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
At its root is an idea I call mutual existence between things that do not agree. 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 here in this archipelago, I want to 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 are not satisfied by easy answers or clean harmony, who would rather hold what is foreign as foreign instead of smoothing it into agreement, and who want to think the world again 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 and grow these ideas slowly, over a long time, together with the people who read 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.
