Welcome to From the Tideline.
This is a philosophy newsletter that thinks from inside change itself, in an age where every relation shifts without rest.
About
The premodern frame of “place, rite, and community,” and the modern frame of “labor, progress, and career,” have both fallen away at once. We are not falling out of these frames. We live in a world where the frame we would fall into no longer exists at all.
In this new world, you are not alienated from meaning and left in despair over it. The very horizon on which meaning could take hold has vanished, and we cannot so much as hold a memory of the meaning we might mourn.
From the Tideline holds one conviction. Japan is where the fault line shows most plainly, a place that has lived both the premodern and the modern to their limits. From here, the question of what frame comes next, and of where a reason to live could still take hold, can be kept open and worked through without rest.
Against a present where every relation shifts without pause, it thinks from inside change itself. At the root of this philosophy newsletter, one unlike any other, is an idea I call mutual existence between things that contradict. Rather than forcing what differs into harmony or pressing it into one, this is about letting things stay as they are, foreign to one another, unreconciled, and yet present in the same place.
Watching these shifting and ever changing presences, I offer a way of thinking that holds the failure to understand one another and still weaves new relations from it.
Here are a few posts to start with.
Transformation of Wa
On what gets called conformity here, the unseen force that shapes a mass without anyone forming it.What the meeting of different gods became as a first experience, handed down through myth by those who came before.
Seeking the Locus of the Power to Believe in the Buddha
An On Dogen series, thinking through how a Buddhism born on the continent was received across this archipelago.
A photo essay on the ground I covered through 2025.
Who it's for
From the Tideline is written for those who want to reach a frame that comes after the existing Western one, not the meaning of life sought within it, who would rather hold what is foreign as foreign instead of smoothing it into agreement, and who want to think the world from another frame now that no single universal holds it together.
Where do we come to terms with what cannot be understood, and how do we ourselves become the buffer that stands between things that differ. That is the question I want to keep from letting go of, together with you.
Support From the Tideline
About a third of every post is open to free subscribers. The full text is for paid subscribers. I keep it that way for one clear reason. I want to share these ideas with readers over the long term, and to grow a new framework together with them.
Takahiro Mitsui
I write from two formative experiences.
The first is that I was born between three collapses, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the fall of Japan’s bubble economy. The second is that I spent the 2010s between London, a city that made its diversity real, and Tokyo, a city that did not.
One current pulls toward being gathered into one. Another breaks apart toward many. Being torn between those two tidelines is what eventually sent me looking for what came before them.
In the autumn of 2019, I set out alone to travel and research across the islands. Working through ancient history, myth, and folklore, I came to know in my body that unity in any true sense is a fiction.
Since then I have worked from two thinkers, Takaaki Yoshimoto, who traced the intricate forms of communal illusion, and Hirofumi Tsuboi, who held that no unified world of nation or people has ever existed. Thinking thoroughly from the archipelago, I have asked whether this might offer something to the world.
That is the work of From the Tideline.
