Research Institute for High-Life

Why hospitality is now important: assumptions and challenges

1. Definition of the concept of hospitality
First, we would like to define the concept of hospitality according to our understanding. The original meaning of the word "hospitality" is "hospitable treatment". Therefore, when we try to determine the meaning of hospitality, the question begins from a situation in which "I" welcome and entertain "you". Furthermore, the relationship between "I" and "you" created in this situation and the roles of "I" and "you" that are redefined through this situation become the core questions. In other words, the essence of the question of the meaning of hospitality is to clarify the nature and characteristics human relationships as seen in the situation of "hospitable treatment" as well as to clarify individual roles that can be seen in this relationship in detail.
Human relationships typically established in the social reality in which we live entails elements or characteristics involving private interests or private gain, or "those in control and those being controlled" and "taking advantage of others to achieve one’s own goals". We will call relationships that entail such elements or characteristics "exchange relationships" as the concept of a "market" comes to mind as a typical example of such relationships. That is, we live in a "market" where individuals sell and buy (exchange) goods (products) to seek profits. An "exchange relationship" can be seen as a typical example of the relationships between individuals in the "market". On the other hand, this "exchange relationship" includes element of "power relationships" because it involves the control and use of others. This "power relationship" will finally converge with the relationships between those in control and those being controlled in our "nation". Human relationships in the social reality in which we live are basically composed of "exchange/power relationships" that converge with the "market" and the "nation".
How do human relationships work in a situation of "hospitable treatment"? Establishing genuine "hospitable treatment" has simply been difficult in our society because the conditions for establishing "hospitable treatment" are fundamentally different from those for establishing an "exchange/power relationship", which describes most relationships in our society. The most important precondition for truly establishing "hospitable treatment" is an attitude of "thinking and acting by putting yourself in another’s shoes", or in other words, treating others based on the concept of "generous treatment". That is to say, the essence of "hospitable treatment" is the simple intention to bestow something regardless of economic interests. Thoughts of private interests or private gains are not involved, and if such elements are involved, bestowal will not occur and the concept of "hospitable treatment" will be lost. Of course, the control and use of others are not involved. The basis of "hospitable treatment" is to have an exchange of feelings of happiness, or an "exchange of wishes", obtained through simple bestowals that will be realized when people act by placing themselves in others’ shoes. With this "exchange of wishes", a pure relationship that does not involve any elements of domination or exploitation will be established. Interactive will power and efforts work to establish such relationships. A relationship involving such will power and efforts is a relationship of "cooperativity" that simultaneously includes the meanings of "existing together" (cooperativity) and "working together" (collaboration). We would like to define the realization of such a relationship of cooperativity in a situation of "hospitable treatment" that aims toward an exchange of wishes and is principally different from an "exchange/power relationship" as the essence of hospitality. We would like to roughly translate hospitality, for which we can hardly find an appropriate word in Japanese, as "cooperativity with an exchange of wishes" for now. The relationship between "I" and "you" is not established based on a relationship between two people basing their identities on their egos and thinking only of private gains, nor is it a forced relationship of domination imposed from an authority of a higher rank. A relationship with an "exchange of wishes" means that "I" and "you" establish a relationship while realizing simple harmony and communication from the deepest parts of "I" and "you". This is what it means to share "happiness", or to "please" others. The way such a relationship functions is the way a relationship of "cooperativity" based on "doing something together to create something" functions. The conditions for simultaneously realizing the disappearing concepts of "autonomy" and "coexistence" in a society where "exchange/power relationships" are dominant become apparent in a meaningful way for the first time through such relationships based on "cooperativity with an exchange of wishes" (conditions for structuring social relationship in which self-fulfillment can simultaneously be the fulfillment of others). This is the basic focal point of our hospitality study. Hospitality is nothing but the practice of "cooperativity with an exchange of wishes".

Here, we will clarify the following points: why hospitality is now being focused on, and what we are aiming toward and trying to seek through the concept of hospitality.

