In his 1987 book The Game of Words, Willard R. Espy offered a poem of “forgotten positives”:

I dreamt of a corrigible, nocuous youth,
Gainly, gruntled, and kempt;
A mayed and a sidious fellow, forsooth —
Ordinate, effable, shevelled, ept, couth;
A delible fellow I dreamt.

Correspondingly, he pointed out, many common words ending in -less seem to have no opposites ending in -ful:

A tailful dog, one leaf-ful spring
Set out for toothful foraging,
And as he dug in rootful sod,
Paid voiceful tribute to his God.
At which, a feckful, loveful lass,
Whose strapful bodice charmed each pass-
Erby, cried out, “O timeful sound!
O ageful, lifeful, peerful hound!”

As birth rates fall and countries turn to immigration to address their labor shortages, a lot of countries around the world are struggling with crises of national identity. Japan is one of them. Over a decade ago, Japan began opening itself up to mass immigration:

Because Japan did this later than other rich nations, immigrants aren’t yet as numerous as in Europe or the U.S., but the percentage is rising fast. And so discussions about what it truly means to be Japanese are starting to emerge.

I thought it would be useful for my readers — most of whom live in America or other English-speaking nations that are going through their own crises of national identity right now — to get some perspective on how Japanese people think about these issues. And so I asked my friend Hiroko Yoda to write me a post about it. Hiroko is a Japan-based entrepreneur, cultural historian, and writer. She's the author of a new book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness, which is a memoir exploring Japan's modern secular-spiritual landscape. She also writes on Substack.

In this post, she writes about how shared culture, rather than adherence to a particular religious doctrine, is what binds Japan so tightly together. Interestingly, “culture” is the same answer I arrived at when I asked the question of what will bind America together in the future.

Although I live in Japan, as a Japanese person married to an American, and who studied at American universities for my undergrad and graduate degrees, I probably pay more attention to happenings in the U.S. than many Japanese people. One of the topics I have found most interesting is the ongoing struggle to define what an American is. The reason being, we Japanese are grappling with this issue as well.

As Noah has written, Japan is accepting more immigrants than ever before. When my husband and I moved to Tokyo in 2003, international couples were still uncommon, and we’d sometimes draw stares if we walked hand in hand. These days, it’s completely unremarkable. The numbers of tourists visiting Japan increase year by year, and so does the number of people taking permanent residence. I see many international families in the suburb where we live, and I don’t think we are unusual, at least as regards urban centers.

As Japanese are finding new ways to co-exist and live alongside non-Japanese, they are also revisiting what it means to be Japanese. As I’ve written in my own newsletter, the question once centered simply on ethnicity, but now many are coming to believe that shared cultural values are more important.

Are you Japanese simply because of where you were born, or are you Japanese because of how you participate in society? Superficially, this resembles the arguments going on in America. Are you American because of some kind of heritage, or are you American because you embrace shared values, like those laid out in the Constitution?

But there is an interesting difference, too. Japan is (or was) a country with relatively little immigration; that’s why the question of who’s Japanese traditionally hinges on ethnicity. On the other hand in America, an immigrant melting pot, the litmus test often seems to return to faith.

It comes up again and again in American discussions about what it means to be American. Take this recent essay from The New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat:

One doesn’t need to be a specific kind of religious believer to be a good believer in the Declaration [of Independence]. But if you look at the sweep of American history, it’s very hard to disentangle the advance of equality from the religious belief that our rights come from God and that human beings are equal in his eyes… it has more power in a context where most Americans believe in a providential God.

And then there’s Derek Thompson, who in a recent conversation with religious scholar Ryan Burge, noted:

There’s this category of Americans who have gone into religion as if it’s a foreign country, harvested certain souvenirs, and brought them back to the world of secularism. They practice yoga but have no interest in understanding its religious origins. They meditate but are not remotely interested in any Buddhist version of nirvana.

To which Burge replies:

They only wanted the parts of religion they liked and left the others behind…

You can’t just pick and choose…A lot of people are doing that with religion right now. They’re walking down the buffet line, picking one piece, putting it on their plate, and calling it a spiritual life. That doesn’t endure.

