Ontological shift
What we call “Japan” is not a container with institutions inside; it is a reverberating pattern of eight simultaneous thought-feel loops. When the loops synchronize we experience “state capacity”; when they de-phase we experience “crisis.” The border, flag and treasury are side-effects, not pre-conditions.

States are reflexive hallucinations
The nodes (army, merchants, priests . . . ) are biological humans, but the state emerges when those humans watch themselves being watched by the other nodes and adjust their next utterance accordingly. The dataset shows that this mirror-game can crash (1945) or levitate (1964) without any change in physical territory.

Feeling is prior to force
Capacity–Stress predicts major institutional breaks 1-3 years before they appear in law or GDP. Affect is the early-warning radar of the collective mind; ignore it and the cognitive layer will keep producing plans that nobody has the emotional fuel to execute (1990-2012).

Coherence is the scarce resource
Abstraction (ideas) is cheap; coherence (aligned ideas) is expensive. The twentieth-century tragedies came not from poverty of concepts but from affective overload that collapsed coherence—the nodes could still think, but no longer in the same language.

States learn only when thought and feeling learn together
Successful phase transitions (1955-73) display a 1:1 slope between the National Thought Index and the National Feeling Index. Policies that target one without the other—structural reform without emotional narrative, or populist narrative without cognitive upgrade—are homeostatically rejected within ~5 years (see 1920, 1974, 1998).

Collapse is a mood attractor, not an external event
Defeat, earthquake, oil shock are perturbations; whether the lattice amplifies or dampens them is encoded in the pre-shock Capacity–Stress spread. Thus the same physical war (1943-45) drives the system through the floor, while the 2011 triple disaster is absorbed—because the 2008-10 lattice already sat in a high-coherence, moderate-stress region.

The sovereign is the breathing rhythm itself
There is no final ruler; the closest thing to sovereignty is the phase relationship between cognition and affect across the eight nodes. When the rhythm is lost, constitutions, parliaments and emperors become decorative; when the rhythm is regained, even foreign-written constitutions can be emotionally owned (Japan 1947-1964).