2. Goals of hospitality
It is easy to describe the aims and goals of hospitality verbally because the goal of hospitality is to "realize pleasure".
"Pleasure" as used here refers to when people can be truly relaxed while their body and mind are released from various pressures or stresses and they can live and work in such a relaxed condition. "Realizing pleasure" is the only aim of hospitality.
It is not easy to clarify the conditions for realizing pleasure experienced with a totally relaxed mind and body, or the conditions for us to live and work based on such "pleasure", and the reasons why this realization of "pleasure" should be consciously pursued in the first place. The difficulty of the challenge of hospitality actually lies in these points. Here, the challenges of hospitality lead to basic questions regarding our existence and demand changes in our thinking.

3. Nature itself is the internal substance of life"Pleasure" as referred to previously?that is, the core challenge of hospitality that includes the realization of conditions in which the body and mind are completely relaxed?is deeply related to the nature of life, which is the basis of our existence. The word "pleasure" fundamentally refers to a condition with signs of our healthy life.
Our lives are rooted in nature. More specifically, our life is one of the organic elements of nature. Nature in this context refers not only to the external material environment but also to the fact that the basis of nature is rooted in the extremely long history of the Earth, which was born several billion years ago and where the phenomenon of life was created when various factors came together, and that it has promoted the phenomenon of life through the processes toward high development. Therefore, nature in this context refers to the overall global environment, which allows for and supports the phenomenon of life that has been created over the long history of the Earth. Along with the fundamental elements, such as water, air, land, and energy, it includes the entirety of the great ecological linkages from the level of DNA, which promotes reproduction and the development of life while organically connecting these elements together, to the level of metabolism, sustention, and prosperity of individual organisms, types, and classes of life. The entirety of life on Earth, including human beings, has been part of the creation and various developments of history while being supported by such nature. This suggests that nature is the true internal substance of life.

4. Acquiring intelligence and creating sociocultural environments
It is clear that human beings are at the apex of the history of the various developments of life, and in the process of developing life activities, human beings have acquired the ability to think and make decisions, called "intelligence", that cannot be found in any other species through the explosive advanced development of the brain (especially the frontal lobe), most likely due to the impact of the fact that human beings no longer lived in the trees and started walking upright on the ground. The intelligence that human acquired separated from the organic chain of the eco-system known as nature where human beings belonged and could be used consciously. The first step was the invention of tools, followed by the use of language.
With these inventions, human beings have created sociocultural environments as man-made secondary biological environments that are distinguished from the primary biological environment of nature. For the first time, the primary nature became an outside element for human beings.
Human history has achieved rapid developments in the sociocultural environments that we may refer to as the second nature. In several million years, which is extremely short in the context of the entire history of the Earth, and only 100 thousand years since the birth of Homo sapiens, modern humans that are directly linked to us, human beings have established systems that could completely use the entirety of nature that the Earth had created over several billion years as resources for the development of sociocultural environments.
It is clear that the advanced development of "tools (technology)" and "language (communication)" as vehicles for employing intellectual functions in dealing with nature were the bases of these systems. The history of industrial civilization as a system of complete organization and efficiency in using nature was born as part of this development.

