now call a fragile federation of regional warlords — powerful clans called gōzoku, each with its own army, its own land, and its own ambitions. The emperor did not hold absolute power. He was more of a symbolic center that these clans competed to control. Alliances shifted. Assassinations were common. It was, structurally, not so different from the fractured, anxious environments many of us recognize today.
Then, in either 538 or 552 AD — historians still debate the exact year — Buddhist statues and sutras arrived officially in Japan from the kingdom of Baekje, on the Korean peninsula. This wasn’t a peaceful cultural exchange that everyone simply absorbed. It detonated an existing rivalry.
Two powerful clans found themselves on opposite sides of the new religion. The Soga clan, closely tied by marriage to the imperial line, embraced Buddhism and the continental technology and learning that came with it. The Mononobe clan, allied with the Nakatomi, held that worshipping foreign gods would offend Japan’s native kami and invite disaster. Both sides framed the dispute in religious terms. Neither side was really fighting about religion alone. This was a fight over who would define Japan’s future — the isolationists or the internationalists — dressed in theological language.
In 587, it stopped being a debate and became a war: the Battle of Shigisan, also recorded as Teibi no Ran. The Soga and Mononobe armies met near Mount Shigi, close to what is now Osaka. According to the Nihon Shoki, the Mononobe forces initially held the advantage. The Soga were driven back, demoralized, close to collapse.
There is a detail from that battle I find hard to shake. Among the Soga ranks was a boy not yet fourteen years old — the future Prince Shotoku. As his side neared defeat, he is said to have carved a small image of the Four Heavenly Kings, the Buddhist guardian deities, from the wood of a sacred nurude tree, and prayed with everything he had: if we win, I will build you a great temple. Whether you read that as legend, propaganda, or something that actually happened in some form, the underlying reality is not in dispute — the Soga rallied, the tide turned, and the Mononobe clan was destroyed as a political force. Its survivors changed their names to erase the association.
I want to be clear about what this war actually was, because it’s tempting to soften it into a tidy story about “Japan choosing Buddhism.” It wasn’t a debate settled by argument. It was total war between clans, and the losing side didn’t just lose an argument — it lost its land, its name, and in many cases its life. That is the actual, unromantic origin point of what would later be called Japanese harmony. Not agreement. Annihilation of one side by the other.
Shotoku kept his vow. In 593, once the dust had settled and he had become regent under his aunt, Empress Suiko, he began building the temple he’d promised — what is now Shitennoji, in Osaka, one of the oldest Buddhist temples in the country and a place I have walked past more times than I can count.
Writing the Cure After Living the Disease
Eleven years later, in 604, Shotoku issued Japan’s first constitution — seventeen articles of moral and political guidance. Its opening line is the one line from ancient Japan that most Westerners have actually encountered, usually stripped of everything around it:
以和為貴、忤ふること無きを宗とせよ。
“Harmony is to be valued, and the avoidance of wanton opposition is to be honored.”
Read in isolation, it sounds like an instruction to keep quiet. Read against the backdrop of a civil war that had just torn the court apart within living memory — a war this same young man had personally survived, arrow-close, at thirteen — it reads very differently. This isn’t a philosopher’s abstraction. It’s the constitution of someone who had watched what happens when a society runs out of ways to disagree without destroying each other, and was trying, urgently, to write the antidote.
And the article doesn’t stop at that first line. It continues:
上和らぎ下睦びて、事を論うに諧うときは、すなわち事理おのずから通ず。
“When those above are harmonious and those below are friendly, and there is concord in the discussion of matters, right understanding will spontaneously arise.”
This is the part that gets left out of the postcard version. Shotoku isn’t asking people to agree before the conversation starts. He is describing a process — one where people of different rank and different views actually talk, at length, until something true is allowed to surface on its own. The harmony he’s prescribing isn’t the harmony of silence. It’s the harmony that is only reachable by going through disagreement, not around it. He had just watched the alternative. The alternative was Shigisan.
