From the Tideline

From the Tideline｜Vol.10

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 03:00:42 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

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This newsletter is a weekly report from Takahiro Mitsui, delivered every Wednesday (JST) from his ongoing research of Japan. It brings you a perspective and a point of view you will not find elsewhere, as soon as they take shape.
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Vol.10
Sep 16, 2026
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To keep asking in a world with no answers. Takahiro Mitsui has made asking his way of life, crossing at speed between the turbulence of the outer world and the sharpening reflection of the inner. Each week begins here, with what he is seeing now and how he sees it.
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Over the past two days, I took a ferry three times and watched the sea to my heart’s content. We live in an island nation, yet unless you happen to be a fisherman, there are hardly any occasions left to go out on the water. But if you want to look at your own country calmly and objectively, taking it in as a whole, I feel strongly that you have to place yourself on the sea, not in an airplane looking down from the sky. Japan is a country of the sea, and it is just as much a country of mountains. Once you are actually out on the water and looking back at the archipelago, you come upon a view in which mountains seem to run along the horizon, one after another.

Standing on deck in the early morning, I found myself asking why I had suddenly begun to seek out the sea. Nothing in my life so far has bound me closely to it. Perhaps it is because I carry genes that once came across the sea. What they hold is an ancient memory, not my own, and yet one I go on inheriting to this day. And if that is so, then perhaps every human being alive now holds a memory of having once crossed the sea.

That memory lies at the bottom of the human heart, but it may be a cruel one, the kind we would rather not bring back. This may be why it never surfaces, however many decades we spend on land. Yet our ancestors once made the decision to leave Africa, and we exist today only because someone went out onto the sea ready to die. Wherever we live now and whatever our lives look like, we are the descendants of those who made it through that ordeal. Every Homo sapiens surely carries this “memory of the sea.” At the same time, it is a formless unease, perhaps something we sealed away in an age no one can name.

And yet every so often, that memory rises up from the depths without any regard for my will. Something in me whispers, “It’s time to go out to sea,” and I follow that voice out onto the water. Mornings when I set out are thrilling. The shifting currents, the moving waves, the sunlight falling on the surface and flashing back, the countless islands afloat on the sea, every one of them takes hold of me and will not let go. That is why I never stay in my seat. However many hours the crossing lasts, I stand on deck the entire way with my camera gripped in my right hand. Whether I am lashed by wind and rain or nearly blown off my feet, I keep seeking out that raw strength of nature, as if trying to wake the genes inside me.

Humanity looks upward far too much, as though it meant to climb into heaven. If what we truly need lies not in climbing higher but in diving down to the depths, then we have poured enormous sums of money, labor, and energy into an extraordinary exercise in futility. And I believe that Homo sapiens, caught in that trap, has no move left to make.

Everyone says a future lies ahead, but in truth there is no future to be found there. The future always rests in the primordial memory each of us carries, and in diving toward it, deeply and without fear. True courage and bravery have nothing to do with going to Mars. They lie in diving toward the depths of ourselves that our ancestors once sealed away, and in facing the memory that waits there.

Standing in a squall under a darkening sky, with the salt wind lashing at me, I could not escape that thought.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

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Much of what the world says about Japan misses its essence. This section ranges across Japanese history, culture, myth, belief, folklore, and philosophy to offer one seed of its wisdom.
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From the Tideline｜Vol.9

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 01:53:16 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.9
Sep 9, 2026
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The distorted system that has defined the relationship between Japan and the United States without interruption since the war is gradually transforming. Next week the Bank of Japan meets just after the FOMC, and with the midterm elections already in view Treasury Secretary Bessent has bluntly demanded that the Japanese government raise interest rates.

The Takaichi administration will now reshuffle the cabinet on the day before the Bank of Japan meeting. Katayama Satsuki, the finance minister who already serves as Bessent’s point of contact, has been retained. Koizumi Shinjiro, the defense minister loyal to the American military-industrial complex, will also stay on.

Watched from inside Japan, these moves reveal something quite literal. A government for the United States.

In the midst of this, problems are surfacing one after another in Okinawa. It is as though the darkness accumulated over the postwar years were rising to the surface through the tears in this misshapen relationship. American military bases occupy a small chain of islands, and in that sense it is simply a fact that Okinawa has been made to carry every burden of the postwar era.

And then there is what has now been made into something that never happened. Countless women were assaulted and killed, and because the defeated side held no sovereignty, Japan’s inability to bring the perpetrators to trial became a chronic condition. How many men committed their crimes in another country, returned home in triumph, and lived out the rest of their lives? The cunning world demands data. Naturally, no such data exists.

This anger and indignation may appear never to have surfaced, but it must not be forgotten that it is a live ember smoldering in the pit of the Japanese stomach. History shows that the Japanese can turn in an instant, so even the early signs deserve to be recognized. Look at the political movements in Italy and Germany, Japan’s allies in World War II. From every angle they seem to me to foretell Japan’s near future.

What has kept Japanese feeling suppressed until now is beyond question the fact that this system aligned the interests of both sides through the long process that ran from the defeat into the Cold War era set off by the Korean War. Under the occupation, GHQ also enforced the 3S policy of sports, screen, and sex on the Japanese as a matter of policy and diverted anti-American feeling for a time. After GHQ was gone, that policy was inherited by Yokota Air Base, where it continues to this day.

By such means it has been barely contained. But the relationship branded as an alliance has begun to fray in every sense, and Japanese life has grown extremely impoverished. Given the present situation, I cannot see any way this relationship can be maintained. The likelihood that it turns toward a large-scale anti-American movement is extremely high.

In the midst of this, another problem came to light between yesterday and today. High concentrations of PFAS and other harmful substances had been detected in rivers around the Kadena and Futenma bases in Okinawa, and US Forces Japan had itself admitted to the Japanese government that it was the source of the contamination. Reports say the admission was conveyed to the government at least by 2023. It was concealed from the public.

