The Question from the Previous Chapter
Part 2, Chapter 3 "Rebuilding Society" showed that every premise of current society is collapsing.
Food production → Must escape chemical fertilizer dependency
Industries → Military, IT, desk work all shrinking
Population distribution → No reason for Tokyo's extreme concentration
Trade → The premise of free trade is collapsing
Healthcare and pensions → Systems designed for urban salaried workers no longer fit
Incremental fixes will not work. A world quite different from today must be designed.
So what do we add, and what do we subtract?
The Principle of Subtraction
Subtraction means removing what was added during the era of fossil fuels and urban concentration. The minimum configuration that remains after every unnecessary thing has been removed is what fits the new premises. Not "add something to solve the problem," but "the premises changed, so take out what is no longer needed."
Why subtraction never became the mainstream is also clear by now. A solution that adds is sellable; a solution that subtracts is not (Part 1, Chapter 1). So the world filled up with additive solutions.
Apply this principle to all of society.
Subtract #1: Tokyo's Extreme Concentration
As Chapter 9 showed, 36 million people concentrated in Tokyo because of desk work. When desk work disappears, the reason for concentration disappears.
Commuting to Tokyo → Subtract
Office buildings → Subtract
Packed trains → Subtract
30% of income on city-center rent → Subtract
What remains:
Regional towns → Shops, schools, clinics already exist
Farmland and forestland → The foundation for bio-materials and food production
Water, sunlight, and soil → Japan's true resources
Regional towns are already the destination, as they are. What we subtract is Tokyo's concentration — we do not need to add anything to rural Japan.
Subtract #2: The Premise of Free Trade
Free trade assumed cheap oil could ship goods from the other side of the planet. That premise is collapsing.
Cheap agricultural imports from abroad → Subtract
Cheap foreign timber → Subtract
The assumption that "domestic farming is inefficient" → Subtract
What remains:
Food and timber produced on domestic farmland and forestland
Distribution that completes within the region
A local production, local consumption structure with near-zero transport costs
Farmer → Consumer
Direct online sales, farmers' markets, CSA (community-supported agriculture)
Farmer's share → 100%
Transport distance → Minimized
Packaging → Minimized (face-to-face needs none)
Subtract middlemen → Subtract oil dependency → Subtract cost
Subtract #3: Urban Healthcare and Pensions
Current healthcare: "Desk work destroys the body → Hospitals fix it." Current pensions: "Retire at 65 → Pensions support you." Both are systems designed for urban salaried workers.
Sedentary desk work → Subtract (work becomes land-based)
Processed food dependency → Subtract (replaced by food you grow yourself)
Lifestyle diseases → Subtract (natural diet and exercise reduce them)
Enormous medical costs → Subtract (unnecessary if you don't get sick)
The premise of retiring at 65 → Subtract (physical work can continue longer)
Pension dependency → Subtract (unnecessary if you don't retire)
Desk work society's healthcare and pensions: Sit and work → Body breaks down → Medicine fixes it → High cost Cannot work past 65 → Pensions support → Working generation bears the burden
Land-based society's healthcare and pensions: Physical work → Health maintained → Less medical dependency Work continues longer → Less pension dependency → Less institutional burden
Subtract "curing disease." Keep "not getting sick." Subtract "supporting with pensions." Keep "a life that doesn't need pensions."
Subtract #4: Enterprise IT Taxes
As Chapter 8 showed, companies pay enormous "IT taxes."
Oracle/SQL Server license fees → Subtract (migrate to PostgreSQL + Claude)
Microsoft tax → Subtract (migrate to open source)
SaaS monthly subscriptions → Subtract (build your own)
Systems integrator billable hours → Subtract (Claude replaces them)
Consultant fees → Subtract (Claude handles structural analysis)
What remains:
A simple system run by 1 person + Claude
A self-hosted server costing a few dollars a month
This site is living proof.
How this site was built: Structural thinking: myself (1 person) Research: Gemini (literature review, fact-checking) Structure, writing, coding: Claude (Claude Code) Design and layout: Claude (CSS architecture) Translation: Claude (Japanese–English bilingual) A web agency would charge tens of thousands of dollars. This was built for AI subscription fees alone.
