Dr. Dédé being fitted in a SENANU kimono for a fashion show
This is the third installment of The Bridge Builders series. This week contains the most personal essay of the entire series and Episode 4 of the Building Me Back experiment. The thesis: AI is culturally illiterate by default. Cultural fluency — knowing what it costs to navigate a system not built for you — is a governance capacity.
The most important thing I have learned about inclusive design, I did not learn in a lecture hall or a conference room; .I learned it in Japan.
Over 25 years ago, I moved to Japan, returning to the US eight years ago. I’ve spent more of my adult life there than anywhere else. Yet, Japan is not my home country; I am not Japanese. I will never be fully part of its social architecture. That outsideness — that permanent, albeit gracious and informative outsideness — is some of the most important education I have ever received.
Japan did not teach me to rest, but Japan has karoshi — a word coined because death from overwork in the Japanese workforce was common enough to require it. According to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, there were 1,304 recognized cases of overwork-related deaths and health disorders in fiscal 2024, including 89 deaths by suicide and/or attempted suicides. The WHO and ILO estimated approximately 750,000 deaths globally due to overwork in 2021.
Additionally, Japan passed the Barrier Free Act in 2006, requiring public and private entities to improve accessibility. Tokyo’s transit system is now 80 to 90 percent wheelchair-accessible, with tactile paving, accessible toilets, and universal design features that were built not as afterthoughts but as infrastructure. The country that named death by overwork is also the country that leads the world in designing public spaces for the full range of human bodies.
Japan taught me — by being a system I had to navigate carefully, from outside its assumed default — is how to see the gap between the official story and the real one. That skill is the foundation of everything I do.
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