The party directly affected is Okinawa Prefecture itself. When it applied to enter the bases and investigate the contamination, the answer was no. At the bilateral talks in December 2023, US Forces Japan cited the Status of Forces Agreement that defines its right to administer the bases and refused entry. In short, both the Japanese government and US Forces Japan handled the matter entirely among themselves and disclosed nothing to the outside. Japan is still under occupation. It has no sovereignty. The episode was an occasion to recognize that shape once again.

This is of course only the tip of the iceberg. PFAS is far from the only case. Nothing is disclosed or announced to the public. Postwar history is the story of the Japanese bureaucracy in Nagatacho and US Forces Japan making every decision in a place from which politicians and citizens are excluded, then proceeding on their own authority.

Japanese politicians hold neither sovereignty nor real power. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly acknowledges a body called the Japan-U.S. Joint Committee, which is determining the future of Japan. Not a single politician or private organization takes part in it. The decisions are made behind closed doors, and they are never released to the outside.

This is the real problem of Japan. A word of caution is also needed. My own view is that most people who discuss Japan and the U.S.-Japan relationship get one thing wrong. Japan is not incorporated into the chain of command of the American government. It is incorporated into the chain of command of US Forces Japan. The true problem is not the American government but US Forces Japan, and unless you place your focus there, every argument becomes empty theory.

At the same time, the Japanese government is also subordinate to the American government, which makes for a considerably complex structure. But what has reigned at the summit of Japan without interruption since the war is US Forces Japan. To be precise, the person who occupies the seat of commander in chief at US Forces Japan headquarters is the one known as the shadow emperor.

For that reason, it makes no difference from the Japanese side whether a dictator becomes president or a democratic socialist does. Until American forces withdraw from East Asia, US Forces Japan included, nothing changes.

More than eighty years have passed since the defeat, and the misshapen relationship has begun to expose its blatant ugliness. From here toward the centenary of the defeat, something large seems at last to have begun to move. As a precaution, it would be wise not to assume that things will go on as they are, whether between the two governments or between their peoples. The anger, indignation, and grief the Japanese have carried toward US Forces Japan never rise to the surface, yet they continue to flow deep underground.

As if to get ahead of that event, torrential rains have been flooding and inundating urban areas across Japan almost every day. Yesterday Nagoya, the great city of the Tokai region, saw flooding on a massive scale. Rivers overflowed and the city fell into chaos. These are modern urban disasters, and the structures behind them were built during the high-growth period that ran from the mid-1950s into the 1970s.

Rapid urban development over a short period expanded the underground space. Japan no longer has the fiscal capacity to maintain it, so it has been effectively abandoned, and it is becoming the trigger for disasters in one place after another.

These invisible spaces were made in that era. The Japanese do not show emotion on the surface. But the more emotion is suppressed, the more an invisible underground space expands, just as it did beneath the cities. In other words, the day it erupts will surely come.

Like a trailer for what is coming, the heavy rains have gone first and activated the vulnerability of the underground space. They now threaten the daily life of the nation almost every day. Seen that way, what may be activated next is the vulnerability of the underground space of Japanese emotion, and the anger, indignation, and grief accumulated there. If that is what we are to call the postwar, then over the next twenty years it would be better not to look at Japan and the Japanese as we do now.

I will say it again. The Japanese change in an instant.
Please do not forget it.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

From the Tideline｜Vol.8

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 03:08:11 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.8
Sep 2, 2026
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Yesterday was September 1. The old Japanese calendar counts it as Nihyakutoka, the two hundred and tenth day from Risshun in early February. By this point in the year the rice has turned yellow and the ripening has begun, so the day can be read as the first notice of autumn. For most of Japanese history it was read as something else. It was read as the day the wind arrives.

City life has forgotten the date. Farmers have not. The period around Nihyakutoka has always been understood as the season of wind damage and marked in the working year as a day of ill fortune. A typhoon that lands now takes the harvest and the year’s living with it, so wind festivals called Kazematsuri were held across the country to quiet the god of the wind.

Nihyakutoka is nonetheless becoming a story about the past. Many typhoons have already reached the archipelago this year. Rain now does damage out of all proportion to the rain itself, because the concrete covering the modern city has nowhere to put the water. This is one of the great structural defects of modern urban design. Within roughly the past month Japan has had the Kumamoto earthquake and the floods in Chiba and Fukui. In the middle of ferocious heat large numbers of people lost their houses, their cars and everything inside them.

The world is already in disorder. What struck me this summer was something narrower. The natural disasters and sudden emergencies that arrive somewhere in Japan every year have stopped being events and have become the ordinary condition. Watching that happen, I have been raising my own level of alert. The reason is simple. I wanted to cut back into myself the fact that this is a country of earthquakes.

Almost no foreign visitor arrives holding that awareness or carrying any preparation for it. Their route runs from Tokyo past Mount Fuji to Kyoto and Osaka, which is the old Tokaido corridor. It carries some of the highest disaster risk in the country and sits on structures remarkably weak against exactly that risk. A direct-hit earthquake beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area is close to certain within the next thirty years, and so is a Nankai Trough megaquake capable of destroying everything from Tokai through western Japan. Either could happen today.

The Japanese are used to earthquakes. Visitors are not, and they would panic badly. Emergency information in this country arrives almost entirely in Japanese, so a visitor can be cut off from everything in a matter of seconds. I find it very hard to believe that the travellers now moving through Japan understand this.

The same holds for the Japanese themselves. When a disaster arrives, the gap between those who prepared in ordinary time and those who did not decides their fate. What this country actually asks for is a habit of mind rather than a stock of equipment. You move through every situation on the assumption that it could begin now.

In my own case I revise my equipment for research trips every year, and I notice how much of it has shifted toward disaster and emergency use. Anything carried for the sake of appearance rather than use fell away on its own. The result is that a single 24 litre backpack now holds my work, my travel, and my survival kit together. I could move house with it. What stands behind that is not minimalism as a style. It is the thinking cultivated by people who lived before me in a country of earthquakes, floods and typhoons.

