Imagining Japan’s Economic Collapse: Orientalism, Crisis, and Digital Media

Javier Pérez-Jara

In this talk, I examine how digital journalism and social media in the Spanish-speaking world have often circulated the perception that Japan faces an imminent economic collapse. I identify several factors shaping this apocalyptic narrative: orientalist tropes and misunderstand

ing of cultural codes, political propaganda, cognitive biases, and the algorithmic dynamics of digital platforms. Against accounts that portray Japan as a dying society trapped by public debt, demographic decline, low immigration, low productivity, and the so-called “lost decades,” I propose an alternative reading of its socioeconomic challenges.

My aim is to analyze these problems not through an apocalyptic lens, but through an interdisciplinary framework incorporating insights from cultural sociology, evolutionary economics, social psychology, media studies, and philosophy. This approach understands economic processes as dynamically shaped by social, cultural, and environmental factors often neglected by narrowly economicist analyses. From this multidimensional standpoint, issues such as the “lost decades,” public debt, and low productivity acquire a different meaning than that offered by economic reductionism.

Javier Pérez-Jara is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and East Asian Studies at the University of Seville and Faculty Fellow at Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2012 and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge before teaching for eight years at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is the author of Techno-Utopia and Techno-Apocalypse in Global Capitalism (CUP, forthcoming), co-author of Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell (Lexington 2022), and co-editor of Dramatic Intellectuals (Palgrave Macmillan 2025), Beyond Nature and Nurture (Springer Synthese 2025), and Contemporary Materialism (Springer Synthese 2022). Pérez-Jara has held visiting positions at the Universities of Stanford, Yale, Tokyo, Kyoto, Sangyo, Gothenburg, Aristotle of Thessaloniki, Fu Jen Catholic, and Minzu of China.

This talk is organized by Takehiro Watatanabe (Associate Professor, Sophia University)