And Thompson concludes:

If you don’t have that central spine of purpose, the community won’t last. If your only purpose is “let’s get together,” that’s not enough. You need that higher purpose—that vertical spine—in order to build a truly strong horizontal community.

These pundits are arguing that ideas alone – the values of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution – aren’t enough to keep Americans together, whether in communities or as a country. America’s loneliness epidemic, its polarization, its young citizens’ loss of hope: a big part of it can be attributed to the fact Americans don’t go to church or synagogue or temple or what have you anymore.

All of which makes me want to say: have you ever been to Japan?

Japanese, as a nation, don’t subscribe to any one faith. In fact, there’s a popular saying “born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist.” We pick and choose, bringing what we like from various traditions – the purifications of Shinto, the pretty aspects of Christian weddings, the traditions of Buddhist funeral rites – into our secular lives. We’re so flexible about it that we often answer no when people ask if we’re religious. Look at this chart:

I’m going to put aside the question of how accurate this is. I actually wrote an entire book on how I believe surveys like this can miss the forest for the trees. (Spoiler: it involves how one defines “religion.”) But Burge and others argue Americans are “setting themselves up for failure” in becoming less religious, or at least in not going to religious institutions.

America is a flexible society that is rigid when it comes to religion; Japan is the opposite, a rigid society with a surprising flexibility when it comes to faith. There’s an old phrase that sums up Japan’s traditional spiritual cosmology: yaoyorozu no kami, which means eight million deities. It isn’t an accounting; it’s an expression of awe at the infinite nature of the sublime in all its forms. It incorporates, absorbs, rather than draws lines. In short, it’s radically inclusive.

I get that America is a religious country. I was taken to Sunday school every week when I was a homestay student in Indiana in the 1990s. I recited the Pledge of Allegiance alongside the other students every day. But there’s no pledge of allegiance in Japanese schools. The Japanese flag wasn’t even displayed in any of my classrooms. None of my classmates ever went to anything resembling a Sunday school.

But we were united in other ways. Ways that look like faith to outsiders, but just felt like everyday life to us. We made New Year’s visits to shrines or temples for hatsumode, a first prayer for the year. Many of us had Buddhist-style altars in our homes, where we kept photos of departed family members. Many of us carried omamori, Shinto or Buddhist amulets for scholarship or travel safety on our schoolbags.

But if you’d asked the majority of us what our faith was, or who we were praying to, we’d have reacted with utter confusion. None of us saw amulets as a replacement for studying, or looking both ways before crossing the street. They were simply cute ways to wish. If you’d asked us what we believed, I honestly don’t think we would have even understood the question. We just did.

So if institutional faith is core to the communities that form a healthy society, why is Japan’s so successful without it?

First, let me be clear here. I don’t see Japan as some kind of utopia or even a role model. I just see it as different. But the fact it is different – and not struggling in the ways many commentators seem to think America is struggling, at least regards faith as an identity – is what might make the Japanese counterpoint relevant. Let me also be clear that I believe faith can nurture a life or a community. If your personal faith nourishes you, I cheer you on.

But speaking broadly, if Japan can maintain a stable society without faith, it would seem to indicate it isn’t a necessity for a healthy society.

So what is keeping Japan together?

For a long time, Japanese could rely on clear lines to define themselves, like language (Japanese being little spoken outside the nation) and terrain (being an archipelago). But things are changing, and changing fast. It isn’t particularly difficult to get to Japan anymore. More people outside Japan are learning and speaking Japanese than ever before. More want to live here than ever before.

And Japan is aging and shrinking. We’ve “lost” three million citizens over the last few years alone, as deaths outpace births. The numbers of foreign visitors and permanent residents are higher than ever before. All of these factors are driving the question of what it means to be Japanese, which is playing out in online forums, TV shows, newspapers, and election contests throughout Japan.

A recent Stanford survey about immigration shows that race isn’t a major factor in resistance to immigration. Rather, Japanese language ability is. In this chart, you can see how many more respondents chose to admit a hypothetical immigration applicant based on their ability to speak fluently.