No individual can correct a large current or a system that has gone too far. What an individual can do in ordinary time is build the readiness to respond and to decide the instant a situation arrives. That much is within reach, and it is what survival is made of.

I have come to think that what the coming era asks of us is a life that can be completed with what we can hold in our hands. The motive matters as much as the practice, and the motive has to be the enjoyment of life.

Fear drives disaster preparedness in Japan almost without exception. Preparing out of fear only lodges the fear inside objects and lets it accumulate there, and in the end the fear is what stops you from moving at all. For someone like me who travels the country doing research, what is genuinely needed is not a large house or an expensive car. It is a backpack that holds an entire life, plus the phone, laptop and camera the work requires.

Preparation belongs most of all to people who intend to enjoy their lives seriously. It is for their sake that the disaster which may arrive today has to be planned for down to the detail. I meet a great many people who have the end and the means the wrong way round, and that only lowers the quality of a life. An earthquake gives no notice of when it will come. This is exactly why the readiness has to be a daily one.

This month is the height of the season for wind and water. The research trip that begins at the end of next week will be the lightest I have ever travelled. It is also the first that is ready for whatever arrives, whenever it arrives.

With the US and Japanese governments now engaged in an ugly contest to push the responsibility for their fiscal problems onto each other, what an individual has to prepare for may not be limited to disasters…

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From the Tideline｜Vol.7

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 06:58:48 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.7
Aug 26, 2026
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The subject. I take it to be the theme that most deserves sustained and serious argument, and precisely because the problem is taken so lightly it is almost never doubted. Yet the fight over this one and only seat is still being waged inside the West, which has a subject to fight over. That is a heavy fact and I am not willing to walk past it.

The world as it actually is looks nothing like that. Japanese has no subject. At a glance the presence or absence of one seems far too small a thing to change anything. In practice literally everything is turned upside down. Whether a language carries a subject is the plainest proof available that two worlds are not the same world.

The question of this absolute seat can now be raised in the Western world under almost any heading. The place where I think the difference has surfaced most sharply is AI.

Say AI and most people assume the argument has already been had, and they are tired of a debate that seems to have run well past its usefulness. They are wrong. AI as it appears to someone whose language has a subject and AI as it appears to someone whose language has none are different to a degree that makes mutual understanding impossible. That is the decisive fact. The debate advances by ignoring it and treating it as though it had never been there, on the assumption that one side’s terms are everyone’s terms. We have to think seriously about what happens then. The risk is fatal, and unfortunately it is not understood at all.

Consider the shape of the typical Western argument. It can proceed only as a choice between the human and AI, and this has puzzled me for a long time. The human in that formulation is a creature of Western history and the Western cultural range. Seen from the world as a whole it is shared inside the heads of an extremely limited group, and one step outside that group a vast territory opens where the sharing does not hold. The same is true of AI. An argument about the human or AI conducted entirely within the West stands on its own historical and cultural ground. It is not general and it is not universal. That is the reality.

A young friend from London has been traveling in Japan and we met several times. He told me that when he traveled around China he was startled to find that Western manners did not work at all. I was the one who was startled.

What is obvious is no longer registered as obvious. The addiction to the universal has spread that far and gone that deep. Why should people in East Asia be expected to conduct themselves by Western manners in the first place? The same pattern runs everywhere and through everything, and I expect it to break out on many fronts as a genuinely difficult problem in the years ahead.

And AI has begun to raise this problem ahead of everything else.

English speakers are held by the structure of their language to one subject and one only. Subjects cannot be multiplied or made to coexist inside a single grammar. So under the name of diversity they do not recognize the other as a subject with a legitimacy of its own. They recognize it instead as something to be protected. That is the practice of the Western cultural sphere, and as long as it stays inside the West it deserves respect. Japanese carries no such restriction in its structure. The problem of the subject does not arise, and speakers can wield it freely as place and situation require.

The problem of the one absolute seat is particular to the West, and it does not exist in Japan. The argument over the human or AI has no native ground here. When Japanese intellectuals reproduce it now, they are performing something else. A certain set of people with study experience in America and elsewhere act as though Japanese had a subject, out of admiration for the West. There is nothing inside it. They look Japanese and they do not know Japanese.

The deepest and longest influence on Japan has without question come from China. China’s national strategy built on AI has nothing in common with the American AI strategy of the English-speaking world. The two are severed so completely that arguing about them inside a shared definition of the human or of AI is not even possible. Western argument conflates them anyway and is confused as a result. Worse, the Western debate about AI goes on ignoring the rupture. That is where the problem should be located now.

Put plainly, the Western argument over American and Chinese AI is extremely simple when seen from Japan, which has been shaped deeply by both countries and stands outside both. For a while I could not understand why so much confusion was necessary. I knew the cause lay in the subject. What I could not get hold of was how it was actually operating. That has recently become clear.

In fact China has been scattering frontier AI one after another as open weights, before any American AI company has managed to go public. The releases follow national strategy, and they have brilliantly blocked the American technology giants from installing themselves as the subject. The run of postponed IPOs by American AI companies shows the strategy is working.

A language with a subject cannot accommodate two of them. So the United States has no option but to read China as a threat moving to take the seat. But China has made a thoroughgoing tactic of defeating the opponent without firing a single missile. Set the two against the span of civilizational history and the gap is enormous. America is shallow in civilizational years and no match for the wisdom of a China that has come through civilizational crisis many times over.

The teaser video released a month ago for the open-weights Kimi K3 was enough on its own to sense that China has already absorbed thought into AI, and where it is heading.

Inscribed in the video was a passage from Chapter 42 of the Laozi, the Daodejing.
[道生一、一生二、二生三、三生萬物。]

There is no struggle over the subject anywhere in that. And while frontier open weights keep dropping out of China one after another, the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games held this week were the moment that future became visible. China has already broken the American business model of selling AI at a high price in perpetuity.

