In a Society That Calls 'Going Back' Success, Something Quietly Accumulates

For some reason, I started thinking about an aircraft cockpit.

There was no particular trigger. The thought just floated up and I kept following it.

"Does it really need to be that complicated these days? Couldn't they just unify everything onto a touchscreen?" That kind of naive question. As I dug in, I realized the answer was "no, and for good reason." Being able to operate things by feel in turbulence. Making sure one failure doesn't take out multiple functions. Letting pilots act without taking their eyes off the view. The reason physical switches keep surviving in cockpits isn't a technology problem — it's a human problem.

These thoughts may not cohere into much, but I want to write down the day's reflection as it was.

"Technically possible" vs. "natural for humans"

When Tesla and the VW Golf 8 consolidated everything — A/C, turn signals — into a touchscreen, users complained almost immediately about how hard it was to use. The European safety body Euro NCAP has even announced that from 2026, cars without physical buttons will receive lower scores.

Humans rely on tactile feedback to maintain the situational awareness of "right now, I'm controlling this." Take that away and something starts to drift. "Technically possible" and "natural for humans" don't always line up.

The cockpit knew this.

What Nintendo built

That's when I thought of the Nintendo Switch.

The Switch draws an exquisite line between "what should be a physical button" and "what can be a touch control." Anything that requires real-time precision is physical; settings and information are touch. Users don't even have to think about the distinction — your body just picks the right one before you notice.

But the idea of "respecting physical buttons" isn't unique to the Switch. Both Xbox and PlayStation controllers are still fundamentally button-driven. Why? Because Nintendo got there first.

In 1982, a developer named Gunpei Yokoi invented the D-pad. The "D-pad on the left, buttons on the right" layout originated with the Famicom and became the de facto industry standard. The reason the original PlayStation's directional pad has "four separate shapes" is that Sony deliberately designed around Nintendo's utility model patent. Analog sticks too: the Nintendo 64 (1996) was the first home console to ship one as standard, and PlayStation and Xbox followed afterwards. Other companies built on top of a standard Nintendo had created.

There's also another piece. Nintendo has a development philosophy that's fundamentally different from PlayStation or Xbox: "lateral thinking with seasoned technology" (kareta gijutsu no suihei shikou), proposed by Gunpei Yokoi. Instead of competing on cutting-edge specs, you take widely available, already-cheap technology and combine it in new ways for new experiences.

The Game Boy could have been color, but Nintendo deliberately shipped it in black and white. In exchange, the battery lasted forever, and color competitors got pushed out of the market. The Wii was technically inferior to both the PS3 and Xbox 360, but by changing how you played, it pulled in a huge audience and won — without ever joining the spec race.

The Nintendo Switch 2, released in June 2025, reads in the same way. A few new features were added, but the concept hasn't changed from the original. According to developer interviews, the reason they raised the specs wasn't "to beat the competition" — it was that "we wanted to propose new kinds of play, and processing speed was increasingly getting in the way." The experience came first; the hardware was widened only to enable it. The spec gap with the PS5 and Xbox Series X is still huge.

"Widen the vessel only when constraints get in the way of the experience." Other than that, don't change the concept.

Nintendo doesn't use constraints as an excuse. They keep asking what can be created within the constraints. That sensibility has been continuous since 1982.

From the cockpit to people

So what happens when someone with this kind of sensibility moves into a different industry?

The instinct to start design from "what's natural for humans" rather than "what's technically possible." The instinct to start ideas from constraints. When that gets carried outside the gaming industry, something might change. When I framed it that way, the meaning of "people moving across industries" started to look slightly different.

New things get born when unfamiliar sensibilities cross paths.

For example: what would happen if someone who has internalized Nintendo's "create experience within constraints" moved into an aircraft manufacturer or a medical device company? Or conversely, what would change if the gaming industry absorbed cockpit design philosophy? When you imagine those scenarios, "people moving across industries" starts to carry a weight that's different from a regular career conversation.