5. Realization and awareness of the substance and conditions of life
Before we discuss industrial civilization, we would like to return to the basic foundation for considering the issues of human life.
Human beings have certainly created sociocultural environments that were distinguished from the primary biological environment with their intellectual powers. However, this does not mean that human beings are completely separated as a life form from the primary biological environment, namely the foundation of nature. Even if the brain functions are enhanced and the intellectual level becomes higher, nature is what supports the basis of the existence of humans as a life form.
This is an example based on senses and impressions, but let us think about a situation in which you are in bed because you have caught a cold and have a fever. In this situation, we often experience that the normal surrounding environment appears different. For example, objects may appear blurred and we may overreact to noises and lose sense of our vertical and horizontal orientation. This phenomenon occurs when the framework of the sociocultural environment that we maintain on a routine basis becomes unclear due to the illness. More specifically, the boundary between yourself and the outside environment, which you can clearly distinguish in "normal" conditions, becomes unclear because the level of consciousness that supports our intellectual functions is decreased due to symptoms such as fever or chill.
In other words, the distinction between the primary biological environment and our sociocultural environment that is supported by the functioning of our intellectual consciousness becomes unclear, and we are therefore pulled toward the primary biological environment. That is, we are brought closer to the level of more natural life forms.
This situation is certainly caused by the illness. In other words, we believe, as part of our common sense, that such imbalances should not occur in "normal" conditions. However, is this really true? I emphasize the word "normal" because I have some doubts in our common-sense understanding that the normal condition is one in which the primary biological environment and sociocultural environment are completely separated and that if you cannot completely distinguish them, you are simply affected by illness or are in an abnormal condition.
Even if we are not sick, our five senses react to various signs or stimuli that we usually do not notice in our daily lives. In these moments, we are feeling the rhythms of life in our body that are at the bottom of our consciousness and that we hardly notice. That is, we are feeling the rhythms of life inside us that are created by several elements, such as breathing and inner circulation as well as cutaneous and visceral sensations. It may be appropriate to refer to this as our "inner nature". There is the word "awareness" in English, which means "feeling" or "self-awareness" according to the dictionary, but this is substantially different from "consciousness". The word "aware" originally refers to realization. The derivative word, awareness, literally means "to realize". This "realization" is not the level of superficial awareness that the word "consciousness" represents, but it indicates a deeper level of "realization" of our "inner nature", or a self-awareness resulting from such "realization".
Various elements of our brain functions that were previously unknown to us have become apparent with recent remarkable developments in neuroscience. The wide range of activities and the diversity of the brain, like the universe itself, that go beyond the intellectual mechanisms based on the frontal lobe suggest that our brain is also a part of nature that should be compared with an ecosystem that has organic collectiveness and integration. To be more accurate, it suggests that the brain is an element of the organic collectiveness of our inner nature that our body and mind create. At the same time, it also suggests that functions such as programming, classification, divisibility, and adjustment that provide analogies for the logistic thinking process controlled by the brain are integrated with the nature of life, namely the functions of homeostasis (homeostatic function) of the base sequences of DNA or cell composition and the autonomic nervous system, the immune system, and the endocrine system at the basis of our life activities, as our inner nature and create an organic unity that cannot be understood with dualistic concepts such as "nature as outside environment" vs. "life forms", "materials" vs. "spirit", or "body" vs. "mind", or a unity of our outer and inner natures as an autonomous and holistic inner environment.
To further clarify this point, the way our life works is supported by an "organic unity" that is created by a balance between nature as a primary biological environment and our sociocultural environment as the second nature. That is, this unity is created when these two natures separate from each other while simultaneously interacting with and penetrating each other, and it is therefore supported by overall harmony. It certainly exists in the deeper parts of our consciousness in our daily lives, and we are rarely clearly aware of it. However, self-defense reactions to outside threats, indicated by phenomena such as pain and fever, are definitely the manifestation of life functions for recovering harmony or balance in this inner nature, and this balance is the basic condition of existence of humans as a life form.