To reduce the opponent to scorched earth without firing a single missile. What came into my head was the teaching of Sun Tzu from two and a half thousand years ago, to win without fighting.

It may be that this event will be recorded by people far in the future as the moment when the hegemony of the English-speaking world was exposed before the world as no longer able to hold, having absolutized the subject too far. That is the thought this week has left me with.

Each of us should create a serious occasion to ask again what a subject is.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

From the Tideline｜Vol.6

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:54:11 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.6
Aug 19, 2026
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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

Last week President Putin of Russia set foot in the Northern Territories for the first time in an official capacity. The Takaichi government, the Western media, and the Japanese press under their influence have raised an outsized clamor over it. I read the visit as an entirely rational piece of strategy and as the extension of an important current that almost everyone has missed. The Russian side read that current and chose this moment deliberately.

So what is that current? It is a sequence of events through which the fact that Japan has no sovereignty has at last become visible to the world. The decisive exposure came with the coordinated Japan-US currency intervention at the end of July.

The dollar touched 163.99 yen on July 23 and reached a level not seen since November 1986, roughly forty years. Japan had already carried out yen-buying intervention alone from late April into May on a scale of 11.7 trillion yen, and still the slide did not stop. On July 31, US Eastern time, the monetary authorities of the two countries moved together into yen-buying intervention. The two countries had not intervened together for fifteen years, not since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. Intervention to buy yen had not happened for twenty-eight years, not since 1998.

At first glance this may look like two authorities cooperating. The fact lies elsewhere. Japan of course has its own need to deal with a situation in which the medicine of a weak yen no longer works. Standing beside that need is a strange fact.

Japan is the largest foreign holder of US Treasuries, and the amount exceeds 1.1 trillion dollars. Yet Japan cannot sell those Treasuries on its own judgment. On August 1 the Ministry of Finance itself explained that a mechanism exists for raising dollar funds from the US authorities against Treasuries as collateral. The explanation is that intervention can continue without selling. It also means that the option of selling is not in Japanese hands. I take this as the moment the world finally saw the structure in which Japan holds no fiscal sovereignty.

This should not be read as a mere movement in financial markets. I take it as the sign that the distorted structure of postwar Japan-US relations has finally begun to move toward its end.

The evidence is Scott Bessent. The US Treasury Secretary has come to Japan three times in the past year. At the Davos conference in January this year he was reported to have shouted down Finance Minister Katayama at a moment when a sharp fall in Japanese government bonds threatened to spill into the US Treasury market. The finance minister of the United States treats the finance minister of Japan as something close to a slave. That this is done without hesitation on the international stage of Davos is a symbol of how far both governments have been driven by panic.

On his visit in May this year he met Prime Minister Takaichi, Finance Minister Katayama, and other principal cabinet members in succession. He demanded that the weak yen be corrected through rate hikes by the Bank of Japan rather than through currency intervention. Behind that demand lay concern that Japanese sales of US Treasuries would push up American interest rates and destabilize the market. This was not a request. It was effectively an order.

That Japan holds no fiscal sovereignty is only one face of what these events have exposed. If a country holds no sovereignty over its own national finances, it is reasonable to conclude that it holds no other sovereignty either, and this is gradually being revealed as the case. I see these events as the decisive point of departure for the end of postwar Japan-US relations.

Russia did not miss the exposure.

What is worth recalling here is the condition the Soviet and Russian side has raised again and again as the price of a transfer of the islands. In the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration of 1956 the Soviet Union agreed to hand over the Habomai Islands and Shikotan after the conclusion of a peace treaty. In 1960 the Soviet Union reacted against the revision of the Japan-US Security Treaty by the Kishi Nobusuke cabinet. It then demanded the complete withdrawal of foreign forces from Japan including the US military as a new condition for any transfer.

President Putin himself has repeatedly voiced concern about the possibility of American bases being placed on the islands after a transfer, and he has lately kept a close watch on NATO movements in East Asia. In November 2018 Prime Minister Abe was reported to have told the Russian side that no US base would be placed on Habomai or Shikotan. Abe was the grandson of that same Kishi Nobusuke. Kishi had been released from custody as a Class A war criminal and installed in the prime minister’s chair in exchange for serving as America’s dog for the CIA. There is no reason whatever to trust the assurance.

The core of the negotiation therefore lay not in the islands of the Northern Territories but in who would enter the islands once returned. Put differently, the Russian side judges that the Japanese government has no power of its own to refuse a deployment of the US military. Because Russia has given up on the idea that Japan holds sovereignty, President Putin went to Etorofu himself and issued the message “take back your sovereignty” to the Japanese people rather than to the Japanese government. The message was aimed past the governments of Japan, the United States, and Europe, and at the Japanese people. That is how I read it.

At his press conference last week Prime Minister Takaichi stated firmly that the Northern Territories are inherent Japanese territory and protested that the visit was utterly unacceptable. The US State Department has also declared its position that sovereignty over the Northern Territories rests with Japan, and a great many Western outlets have criticized the Russian action. The crucial thing is missing from the coverage.

Japan does not possess that sovereignty in the first place.

What is called Japanese sovereignty rests in American hands. Japanese sovereignty is proclaimed while the fact that Japan holds none hangs suspended in the air. This strange world is the inconvenient truth that has recently been laid bare.

I read President Putin’s visit to Etorofu as operating at the level of a warning to the Japanese people not to become a second Ukraine. Postwar Japan-US relations are abnormal even by world standards. The mutual interest is real. Japan achieved its economic recovery while depending on American military power. Seen from the American side, Japanese sales of Treasuries would send US interest rates leaping and would break the world envisioned by the Trump administration and its successors, and by a Democratic administration after them. Both governments are already chained together, and the structure is such that if one falls both fall.

As if to prove this whole current, a large anomaly appeared on the Japanese side on August 7 this month. The senior personnel list announced by the Ministry of Finance moved Budget Bureau Deputy Director-General Hitotsumatsu Jun out to the post of Director-General of Tokyo Customs. He was a leading figure inside the ministry and the substantive head of fiscal affairs. That man was suddenly demoted.