But that kind of movement is really hard in Japan today. Job changes are basically one-way. Once you leave a company, your relationship with it resets. So jumping into a different industry becomes a risk in itself, and everyone keeps circulating within the same industry.

What's actually valuable, I think, is a cycle: take the sensibility you've built in one place, try it in another place, then bring back what you learned. But without the freedom to come back, that cycle never starts.

"The freedom to come back" isn't quite the same as "boomerang hires welcome." It's broader than that. It's a state where stepping outside isn't a risk, where the result of moving doesn't get reset to zero. Because that exists, you can purely think "I'm here because I want to be here," which is completely different from "I'm staying because leaving would mean it's over."

The pandemic secondments as a "natural experiment"

This is when I remembered the mass secondments Japanese airlines did during the pandemic.

JAL seconded 2,220 of its roughly 7,000 cabin crew to other industries (cumulative). ANA's cumulative number through April 2021 was around 750. In terms of scale, this was almost without precedent in the history of the Japanese labor market.

I tried looking up "what happened afterwards" — and the data basically doesn't exist.

You can find how many people were sent out. You can find heartwarming stories about people who returned. But the actually important questions — how many came back, how many chose a different path, how the performance of those who returned changed afterwards — aren't recorded anywhere. Not by companies, not by the government, not by research institutions.

That hit me harder than I expected.

Thousands of people were semi-coercively pushed into a different industry, and their lives must have actually changed afterwards — and none of it was captured. As a social experiment, this would have been an extraordinarily valuable dataset. And nobody observed it.

Why nobody recorded it

When you ask "why didn't anyone record this?", the organizational dynamics make sense.

A high return rate becomes "we protected jobs" — a success story. A low return rate becomes "we sent them out and then we lost them" — talent leakage. Either way, there isn't much incentive to publish. The secondments were funded by the Employment Adjustment Subsidy — public money — which makes companies even less inclined to release data that could be read as "there were problems."

The government side is similar: for evaluating the effectiveness of the subsidy, a macro number like "by how much did this reduce unemployment" is enough. What happened to individuals afterwards is outside the scope of the program.

But.

A human being gets shaken by a new environment, realizes "actually, this path suits me better," and chooses the other road. Institutionally, that gets classified as a "failure." Returning to the original place is success; not returning is failure. Because that's the yardstick, the dynamic is to not collect the data.

What if it's the yardstick itself that's off?

What accumulates

This may be a leap, but I started to think this kind of accumulation is eating at Japan's national strength.

Each individual piece looks small. Data wasn't taken. Information wasn't disclosed. The system that makes it hard to move stayed the same. But over decades, this stacks into a society where "new combinations" become hard to generate.

Just as Nintendo has kept creating new experiences from inside constraints, innovation happens at the crossing of unfamiliar sensibilities. And Japan has multiple structures that prevent those crossings.

The tricky part is that no single party is to blame. Companies rationally decide not to release information, the government rationally executes its program, individuals rationally stay because moving is risky. Each is rational in their own position, but in aggregate the trajectory bends toward eroding national strength.

What I still don't know

I don't have an answer to this yet.

"It's natural for humans to have their values shaken and to change — and the question is whether society can recognize that" feels like a different layer from policy debate. It's not the kind of thing that gets solved by reforming a single institution. It's a question of whether we can, somewhere, question the unconscious premise that "returning to where you came from = success."

Maybe the pandemic-era secondments were a chance to shake that premise. Out of the thousands of people who experienced the outside world, some came back saying "yeah, here is where I belong," and some chose a different path saying "the other world fit me better." Both should have been equally meaningful experiences.

The "what a waste" feeling I have about that data not existing is, perhaps, a mirror reflecting what society has chosen to define as success.

A passing thought about a cockpit ended up here.

I think I'll keep holding on to it a bit longer.

Further reading

Gunpei Yokoi's thinking and the "lateral thinking with seasoned technology" philosophy come from the following book, a collection of interviews with him. It's a worthwhile read for understanding the sensibility at the root of Nintendo as a company (Japanese only).

For those who want to think further about "the freedom to come back" and the way careers shift, the following book is also a useful reference.