Impossible to Pursue Happiness: A Historical Text Mining Study of Modern Japanese Books

Teru Sako, Professor, Tokyo Metropolitan University

In Japan, it was only in the twenty-first century that the social sciences began to reflect systematically on happiness. Much previous research, based on surveys and interviews, has concluded that the maintenance of good face-to-face interpersonal relationships—here referred to as Theory of Happiness A—constitutes an important component of happiness for Japanese people. This paper adds a historical perspective to these findings. Using text mining, I analyze the titles and full texts of 33,882 Japanese-language books published between 1868 and 2023. The analysis reveals four major patterns. First, the most consistently recurring conception over the past 150 years is Theory of Happiness B. In this view, happiness is not something that can be deliberately pursued and attained. Rather, it refers to worldly and material benefits that arise unexpectedly in the course of living a morally upright life. Second, in the 1950s and 1960s, when modern European and American novels were systematically translated into Japanese, two additional conceptions emerged: Theory of Happiness C, which emphasizes consummatory happiness, and Theory of Happiness D, which frames happiness as the achievement of value-rational goals. Third, from the 1970s onward, Theory of Happiness E—which claims that divination can help individuals obtain happiness, without specifying its content—increased sharply and has remained prominent to the present. Fourth, since the 2000s, two further conceptions have expanded rapidly: Theory of Happiness F, which associates happiness with sharing satisfying meals with intimate others, and another strand of Theory of Happiness E, which identifies gentle communication with companion animals as a source of happiness. Taken together, these findings suggest that Japanese discourses on happiness have generally placed less emphasis on the rational pursuit and achievement of values through deliberate means. Instead, they highlight the perceived impossibility of linking ends and means rationally, treating this condition as central to happiness itself today.

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 Presented in Session 76. Reading the Modern: Computational Methods and the Historical Genealogy of Social Meaning