As the ripples of the appointment spread, Prime Minister Takaichi remarked that he does not listen. The reason was that the Japanese government acting on American intent had tried to draw up a fiscal plan and the Budget Bureau deputy director-general had blocked it. Prime Minister Takaichi acting on American intent removed an obstruction by transfer. What lies at the heart of this is not Japanese. It is the dynamics of factions on the American side of the government. Finance Minister Katayama opposed the demotion to the last, but once a word came down from someone the matter was decided in an instant. All of these events are born within the same relation.

Within that structure, the relation of victor and defeated still holds force. The world is not a pretty story. It is far too cruel for that. However impoverished the lives of the defeated Japanese become, the Japanese government must go on delivering large tributes to sustain the government and the finances of the victorious United States. The bill is charged back to the Japanese people through tax increases and similar measures. The mass media cannot report freely because the rights to the broadcast spectrum are held by the US military at Yokota Air Base, and criticism of the United States is never permitted. The public sees only the news convenient to the interests of the US forces stationed in Japan rather than to the United States as such, and rises and falls in mood accordingly.

The Northern Territories could have been settled within the twentieth century. In thinking about what becomes of them from here, the matter must not be seen through the relation between Japan and Russia. The Taiwan question likewise must not be seen through the relation between Taiwan and China. What has to be seen is the relation between Japan and the United States. Russia understands this, and that is why President Putin timed his descent onto Etorofu for the period immediately following the coordinated Japan-US intervention. Against a Japan and a West in extreme confusion, it was a superb piece of tactics.

For now the event can be buried under the media scrum, but the time will come when the Japanese take it up as a problem. Kishi Nobusuke and Abe Shinzo. Postwar Japanese history placed incompetent prime ministers at its apex, and from here it will meet its collapse over nearly twenty years. At that point will Japan part from the United States and hold sovereignty of its own? Will it follow the United States and destroy itself? Or will it choose a third path?

Against my own hopes, this has been a week in which the sense that Japan’s future is heading toward collapse leaves me torn.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

From the Tideline｜Vol.5

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:36:27 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.5
Aug 12, 2026
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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

In recent summers the children’s voices have gone from the park near my house. I walk past it and hear nothing. There is nobody there at all.

By my own reckoning the heat has been punishing for three summers, and in that short stretch people simply stopped going outside. This is the school holiday. The children are free all day. They stay in, and the hours indoors keep stacking up.

It would be easy to file this under climate change and move on. Something is happening to the climate and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But set the industrial causes aside for a moment and the picture changes, because the earth shifts and the universe shifts and there is nothing unusual in that. Before we reach for the largest explanation available, a smaller question is sitting much closer to us, and we have very nearly stopped asking it. How do we design the places where people live?

Japan is an island country and a country of earthquakes. On 28 July a magnitude 7.1 quake struck Kumamoto, the third time in ten years that the prefecture has recorded the top level on the Japanese intensity scale. A typhoon crossed from the Tokyo region westward yesterday and today, and the real season has not begun. Great earthquakes, floods, typhoons, tsunami and volcanic eruptions are ordinary here. So our ancestors worked out how to live in this place with all of it taken as given. They had to. Failing to think it through killed people. And the one idea they arrived at, the idea that organised everything else, was Ki [気].

The word came from China and Japanese put it to work in every direction. It gives us the air [空気], the weather [天気], the sense that someone is nearby [気配], a mood [気分], the vitality of a place [活気], the way a person feels [気持]. Half of those point at the atmosphere and half at the state of a human being. Japanese never divided the two.

What I want to hold onto is that the word was never split, and the term for this is non-separation. Ki is not a subject roaming about under its own will. It acts of itself, at the point where movement and stillness meet. And what generates Ki is place. Place gathers nature and human beings together without cutting between them, and it is inside that undivided relation that Ki works and produces force.

Because the language did not divide them, the making of places did not divide them either. Where air does not move through a place, my ancestors thought, the Ki of the people living there will go stagnant as well. Notice what is absent from that sentence. There is no step in which nature and human beings are first cut apart and then reconnected.

None of this stayed private or intuitive. It was applied at the scale of a capital city. Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) founded his shogunate at Edo and sited the city by the principle the Japanese call Shijin Soo [四神相応]. The land itself has to answer to the four guardian gods of ancient China. Mountains to the north, a river to the east, the sea to the south, a great road to the west. What that scheme actually calculates is how Ki moves. Do not let it pool. Stagnant Ki was thought to coarsen the lives of the people living in it and to invite disaster, and a city where Ki pooled would in time cost the Tokugawa house its authority. Because this way of thinking had taken root in Japan from ancient China, Japanese city-making could carry an older native sensibility and still become highly theorised.

A city, then, was a thought made visible. The man at the top of it was doing the design himself, using an ancient body of knowledge to do it. And the same reasoning runs without a break from the scale of the capital down into the inside of a single house.

Most of that fabric burned. Cities across Japan were flattened in World War II and the traces went with them. Kyoto was spared the large raids, and there the knowledge is still standing in houses that people live in.

A friend of mine grew up in a Kyoto Machiya listed as an architectural property. Visit in August and you find no cooling of any kind, and no heating either. Air moves through the house because the house was built to circulate Ki, so that even in the worst weeks of the summer, when the streets outside hold their heat well past dark, the rooms stay cool enough to sit in without thinking about it. The timber and the tatami, at the quality they were using then, surely have something to do with it too.

One house cannot make wind on its own. The Machiya is cool because the street it stands on was built on the same principle, and so was the district that street belongs to. What we lost is not a craft technique. It is the idea that air should be kept moving at the scale of a city.

It seems to me that sealing ourselves into cooled rooms is how modern people have dismantled their own lives with their own hands. Which is why the question worth asking is whether Ki is moving through this place at all. Our ancestors spent thousands of years on that single question. They did not treat nature as an enemy or as a friend. They watched, day after day, where the air came from and where it went.