What This Actually Looks Like, Day to Day
I don’t want to leave this at the level of ancient history, because the instinct Shotoku was trying to install thirteen centuries ago is something you can still watch operate in ordinary Japanese life, in miniature, almost every day.
A common sequence: a misunderstanding happens. Someone acted on a wrong assumption, and something went wrong as a result. The person who caused the problem says, roughly: “気が付かず申し訳ないです。そういう意味だったんですね。” — “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. So that’s what you meant.”
And the person who was, technically, correct in the dispute responds: “いえいえ、こちらももう少しちゃんとお伝えするべきでした。” — “Not at all — I should have explained myself more clearly.”
Neither statement is really about logic. Nobody is declared right. The tension dissolves because both people took a small step toward each other at the same time. Western observers sometimes mistake this for evasion — nobody “won,” so it looks like nobody took responsibility. I’d argue the opposite is true. This is what it looks like when the goal has quietly shifted from being right to staying in relationship, which is a much harder thing to do and a much rarer skill.
The Same Failure, Wearing Different Clothes
I don’t think Japan has some permanent monopoly on this. Far from it. Wa, pushed to its unhealthy extreme, becomes kuuki wo yomu — “reading the air” — a pressure to suppress disagreement so completely that meetings become performances where everyone nods and nobody says the thing that actually needs saying. I’ve watched that erode workplaces and, in the worst cases, people.
And I’d argue that both Japan and the West are currently making a related mistake, just from opposite directions. Japan’s failure mode is often wa without the process Shotoku actually described — surface smoothness standing in for the hard work of genuine discussion. The failure mode I see more often in the U.S. and elsewhere right now is closer to the opposite: an environment engineered — by algorithms, by news cycles, by the sheer speed of everything — to reward the fastest, loudest declaration of who’s right, with the “staying in the room” part treated as a weakness or a waste of time nobody can afford anymore.
Different symptoms. Same underlying collapse: the abandonment of the slow, unglamorous process of working through disagreement, in favor of either silence or noise — two ways of avoiding the same uncomfortable conversation.
What I Take From a War I Didn’t Live Through
I keep returning to the image of a not-yet-fourteen-year-old on a losing battlefield, carving a small figure out of wood because there was nothing else left to do. I don’t offer that as a lesson in optimism. I offer it because it’s the honest origin of an idea that gets sold, especially to Western business audiences, as some kind of timeless cultural serenity. It wasn’t serene. It was earned the hard way, by people who had personally watched what the absence of it costs.
I can’t promise you that adopting anything from this — the patience, the willingness to be the first to soften, the discipline of staying in the room — will resolve the specific arguments consuming your own country, your own family, your own comment sections right now. I genuinely don’t know if it will. What I notice, from where I sit, is that the times I’ve seen this kind of harmony actually fail, the failure was rarely in the idea itself. It was in people leaving the room too early.
A Question I’m Sitting With
There’s a strange postscript to all of this that I’ve been reluctant to write, because it complicates a story I clearly find moving. The language and phrasing used in the Seventeen-Article Constitution shows signs, according to several historians, of vocabulary and expressions drawn from Chinese texts that weren’t compiled until after Shotoku’s death in 622. Which raises an uncomfortable possibility: that some or all of what we call “Shotoku’s constitution” may have been written later, by someone else, and retroactively credited to him — possibly because Japan, generations afterward, needed a founding figure whose authority nobody would question.
I’m not going to resolve that question here. It deserves its own essay, and I intend to write one. But I’ll leave you with the shape of it, because I think it’s thematically honest to end here rather than pretend the story is tidier than it is: if the man who taught Japan to value harmony over conflict may himself be, in part, a story Japan told about itself after the fact — what does that do to the lesson? Does it weaken it? Or does it tell us something true about how every culture, including the ones we admire, eventually has to compose the story it needs, out of the war it actually lived through?
I don’t have the answer yet. I’m still sitting with it, the way I sit with most things worth carrying.
SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.