6. Forgetting our "natural balance" and "life of inner nature"
The reason why we have discussed these issues, which may seem to be unrelated to hospitality, in such detail is that understanding the substance and conditions of life will provide the necessary assumptions for considering the challenges of hospitality.
We have already mentioned that human beings have created sociocultural environments, known collectively as industrial civilization, through their intellectual abilities. What happened next? Described simply, over the course of development in the history of industrial civilization, human beings forgot about the balance with nature as the primary biological environment that defines the conditions of human existence. This also means that they forgot the rhythms of life as inner nature.
For human beings, being at the apex in the history of development of life forms, it was necessary that only areas of the brain related to the intellect underwent remarkable development. In fact, they created an extremely highly developed man-made second nature that only human beings could create referred to as the sociocultural environment. One of the consequences of this development was the condition of industrial civilization created based on the modern city environment.
However, this resulted in strengthening the extremely unnatural aspects of human beings at the same time. Because the various challenges that human beings normally had to take on while directly dealing with the primary nature were taken on and replaced by technical measures that were created in the man-made sociocultural environment, human beings drastically decreased the number of opportunities in which they could become aware of the way they should live through interactions with the primary nature. That is, in the industrial civilized sociocultural environment, human beings slowly started to forget about opportunities to arouse their inner nature.
Forgetting their inner nature meant a decline in the fundamental functions of life. More specifically, it resulted in a weakening of the awareness created in the organic unity between outer and inner nature. The ability to perceive the various trends of outer nature through the five senses, the ability to feel tiny signs of changes in our life environment through touch or cutaneous sensations, and the ability to quickly sense threats or dangers to life caused by imbalances have diminished to an extreme degree.
The extremely stunning SF animation drama titled the "Ghost in the Shell" series created by Mamoru Oshii, one of Japan’s most well-known anime creators, presents a vision of a future in which human beings have android bodies and freely exchange brain functions, especially knowledge or memory, as information using computer terminals. This means that the nature of human beings is completely absorbed into the artificial side, resulting in the entire bodies of the human beings, except the intellectual part of the brain, being replaced with man-made technology. Oshii’s world may be just a fantastic story, but the allegoric situation depicted in the story is not simply a fairy tale and requires serious consideration.
When we look at the situation around us, the number of people who cannot perform very simple actions or make decisions has been drastically increasing, especially in the younger generation. There are many people around us who have not acquired the very basic manners of the body and mind involving not only natural communication with and compassion, consideration, concern for others and the handling of sensations and life events but also natural expressions of emotion, such as crying to express sadness or shouting for joy during periods of happiness, and having a sense of sympathy and solidarity with others.
These are the results of forgetting to realize that such manners are necessary, or forgetting about awareness. This situation is created as our inner nature, a condition for such realization, continues to be replaced by man-made measures. We can probably describe it as a condition in which one is dozing off in an artificial world where there is no direct connection to nature, like a pupae in a cocoon. This is the image of human beings after pursuing unnatural aspects. I think the world of "Ghost in the Shell" created by Oshii is an allegory for this situation.
Of course, this situation involves an aspect we can call evolution because it is the result of the development of technical measures that decrease our various toils and the pursuit of usefulness and efficiency. On the other hand, we cannot forget that such unnatural aspects, or forgetting our inner nature, creates horrible consequences. Excessive dependency on drugs or the Internet especially in younger generation is currently a problem in the advanced societies of the developed industrial world. It can be said that this was caused when people became unable to feel that they were alive and find evidence of own existence from within their own inner natures because the functions of nature and life were replaced by man-made technical measures. Needless to say, the forgetting of realization and awareness is the basis of this problem. When this situation becomes more serious, it leads to situations in which people view their inner nature or their lives as unnecessary and tend to become aggressive.
Phenomena of self-inflicted damage that have been drastically increasing among the younger generation, including social withdrawal, the desire to "reset", anorexia or bulimia caused by excessive dieting, attention-deficit and panic disorders, depression, the slitting of one’s own wrists, OD (taking excessive amounts of painkillers or tranquilizers at once), are all specific signs of suicidal urges. In such conditions, people attack their own inner natures and their own lives with the will to end up in the critical situation of death. It is a situation where human beings as a life form are "breaking apart", to use a word commonly used among young people. Another aspect of these phenomena may be that they are warnings from our inner natures and our lives.
Female hysteria, which was defined by Freud, was very common in the advanced society of 19th-century England, and it was caused by inner nature when it opposed the excessive oppression of the body in an explosive way due to man-made rules imposed by industrial civilization. Similarly, the above syndromes may constitute a rebellion against the inner natural oppression that has extended to the entire body and mind by the man-made environments of industrial civilization.
Such oppressions of inner nature and the resulting deterioration and weakening of awareness coupled with the urge to attack oneself have been fundamentally threatening the environment for our existence because while the urge to attack one’s own inner nature may merely be an attack on one’s own self, it may easily change to attacks on others.
In reality, there are many cases in the world in which people seek violence or bloodshed. Almost everyday, the mass media reports that there have been inexplicable murder cases that can only be described as indiscriminant and unprovoked. Although it still remains a limited social phenomenon, there are serious lessons to learn and the phenomenon has been spreading and becoming more serious. What we now have to fear the most is the expectation that the environment for human existence will be destroyed from its base if this situation continues. Increases in the number of unemployed young people known as NEET cannot always be attributed to economic reasons. The crucial point is that the environment for our existence has been collapsing like a sand castle. Rats try to escape from a sinking ship as quickly as possible, and just as their escape is a warning of looming danger, the existence of NEET who try to drop out from society can be considered a warning to adults who are not yet sufficiently aware of our critical social situation.