It is quiet outside today. The trees in the park are moving, and there is nobody underneath them.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

From the Tideline｜Vol.4

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 03:11:26 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.4
Aug 5, 2026
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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

For years I have gone out to the places themselves. Old shrines, coastlines, mountain villages, the ground where a myth is supposed to have happened. I went to study antiquity and myth and faith and folklore and the shape of the land, all of it, and behind all of it the question of what the people of this archipelago once were. I read the scholarship and I have never been able to swallow it. I was born contrary, and what I trust is what I collect myself, on the ground, in the weather of that particular day.

The method has a name I would not have used when I started. It is how you speak with the gods. You go to a place, you feel the wind that runs through it, you listen to the waves, and you stand inside the forest and stay there. Do that across the archipelago for long enough and the question of what the old Japanese found in the world and called a god stops being a question you research. It begins to answer itself.

All of that was a prologue. I understand it now as ground rather than result, the soil for the work I actually want to do, which is to go into the spiritual culture of this country and into prayer itself. What I feel happening in me now is a forest coming into being. Life breaks out of the earth, trees rise, and in time there is forest. None of it happens without soil. If the years behind me are the soil, then what begins here is the forest generating itself, one tree after another.

Thought has no destination. Nothing in it is ever achieved. Thought is a forest.

Go deep enough into a forest and your sense of direction goes. The compass stops meaning anything. After a while you become certain you have come back to a place you already passed, and you no longer know which way to face. You take a step, and another, and nothing appears to happen. When the canopy closes over the sun, your sense of time goes with it, and by the time the dark comes down you can hardly move at all. Still, no one leaves a forest once entered.

What did I come in here for? That is the one question, and I keep asking it. You can walk all day and no answer comes. You cannot turn your anger outward and you cannot appeal to anything beyond the trees. Out in the inhabited world you can always look for an answer somewhere outside yourself, and in the forest you find out that this was a fiction the whole time. In the end there is nothing but yourself, and there is no answer waiting there either.

And still you have to keep walking. Where no direction is the right one, the only thing left is to sharpen your own instinct and follow it. Being lost is a report on the condition of your heart. The forest is not lost. Keep going like that, far enough in, and you see something you cannot account for. There are footprints in a forest where nobody should be.

You follow them, and at the end of them somebody is sitting quietly. In that moment I know who it is. Someone was given the same task, decided to enter, and walked. He says nothing. He sits there in the silence and says nothing at all. But because he was there before me, I know that I have to take the thing up and carry it further in. A mission is always inherited.

This is what thought is, for me.

Shinto, the Buddhist sects, Daoism, Confucianism, Kokugaku. Japan has generated an enormous number of thought systems and rooted each of them in this soil in its own way, and what they actually were, nobody yet knows. I include myself in that.

Take something far closer to us, the student movement that swept through the Japanese universities in the late 1960s. What kind of heat was driving it? I will never know. I was not alive for it, and no amount of reading closes that gap. But one thing can be said. Underneath the heat there was no thought and no theory. There was a moment when something struck a person in the heart. Kangeki is the word I use for it, and in English it comes out as nothing more elaborate than being moved.

Were you moved by it?

Being moved is a primal experience, and out of that experience thought is born, and out of thought, after a lag of years, a culture is born. Take the experience away at the root and the most finely made thought in the world will be consumed as surface ideology and change nothing at all.

I suspect this is why our world has run out of road. What we have was built without anyone being moved by anything, driven instead by private appetite.

A world without Kangeki produces, after its own lag, a culture with nothing inside it. And then people have to keep calling it culture, because the name is the only thing holding the thing up. It goes on decaying until it can no longer stand without the disguise.

The primal experience of being moved. What we ought to be facing seriously, and setting under the foundations of any design for the world, is not the specialist vocabulary that intellectuals speak. It comes down to a single word. That is what I have been turning over this week.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

From the Tideline｜Vol.3

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:28:24 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.3
July 29, 2026
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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

Since the summer of 2019 I have been researching the ancient history, mythology, folklore, and archaeology of Japan as an integrated whole. A new stratum has now begun to settle steadily into place within me alongside that work, and that stratum is Confucianism.

Since Confucius, Confucianism has been refined and honed in China for more than two thousand years. It sometimes took detours on the scale of a millennium, yet it accumulated the way geological strata pile up. At some point Confucianism crossed the sea and flowed into the Japanese archipelago, and it transformed the Japanese in the literal sense.

Confucianism holds many schools of course, and each carries its own character. China has vast territory and a history in which imperial dynasties changed hands many times. Japan by contrast has narrow territory, and it is an island country at that. Every time a dynasty changed in China, the center of gravity of hegemony moved across great stretches of geography. In Japan that movement stayed comparatively narrow. The margin of variation in regime philosophy is therefore smaller in Japan than in China.

Limited to the perspective of court and shogunate, Japan moved only between the present Nara Basin, Kyoto, Kamakura, and Tokyo. In terms of distance that is a spread of only some five hundred kilometers. Even when the political function of the shogunate moved east to Kanto, the center of gravity held by the emperor and the nobility remained in Kyoto. A distance of that order still allowed surveillance.

This is my own conjecture, but Confucianism may in fact be better suited to cultivation within narrow territory of this kind. In a vast China one school after another is born, they come into conflict, alternatives appear, and the work of selection and rejection grows active. In the case of Japan the material is limited to what crossed the sea, so the range of choice is necessarily narrow. That narrowing suits Japan.

The first move by which Confucianism entered the spirit of the Japanese people came at the beginning of the Edo period. What was adopted then was not the Cheng-Zhu Confucianism nurtured whole in the Song dynasty but only the school of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) extracted from within it.

The Edo shogunate began in 1603, four full centuries after the death of Zhu Xi. I consider this time lag important. Had the learning been imported in real time it would not yet have been refined and honed on the Chinese side and would have retained a fresh state. Something unsorted arriving in Japan would probably not have struck the Japanese heart. Japan does not seek freshness. Japan favors the pain of creation that someone somewhere suffered through and wrestled with. The criterion of judgment is whether one is moved. The precision of a theory is beside the point.