Now, this might seem like a no-brainer. Of course, you want to admit people who can communicate with you. But “fluent” is doing a lot of lifting here that might not be obvious in English.

Japanese is classified as a “high-context” culture, meaning that a large amount of cultural knowledge is required to speak fluently. (Other high-context cultures include China, Korea, and many Arab countries.) There’s a lot of implicit communication, meaning context is often implied rather than expressed directly. Meanwhile, Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians (among others) are framed as “low-context,” meaning conversations tend to be explicit, with context usually spelled out.

Anyone who’s studied Japanese will know what I mean. We often leave pronouns and even subjects out, in casual speech. You’re expected to kuuki wo yomu – “read the air” and intuit meaning. So when Japanese say they want immigrants to master Japanese, they’re talking less about the linguistics of speaking than they are context – “the air,” in other words.

In a recent survey, 62% of Japanese reported that they wanted immigrants to not only follow the rules, but also “etiquette and customs.” Some interpret this as draconian or authoritarian, but I don’t think so. If you correlate it with that Stanford survey, you can see that once Japanese fluency is achieved, locals ranked people of a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds as acceptable (the dot at far right in each graph.)

Of course, not everyone in Japan agrees with this thinking. There are those who have a vested interest in keeping the definition of Japanese as strict as possible, who use foreigners as scapegoats for society’s failings, who wish to keep the number of outsiders who immigrate here as low as possible. The far-right party that rode an anti-immigrant platform to a surprising number of seats in parliament in the 2025 elections is one example. But I believe the winds are against people who think in this way. The demographics are against them. The technologies that let us cross borders physically, and share our ideas across them virtually, are against them. And most of all, I think our cultural traditions are against them. When our cosmology, so to speak, is so inclusive, it’s hard to square why our society should not be. Anyone who trumpets conservative values in Japan is eventually going to run up against that conundrum.

As a Japanese, it isn’t my place to say who is or isn’t an American. But I can say what I personally envision for my country’s identity going forward. I see it in little moments all over the city today. Non-Japanese employees greeting customers in polite Japanese. Foreign folks showing respect at temples and shrines. The caucasian man and his daughter I saw commuting to kindergarten on a mama-chari bike, her tiny pastel backpack slung incongruously over his big shoulders. In other words, the stuff of everyday life. To me Japanese isn’t what you look like; it’s how you act. In other words, it’s how you read the air.

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Back last summer Slow Boring partnered with the Institute for Progress to help solicit ideas for what we’re now calling the Transit Abundance Playbook, a list of ideas to help address the cost bloat that has afflicted American transit construction.

Veteran Slow Boring readers will know that this is a longtime obsession of mine. I’m a native New Yorker who rode the subway every day in high school. When I moved to the totally unfamiliar city of Washington after college, I blindly ended up in Columbia Heights because I was looking for a cheap place near a Metro station. I used to think that American cities were under-provided with transit because the country was too unwilling to spend money. But I’ve learned that the United States actually spends a lot on transit construction — it just doesn’t build a lot of transit per dollar spent.

Improving the cost-effectiveness of projects would get more projects built without any more spending, and that in turn would strengthen the political case for spending. But while it’s easy to identify specific examples of bloated costs, what’s harder is to develop concrete policy ideas that change the way the whole system works.

Now, though, I think there’s a menu of ideas that could really fix the problem.

— Matt

Stop Paying More for Less Transit

By Will Poff-Webster and Arnab Datta

The United States once led the world in transit construction. In the 19th century, publicly subsidized railroads catalyzed steel production, agriculture, and even financial markets. In the early 20th century, America built the largest network of streetcar tracks in the world, igniting the first suburban boom and making homeownership and jobs available to millions. Subway systems enabled industrial growth and the development of knowledge-economy hubs that fueled American prosperity. Transit’s ability to move large numbers efficiently remains unmatched: Every day, the New York City subway serves more passengers than all American airports combined. Even in car-friendly Houston, more than half of suburban commuters to downtown take the bus.