7. Departing from a society of manualized services
This situation is deeply connected to the fact that the entire society has been manualized as a result of the excessive development of industrial civilization. In other words, society has turned into a "manualized-service society". The provision of services based on manuals aims at optimizing convenience and efficiency by replacing inner nature with man-made (i.e., unnatural) technical measures. The oppression and forgetting of all natural aspects are the goals of the manualized-service society. Nature is nothing more than a disincentive for convenience and efficiency.
One of the truly symbolic aspects of this process is the way such manualized services began spreading from hamburger franchises providing convenience based on mass standardized production as their selling point, because it means that spaces related to eating, a basic aspect of human life and a basis of the inner nature of human beings, becomes part of a manualized service. The same can be said for convenience stores open for 24 hours, which does not match the natural rhythms of time of the human body. We should say that the entire world has now become like these hamburger franchises and convenience stores. The method of providing manualized services that oppress awareness and lead to forgetting is now dominant around the world. A serious problem for our entire society is that the inner nature and life, as I have previously mentioned, have already begun rebelling as a result of manualized services being promoted without consideration of the consequences. This is leading to the complete destruction of the sociocultural environment and finally to the destruction of nature and life itself.
This also applies to Japanese society, which has tried to become a rich and highly developed industrial society based on high economic growth after the end of the Second World War in 1945. It cannot be denied that Japan’s pursuit of convenience and efficiency for realizing a society with manualized services has made the entire society rich. However, in current Japanese society, where the number of part-time workers and NEET has reached several millions, over 30,000 people commit suicide each year, and the cries for help from people facing various desperate situations is related to the excessive advancement of manualized services in which only convenience and efficiency is pursued. I think our society has now reached a point where we must move beyond short-term economic interests and losses and seriously deal with these challenges to fundamentally reconsider the way our manualized-service society functions.
That is one of the major reasons why we began dealing with the issue of hospitality. More than anything, hospitality calls for the recovery of the inner nature and life of human beings that have been destroyed and aims toward creating realization and an awakening.
In order to do so, there is a need to fundamentally change the structure of industrial civilization, especially the lifestyles and values of manualized-service society. Hospitality is nothing more than a principle to realize the sustainability of human beings and their sociocultural environments in a life-centered way through changes that we can refer to as "revolutionary".
The crux of the issue is to reconsider the meaning of "pleasure", which is the goal of hospitality, as the release of the inner nature and life of human beings, who have been oppressed and damaged in the structure of industrial civilization, and to clarify how the design principles for our sociocultural environment should be set based on this concept of "pleasure". As mentioned above, the departure from the manualized-service society is an important turning point in this process. This is not to say that manualization is simply bad or that service is without merit. The problem lies in the ideas of convenience and efficiency that are concentrated in manualized services, as well as the underlying unnatural aspects. Although this may be an extremely simple concept in one sense, it is important to realize at this point that the environment of manualized services is "anything but comfortable". This feeling can be a vehicle to realize our own inner nature and life. In other words, it is important to work toward realizing and becoming aware of things that are truly comfortable and pleasurable (things related to life at a basic level). Hospitality can make this possible.
Do you really enjoy eating a hamburger? Can’t you live without a mobile phone? Have you ever felt the soil with your own two feet? Have you ever paid attention to the pulses or rhythms of your inner body? Have you…?