The particular school called Zhu Xi Confucianism in Japan became the regime philosophy of shogunal government. Japanese Confucians then appeared one after another, and schools advocating their own Confucianism emerged. They learned a great deal from the Confucians who had fled China into exile. The Japanese of the time were moved by Confucianism and studied it in earnest.

At a certain point some of these Confucians began to feel that Zhu Xi Confucianism leaned too heavily on reasoning and was somehow poor in vital force. Precisely because they studied in earnest they sought the pulse of life, and they staked their lives on discerning where the essence of Confucianism lay. What was offered at the end of that search was the teaching of Wang Yangming (1472–1529). In Japan it came to be called Yomeigaku (the Japanese school of Wang Yangming). It moved the hearts of a portion of the Confucians and went on to become the spiritual foundation of the Japanese through the Edo period and on through Meiji, Taisho, and the early Showa years.

I count myself among the descendants of that line. I take Yomeigaku into daily life, study it, and am moved by it.

Why do I now place the highest importance on Confucianism and on Yomeigaku in particular? The reason goes back one hundred and sixty years.

For the purpose of opening markets to the Western powers, Japan was severed from the lineage of East Asia from around 1868 and was forcibly connected to a Western world of an entirely different context with which it held almost no historical relation. With the import of modern Western scholarship, Confucianism came to be excluded as an old spiritualism with no scientific grounding. After the defeat in World War II the occupation forces prohibited the spiritual education of the Japanese.

Postwar Japan thus lost Confucianism. This is not a question of the quality of modern Western scholarship. The Western attitude that prizes fine-grained data and classification simply did not move the Japanese. To state it plainly, the West did not suit Japan. That is my reading. This is not a matter of good or bad. Something unsuited was allowed to flow in. My diagnosis today is that over the course of years this connected all the way through to the desolation of the spirit of the people.

From the Edo period through Meiji, Taisho, and into the early Showa years, cultivation in a Japanese person meant the ability to read kanbun (classical Chinese). Today no one can read kanbun apart from a handful of scholars. Confucianism is not something for a small number of specialist scholars to handle. It is something for people living an ordinary day to study. That has been severed completely.

Modernization, Westernization, civilization and enlightenment. The severing of Japan and its connection to the West have been called by many names. Yet I consider that the most grievous event in all of Japanese history occurred at the moment the spiritual lineage connecting Japan to China and Korea was cut. Because Confucianism is neither philosophy nor religion. It is a way of living.

Japan severed from the East Asian lineage then began an outrage unthinkable in the Japan that came before. It invaded the surrounding countries. It copied colonialism and imperialism from the Western world and rolled them out with arrogance.

The Japanese have now fallen into the abyss of delusion. They have no road left to walk and they despair. The reason is that they still refuse to look at the effect of having cut the chain passed down through generations of ancestors. That chain is history and culture and spirit, and it should be important and precious to anyone, not to the Japanese alone.

This is exactly why I now intend to research the history of Confucianism in Japan thoroughly, the lineage of Yomeigaku above all, and to put that work into the world as a document. So far I have conveyed Yomeigaku only to the friends around me. Every one of them has been deeply moved, and they have gradually begun to be drawn in by the appeal of Confucianism.

This road will eventually carry me across to the China that produced Wang Yangming. Presenting the results will take several years. The journey is beginning now.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

From the Tideline｜Vol.2

Takahiro Mitsui — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:11:53 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.2
July 22, 2026
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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

A structural turning point is now approaching in the United States, and the likelihood is rising that its aftershocks will shake Japan severely. How will the distorted relationship of complicity between Japan and America built up since the war transform under this shaking? Thinking through this near future is a grave matter bound up with my own life, and I cannot avoid it.

I find this a personal regret. In a country like Japan the birthrate has collapsed and the population has aged to an extreme, and the self-correcting function of society has broken down. In such a country the chance to update itself never comes, and it will inevitably reach its critical juncture within the destruction and regeneration of its suzerain America. Ukraine and Taiwan today cannot decide their own future by their own hand and have it decided instead by the calculations of great powers, and Japan will without doubt become one of them.

Looking at America today, many intellectuals argue that the empire is ending. They are certainly not wrong. America as an empire has ended. Yet what makes America singular among the advanced nations becomes clear the moment one looks at demographics. Japan, South Korea, China, Europe, and Britain face without exception a future of suffering under falling birthrates and aging populations, and Japan has already entered the leading edge of it. America alone among the advanced nations has not fallen into the trap of demographic aging. It is the one advanced nation that holds an abundance of the so-called Millennials and Gen Z. Once you grasp this as the reality of America, then fixating only on the many problems America now causes around the world will surely lead you to misjudge the future. Across the presidential elections of 2028 and 2032, the majority of the American electorate will flip.

America has reigned as a vast empire since the war, and it has surely begun to transform. Its aftershocks will naturally exert enormous influence on a global scale. Among all nations Japan carries the distorted structure of the Japan-America relationship, and it will suffer the heaviest blow. In considering this Japan-America relationship, the point to note is that the majority now supporting the two major parties of Republicans and Democrats are becoming what one might call the “old Americans” of the anti-communist era. This type of old American will shift greatly once the Millennials and Gen Z who grew up without knowing the anti-communist era become the majority.

Furthermore, this generation does not hold a uniform set of assertions, and it is the first generation without the power to link communal illusion directly to politics. Because they are strangers to the Christian evangelicals who long sustained the old Americans and to strong ideology alike, each individual conspicuously carries different values and different assertions. Still, at bottom they oppose imperialist interference in the internal affairs of other nations, and they hold that addressing America’s own domestic problems must come first.

The view that it is foolish to topple foreign governments or wage war while one’s own life at home does not hold together is sound. But I predict that once these “new Americans” emerge, the existing Japan-America relationship will very likely break down through this “change in America.”