Subtract #5: Large Organizations
For large corporations, AI is a cost-cutting tool. For individuals, it is a capability multiplier.
Efficiency gain: 20%
Individual: 1 person → AI enables the output of 10
Capability expansion: 1,000%
Large organizations had three advantages: scale of personnel, scale of information, scale of capital. AI neutralizes personnel and information. Only capital remains. But knowledge work requires almost no capital.
Subtract the organization, and decisions become instant, pivots become frictionless, and fixed costs drop to nearly zero.
Subtract #6: Fine-Grained Data Storage and Analysis
Companies have long stored data in fine grain. Data warehouses, BI tools, KPI pipelines, detailed logs — investments premised on "store it, analyze it, and the future becomes visible."
That premise is collapsing on two fronts.
First, the past no longer projects the future. Fine-grained analysis has meaning only while tomorrow is an extension of yesterday. Now the evolution of AI produces unprecedented events one after another — the unit price of desk work shifts by orders of magnitude, the headcount of development shifts by orders of magnitude, the problem statements themselves get replaced. "What has never happened" does not exist in the data (Part 1, Chapter 6). In an era of unprecedented change, the precise extrapolation of past patterns becomes an error that is merely precise. In the words of Part 1, Chapter 11: polishing numbers of high reliability in a world whose validity has vanished.
Second, the standing analysis infrastructure is no longer needed. The apparatus of fine-grained storage and pre-processing existed because analysis was expensive — ETL, aggregation layers, canned reports, professional analysts. Now, when a question arises, hand the raw data to AI and the answer comes back on the spot. Analysis has changed from a standing pipeline into a single question, asked when needed.
Data warehouses and aggregation layers → subtract (when a question arises, AI reads the raw data)
Canned reports and KPI dashboards → subtract (a factory of numbers nobody reads)
Detailed logs stored "for future analysis" → subtract (the past does not project the future)
Keep:
Records that cannot be regenerated — transactions, contracts, statutory retention
The current state — inventory, balances, schedules
That is: the minimum data the business needs to run
A substantial part of existing systems' complexity is the plumbing for "store and analyze." Subtract the plumbing, and systems simplify drastically. This is not giving up analysis — it is giving up the standing apparatus. Ask AI the question, each time it arises.
The Subtraction Blueprint
| What to subtract | Present | After subtraction |
|---|---|---|
| Tokyo concentration | 36 million commuting to offices | Living in regional towns, surrounded by farmland and forestland |
| Free trade premise | Shipping cheap goods from the other side of the planet | Local production, local consumption. Domestic farmland and forestland |
| Middlemen | Farmer→Coop→Wholesaler→Secondary wholesaler→Retailer→Consumer | Farmer→Consumer (direct) |
| Urban healthcare | Cure disease (¥1.6T/year on dialysis alone) | Prevent disease (natural diet and exercise) |
| Pension dependency | Retire at 65 → Pensions support | Work continues → Pensions unnecessary |
| Enterprise IT taxes | Oracle tax + Microsoft tax + SIer tax | PostgreSQL + Claude + self-hosted server |
| Large organizations | 100 people + management overhead | 1 person + AI. Zero fixed costs |
| The data warehouse | store, aggregate, canned reports | minimal records + one question to AI when needed |
| Platforms | Social media dependency (algorithm-controlled) | Own domain + static HTML |
The common thread: subtract what was added during the era of fossil resources and urban concentration.
What remains after subtraction: water, land, plants, microorganisms, and human hands. Japan has all of these.
Subtraction Alone Is Not Enough — Regulations Must Be Redesigned
Subtraction happens naturally. When fossil resources deplete, what was added collapses on its own.
But old regulations do not disappear naturally. Agricultural land laws, free trade agreements, the healthcare system, the pension system, urban planning — regulations designed for the era of fossil resources and urban concentration are blocking the transformation.
To realize subtraction design, regulation redesign is essential. The concrete picture was drawn in the previous chapter.
Food supply after fossil resources (regenerative agriculture, natural farming, Light Farming, and the unresolved problem of large-scale vegetable production) is covered in this site's natural-farming series. It falls outside the structural argument of subtraction and is not treated in this chapter.