But America has lost its edge. Today, we lead the world in transit construction costs, and build less as a result. America’s first subway line opened in 1897: a 1.5-mile tunnel in Boston built in just four years at a cost of roughly $5 million (about $200 million today). Had we kept costs steady since, we would be nearly on par with other developed countries. Instead, in 2022, New York City’s East Side Access project finally opened after 24 years of construction and $11.2 billion in expenditures — giving it the dubious distinction of being, per mile, the most expensive transit project ever built.

At least that project opened. Californians may never see the San Francisco-Los Angeles high-speed rail line they approved in 2008 and have already spent $15 billion on; the project’s expected cost has ballooned from $33 billion to more than $126 billion, with no plan to close the funding gap. Over the same period that California was failing to build a route from Bakersfield to Merced — just 150 miles apart — China connected every one of its major cities with 30,000 miles of high-speed rail.

We spend billions on transit projects but deliver far less per dollar than our global peers. The invisible costs are even higher: dysfunctional processes kill light rail routes that would unlock suburban growth, subway extensions that would connect working-class neighborhoods to job centers, and bus rapid transit corridors that would slash commute times for tens of thousands. Headlines about spiraling costs and decades-long timelines foster the belief that America cannot do big things anymore, a belief reaffirmed every time a major construction project becomes a cautionary tale.

Sky-high costs are an unfortunate case of American exceptionalism, but not an inevitability. The wealthiest country in the world should not fail where Southern Europe succeeds. We know what drives high US transit construction costs: overdesign and excessive customization, poor planning and procurement, too many veto points, burdensome permitting, and anemic state capacity. These problems compound, leaving only one option: pay more for less.

Just as there is no single cause for America’s high transit costs, there is no single solution. This playbook brings together leading transit practitioners, researchers, and advocates to translate research into policy solutions — each addressing a core driver of high US transit costs.

There is renewed attention to the red tape plaguing America’s ability to build. Consensus is growing that we need to remove barriers that constrict growth and stifle government delivery, but implementation is too often underexamined. Federal funding plays a central role in major transit projects. Accordingly, congressional and executive branch actions are powerful levers to address the high costs of transit nationwide. While federal policy is at the core of this playbook, solutions also target states, local governments, and private actors.

Cost-effectiveness need not be polarizing. Transit advocates should champion spending less, because every wasted dollar is another project never built. Fiscal conservatives have much to gain from faster delivery, because every delay begets more spending. Environmentalists can celebrate the construction of megaprojects that reduce pollution. Cities thrive when the public sector can build, and rural counties deserve buses that aren’t twice as expensive as in peer countries. And more transit ridership means less traffic for drivers.

Feats of infrastructure and governance once showed us what was possible, but our policy choices have throttled our ambitions. While American workers, scientists, and technologists race ahead to the next challenge, they ride to work on infrastructure largely built by past generations.

The proposals in this playbook offer concrete solutions to build the transit the public deserves, at costs the public can afford, on timelines that allow people to actually benefit. Let’s close the gap between where we are and where we need to be.

All of the pieces in the Transit Abundance Playbook are available at ifp.org/cheaper-transit, and at the following links:

Planning

• Reform Funding to Encourage Early Transit Planning, Eric Goldwyn - The federal grant review process incentivizes agencies to rush to secure funding rather than methodically plan projects. A phased “Transit ID” program (mirroring the Federal Railroad Administration’s “Corridor ID”) with smaller, milestone-based grants would reduce risk and lead to better projects.

• Focus Capital Investment Grants on Improved Project Delivery, Stephanie Pollack - Federal grants that fund most major American transit projects are governed by rigid, bloated rules that impede timely and cost-effective project delivery. Reforms could cut procedural requirements, fund early right-of-way and early works investments, require accelerated state and local permitting, and loosen procurement rules to favor the highest-value bids.

Cost-effective design

• Reduce Needless Bus Customization, Rohan Aras and Alex Armlovich - Buses cost twice as much in the US as in peer countries, in part due to excessive customization by transit agencies. Capping federal cost-sharing at a benchmark price and encouraging standardization and joint procurement could bring costs down while unlocking manufacturing economies of scale.