8. Basic challenges of hospitality
Hospitality is a condition and a method that enables the realization and awareness of such pleasure by changing the nature of the design principles, specific manners, structures, and performance of our overall life environment. That is, hospitality is a principle based on this pleasure that aims to completely restructure aspects such as food, clothing, shelter, career, and interpersonal relationships. At the same time, it also means to release and visualize uncharted areas or forms of power and energy that are hidden in our inner nature and life. The development of the organic and self-sustaining unity and collectiveness of a life environment that goes beyond the confrontation between nature and man-made nature, as well as clarifying methods that can utilize these elements to create new civilizations for human beings, are the basic challenges of hospitality. Our study begins with verifying the meaning of these challenges of hospitality.
Recognition and awareness of the basic challenges of hospitality have begun in various ways even in Japanese society. Attempts to look at the meaning of "agriculture" as a point for creating ecology-oriented organic environments have been made in various regions in Japan by viewing agriculture not simply as the production of crops but connecting it with challenges such as the interaction of the natural environment with the human environment (for example, reviewing "mountainous areas" or promoting a recycling-oriented waste disposal act), the nature of our lifestyles based on food (for example, proposing "local production for local consumption" or "farm-fresh" products), and methods to lay out goals and values for life that provide the foundation for these issues (so called "slow life" or "eco life").
Such attempts have meaning for revitalizing sustainability-oriented lifestyles that were cast aside by industrial civilization, and they also include the will to effectively use new technologies and industry rather than blindly excluding them in order to realize such sustainability. "Ima, Yamagata kara... (Now, from Yamagata…)", a monthly information magazine issued by Yamagata prefecture, contains very interesting features every month, and the October 2006 issue included features on several strongholds of "green tourism" in that region. For example, in the town of Kaneyama in the Sugisawa area near the prefecture’s border with Akita, Mr. Kazunori Kuriyama looked at the challenges of symbiosis with nature through "agriculture" before anybody else and established the "Kurashi Kobo" with Mr. Takashi Uchiyama, a unique philosopher and professor of Rikkyo University who walked around villages in Japan by himself, creating it as a facility for extended-stay green tourism where people from urban areas can experience the richness of village life.
In the Murayama area, where the town of Takahata is located with its long history of life and culture from the Jomon era, Mr. Kiichi Yamakawa established the "Zao Mountain Farm" and has been conducting green tourism including educational activities such as "life education" and "dietary education" for over 20 years.
These practices have been conducted throughout Japan. We should not understand these with simplistic terms like "iyashi (healing)", which is currently a popular word. We need to lead these efforts toward a basic reorganization of our sociocultural environment, or the entire global biological environment that includes it, through hospitality.
"Mizu ni nezashita kurashi (Water-based life)" in the Harie district of Shin Asahi by Lake Biwa as well as "Funaya no kurashi (Life in Funaya)" in the town of Ine in the Okutango region, which are the case studies of this essay, or even life in Okinawa, especially in the Sakishima islands, where people base their lives on the fundamental rhythms of life as symbolized in the phrase "Nuchi dou takara (life is a treasure)", teach us the importance of such challenges.

9. Conclusion: Focusing on the fields of life science and neuroscience
On the other hand, other methods for approaching this challenge that we have started focusing on include new achievements in the fields of neuroscience and life science and theories of immunity. Findings regarding the way the human brain functions or the ways our bodies and conscious minds function as life environments that include such functions that defy our common wisdom have been confirmed. The dynamic collectiveness and mobility of life and the brain, which cannot be described with traditional dualistic concepts such as systems vs. elements or program vs. data (the root of this dualism involves the separation of the consciousness and the body as described by Descartes, or more specifically, the distinction between the consciousness and the body as evidence of the characteristic properties of life and human beings as physical phenomena), have become apparent. Such new theories tell us that the activities of life forms and the brain are processes of uninterrupted motion that relate to the genetic or cellular level to the collectiveness of life forms and involve the continuity of changes created as a result of the motional process of such activities. It also tells us that the various elements of this process of uninterrupted motion and activities are connected to and interact with one other. In other words, rather than each element existing in a different form in the activities of a life form or the brain, there is first a dynamic collectiveness from which the interrelation of elements emerges as a process of motion or change, and each element is then taken away from the collectiveness in a separate form. For example, it has been confirmed that the immune system is improved drastically when we feel "pleasure", and we can say that this is evidence of one of the locations of the cross-correlated collectiveness of our minds and bodies. The important thing is that seeking the foundation of the activities of life and the brain in the context of collectiveness and applying it to our future scientific technologies or principles of social design may lead to a situation where the atomistic and elemental models that serve as the traditional frameworks (paradigms) for understanding the world has and have been the basis of our modern industrial society (and also, at the same time, the basis for understanding the physical and mechanistic world) may be fundamentally broken down. This type of "theoretical revolution", which is taking place in the most advanced fields of science, will have a greater impact that will overshadow the impact of previous debates over AI (Artificial Intelligence) because it can serve as a theoretical vehicle for realizing an extremely dynamic and cooperative sociocultural environment (including technology) that can fundamentally reflect the kinetic dynamism of life. These also serve as important points when considering hospitality.