Strength may be not talent, but a product of environment and accumulation.
1. Why is the ground that grows players so different
In the later arc of Aoashi, the stage moves to Spain. What's thrust at Ashito there isn't a gap in technique. It's the fact that the very environment that raised them is utterly different.
Players who, from a young age, bathed in success and failure at a youth setup like Barcelona's. While the Japanese player is desperately "thinking, thinking," the European top player is already beyond that. Is this a gap in cleverness? Or —
This time I want to read this "environment gap" alongside two books: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and, again, Bourdieu's Distinction.
2. Guns, Germs, and Steel: strength was decided by environment
Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel answers one big question. Why did the people of one continent become the ones who conquered the people of another?
The answer isn't racial superiority. It's environment and geography. Plants fit for cultivation, animals fit for domestication, a continent long on its east-west axis — people who happened to be in a blessed environment generated surplus through farming, grew their population, and accumulated technology, immunity, and the state. The difference was born not from ability, but from the conditions you were placed in at the starting line.
Soccer is similar. Spanish players are strong not because they were born fast. It's because they happened to be born into an environment where football is rooted as culture. "Before you blame the person, look at the structure" — this book's reach lands straight on the pitch too.
3. The soccer pyramid: an accumulation of heat
Look at Spain's league structure, and it shows.
From the first division down to the seventh. Even small towns have clubs, and soccer is dissolved into daily life. This thickness of layers isn't made overnight. It's many generations of time, fallen and piled up.
And this thickness isn't only a matter of "long history." It's an accumulation of how much heat a whole society has poured into football. In Spain there's an air that permits prioritizing the local club's coaching over your job. On a weekday evening, adults and children gather on a small town pitch as a matter of course. That daily heat, piled over generations, became that thick pyramid. The Japan/Spain gap isn't a gap in talent. It's a gap in the amount of heat society has bet on the game. Diamond's "accumulation born of environment" takes, in soccer, the shape of this heat and this pyramid.
4. Environment changes the premises themselves
The frightening thing about environment is that it changes not only "what you think," but "what your body does before you think."
Picture Barcelona's soccer. That beautiful passing combination, the ball circulating among the players without stagnation. Even someone who doesn't follow football has surely seen that scene once. It's become, before anyone noticed, a shared "normal" the whole world knows.
This is what Bourdieu calls habitus — the unconscious "normal" the environment carves into the body. Spanish players aren't, each time, "choosing" that passing. From a young age, the environment has raised bodies that circulate the ball that way. What the Japanese player tries to catch up to by thinking "I should move like this," they already know in the body, before thought.
Environment soaks in below consciousness. That's why it's the hardest to catch up to. You can learn the form, but the "normal" of a body that moves before thinking — that, you can only grow inside the environment.
5. Accumulation backs the résumé
Here, Distinction from #5, once more.
Aesthetic sense, the discerning eye — made by class and history. That story works directly on a player's "résumé" too. The Spanish player holds, from the start, the cultural capital of the environment they were born into. The Japanese player can only build it up later, consciously.
And as we saw in #5, the evaluating side's gaze isn't neutral either. A résumé that says "from Europe" backs a certain trust all by itself. The accumulated environment backs the résumé, and the résumé clouds the eye. The power of structure, before ability.
So Ashito's fight is doubly heavy. While closing the environment gap, he must also force open the gaze that the gap itself has clouded. #5's "if you aren't seen, make them see" works here too.
6. And still, the individual crosses the sea
But — don't read Diamond's book as fatalism. That environment sets the conditions is true. Yet a person can re-choose their environment.
Fukuda crossed the sea to see football's ceiling. A view he couldn't have seen in Japan. To see it, he moved his own environment. You can't choose the environment you were born into, but the environment you stand in next, you can choose.
And there, in the re-chosen place, someone says it flat.
"Japanese can do it too." The environment gap they were told was absolutely impossible, pinned down by results. Environment is strong. But environment isn't everything. Having taken on the conditions, the individual who still goes to surpass opens a hole in the environment's story.
And the hole one person forces open becomes, in time, a path. The footprints of the one who first proved "Japanese can do it" — the next generation can walk them as a road. The individual who went where no one had gone becomes, before anyone notices, the successors' very environment. A path isn't given. The first person carves it with their own feet. And that path becomes the next person's "normal."
7. Environments can be designed
The most hopeful implication of Diamond's book is, I think, here. If strength is a product of environment, then the environment is what you can design.
If Spain's pyramid took many generations, then an environment that grows players can also be made on purpose. What Aoashi's Esperion tries to draw is, probably, exactly that — not waiting for chance talent, but designing the very environment in which talent grows.
The "heat to cultivate" I read in #6 was an individual act. What I'm reading in #7 is the story of that heat piling up and, in time, becoming an environment. One coach's heat becomes one rung of the pyramid. That's how an accumulation of time gets built.
8. Observation, and environment
Finally, to OrbitLens.
The most dangerous thing about observation is attributing strength to the individual alone. A score of "this person is excellent / low" usually ignores the environment they were placed in. Accumulation built in a blessed environment, and grit endured alone in a barren one, both get rounded into the same "individual score."
This is continuous with #5's unconscious discrimination. Measure the individual without seeing the environment gap, and you misread an environment gap as a talent gap. High just for being from Spain, low just for being from Japan — observation like that preserves the structure as is.
So EIS observes by separating domains. It doesn't mix them. It keeps the relative-within-the-same-environment and the absolute-across-organizations apart. And it tries to observe the accumulation of time (surviving code) together with that person's context. Before pushing strength onto the individual, it asks what environment made it possible. Observation, the moment it overlooks environment, becomes an apparatus of discrimination.
Strength is a product of environment and accumulation. So before measuring the individual, see the environment. And design the better environment.
You can't choose the environment you were born into. But the environment you stand in next, and the environment you build for someone else — those, you can choose.
Books
Next
In #8, Aoashi again. A storied Spanish club — when does its tradition and pride tilt into "a kingdom that lost its essence"? When winning becomes the end, a culture that was an infinite game gets swallowed by a finite one. Read alongside James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.
This is a personal reading of Aoashi (Yugo Kobayashi), Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond), and Distinction (Pierre Bourdieu).
The Japanese version lives on OrbitLens Library.
OrbitLens / machuz
Top comments (0)