• Eliminate Redundant Subway Cross-Passages, Brian Potter - US subways follow a safety standard from the National Fire Protection Association that mandates twice as many cross-passageway tunnels as in Europe, with no demonstrated safety benefits. Adopting the European standard in the US could save millions in construction costs.

Procurement

• Get the Best Value in Transit Procurement, Anthony Potts - State and local procurement rules often require awarding contracts to the lowest bidder, even though this leads to worse, costlier outcomes over the long term. Federal transit grants should encourage best-value selection, in which agencies evaluate contractor competence and price holistically.

• We Should Know How Much Transit Components Cost, Alon Levy - Lump-sum, NDA-protected construction contracts hide true project costs, resulting in lawsuits for changes during construction and 20–50% bid inflation by contractors. Requiring itemized bidding based on a database of component prices (as practiced in Italy and Spain) would increase transparency and reduce costs.

Utility, agency, and local government coordination

• Transit Projects Need a Single Decision-Maker, Anonymous - To build a transit project, transit agencies must negotiate dozens of separate agreements with utilities, local governments, and other third parties. Each is an opportunity to extract concessions paid for with transit dollars. Adopting Italy’s Conference of Services model would allow a single appointee to decide on project tradeoffs and ensure disputes are resolved up front, rather than at the last minute when transit agencies have the least leverage.

• Use AI to Improve Transit Planning, Lizzie Speed and Bennett Capozzi - Transit project knowledge is scattered across past reports and data sources, increasing the need for consultants and preventing the development of in-house expertise. A centralized repository for federal transit reports and project data, along with an AI-based system for querying it, would allow transit agency staff to mine past projects for usable lessons. This would mirror similar innovations at other federal agencies like the FDA.

Permitting

• Let Agencies Do Their Own Environmental Review, Jamey Tesler - The Federal Highway Administration delegates part of its environmental review process to states, reducing review times by up to 85%. Adopting the same framework at the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) could similarly accelerate reviews for transit projects.

• Fast-Track Democratically Approved Transit Projects, Hayden Clarkin - Requiring environmental review for voter-approved transit projects generates costly and redundant documentation (100,000+ pages and more than $1 billion in costs for California high-speed rail) and delays environmentally beneficial transit projects. Exempting voter-approved projects would accelerate their delivery, ensuring constituents don’t wait decades to get what they asked for.

• Let Transit Agencies Buy Land, Aidan Mackenzie - FTA’s expansive reading of environmental law bars agencies from project steps such as buying land until after project permitting is complete. These activities are often best done early, but the ban incentivizes agencies to compromise project design in order to avoid them. Allowing early works would reduce costs and enable better project delivery.

State capacity

• Put Transit Staff in Charge of Their Own Projects, Paul Lewis - Agencies have outsourced design, project management, and risk to consultants, incentivizing scope creep, inflating labor costs, and eroding in-house expertise. Federal grants and oversight should incentivize more capacity within transit agencies.

• Close America’s Transit Automation Gap, Andrew Miller - A provision in the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 mandates an open-ended review whenever federal funding would affect jobs, effectively blocking the automation of legacy subway systems. Amending the statute to explicitly guarantee worker protections, rather than requiring a veto-prone process, would enable agencies to pursue automation and unlock substantial operational savings.

• Share the Truth About Transit Project Failures, Philip Plotch - Fear of reputational damage and litigation suppresses honest post-mortems on transit projects, leading to new projects repeating the same mistakes. Providing confidential ways for agencies to share lessons learned, protected against FOIA, would enable candid knowledge sharing.

• Loans Can Stabilize Transit Funding, Jackson Moore-Otto - Transit agencies depend on unpredictable discretionary grants to fund new transit construction, an arrangement that leads to poorly planned, grant-chasing spending. Streamlining access to federal loans would create an alternative funding model for projects that promise a strong return on investment and encourage both cost discipline and the development of internal agency capacity.

Special thanks to all playbook authors, and to Eric Goldwyn, Jarrett Stoltzfus, and Stephanie Pollack for their contributions advising the project. The Transit Abundance Playbook was created with the help of Rita Sokolova, Reed Schwartz, Abigail “Beez” Africa, Aidan Mackenzie, and Ben Schifman.