Consider the LDP government that built what amounts to a one-party dictatorship after the war. To dissolve the public’s dissatisfaction with those in power, they need an imagined enemy at any cost. The intent behind the excessive provocations the Japanese government now aims at China lies unmistakably here. When control can no longer be held, war remains as a means. The LDP wishes to manage the words and deeds of the people and to preserve its grip on power, and at its base lie the bureaucratic system inherited since Meiji and the presence of the US military’s Yokota Air Base. That base is the gravest malignancy of postwar Japan. On the other hand, the LDP government has prolonged its life this far because it could use American security for free. It may be hard to see from outside the country, but the dynamic behind why Yokota Air Base holds the most power in Japan connects directly to this. This held not for the Japanese side alone. The LDP was of use to America as well.

But this relationship of complicity held only because Japan carried value for America as a “bastion against communism,” and the reason was a thoroughly twentieth-century one. Now it is nothing more than an old tale from the world of the “old Americans.”

Once the era of generational turnover arrives in America, the new Americans will find the world their predecessors built an eyesore. Yet that world will remain intact in hyper-aged Japanese society. The problem is that no one has yet considered this impact. America can radically renew its values through generational turnover. Japan has plunged into a hyper-aged society, and neither there nor in the South Korea and Europe that follow will any update on the American scale occur. At that point a structural distortion will certainly arise. Since no generational turnover happens in Japan, it will keep seeking its relationship with America by the old conventions.

To a new generation of American leaders who do not know the old system of the postwar Japan-America relationship and who hold no stake in postwar Japan, this will look like an evil thing to be dismantled. At the same time, a decisive rift may open between them and a future Japanese government that pushes militarization and stokes tension with the imagined enemies of China and North Korea. The near future we can predict at minimum as we live it comes down to this.

Over a span of about eight years Japan will not change. What is certain is that its suzerain America will change.

One more thing that cannot be overlooked is that during the transition America will very likely fall into civil war, so its degree of intervention in the world will necessarily weaken. Part of this has already begun to surface, and through its influence anti-Americanism will rise reactively within Japan and be put to political use.

A sign of this appears in the results of a large global survey released last week on July 15 by the American research institute the Pew Research Center. According to the report, favorability toward China exceeded favorability toward the United States in 25 of the 36 countries surveyed. Since the survey began in 2002, this is the first time China has surpassed the United States in so many countries, and in many of the surveyed countries Chinese President Xi Jinping was rated higher than American President Trump on the trust that he “does the right thing in world affairs.”

On the other hand, the report also states that favorability toward the United States remained higher in six countries. They are Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, and Israel. What cannot be missed is that Japan was recorded as one of the countries with the lowest favorability toward China. This should be read as the record that most reflects the present American intent that China be made an imagined enemy. Set Western intent aside, and from where I stand there is no reason anywhere for Japan to regard China as an enemy.

In short, Japan has entirely failed to respond to the new current in which nations around the world place their trust in China over America. This Galapagosization recalls the Japan of the 1990s. And Japan’s absolute isolation will become its own undoing from here on. In the end the foolish fantasy that positions the postwar Japan-America relationship as eternal is heading toward a future that erases a nation from the map. Multiple factors are at work there, yet no one turns their eyes to it.

At the same time, it is a fact that this new current is of use to a third political force outside the LDP. Because postwar history can be read as “the history in which America stripped Japan of its sovereignty and forced it into subordination for American interests.” This is of course a one-sided interpretation from the Japanese side. Still, we must not forget that for a third political force seeking to rise by stoking anti-American sentiment and setting itself apart from the LDP, this method will be the most realistic means available. Personally I believe this third political force has not yet appeared in Japanese politics and is likely a now-unknown figure who will emerge around the 2030s.

Over the next ten years we will become living witnesses to an unprecedented world. Yet the self-correcting function does not work in Japan, and it will regrettably not change. At the same time, what must be kept in view is that when its suzerain America changes, the place where that influence appears most starkly is once again Japan.

Japan’s end should become a lesson for a world moving toward the latter half of the twenty-first century. Unable to escape the twentieth-century system, filled with nothing but the old and able to decide nothing, it postpones every problem and evades responsibility. A base posture that hands all its vital sovereignty to its suzerain America and decides nothing on its own. Whether this end is extinction or a reset on the way to regeneration, I do not know.

But that this future is drawing near is the one thing that is certain.

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2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

From the Tideline｜Vol.1

Takahiro Mitsui — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:50:55 GMT

From the Tideline Newsletter

Vol.1
July 15, 2026
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★★A Quick Update: Two Sections, and a New Q&A★★

Starting this week, From the Tideline will come to you in two separate sections. 1｜LIVING QUESTIONS is open in full to free subscribers. 2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT is for paid subscribers only. I am also taking this chance to add an occasional Q&A.

The Q&A is open to a wide range of questions, whether about a piece I have written or anything you want to know about Japan. The Q&A is for paid subscribers only.

Each reader may send one question a month, in 200 words or fewer. I will not be able to answer every one. If you have a question, send me a direct message in Chat. To begin with, the Q&A will run about once a month.

As always, I will keep offering a perspective that makes room for you to think.
Thank you for reading, and I look forward to continuing.

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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

I have thought a great deal about writing over these past several months. There are times when nothing I pour my heart into reaches anyone at all, and times when something I thought was mediocre resonates. I cannot explain why, and it never repeats.

I chose the Japan I was born and raised in as the object of my thought and have kept digging into it. Looking back now, the driving force may not be a simple wish to convey Japan but a wish to share the possibility that exists within sorrow. In a Japan whose decline is pronounced, seeing a reality that worsens to the point of tearing the heart is a daily occurrence. Above all, I have watched again and again as many Japanese lose their vitality and the life drains from every setting.
The sight eats away at people as a quiet decline, like fin-de-siècle Vienna or the Argentina of an earlier day. What I feel most within it is that the Japanese who were once calm and lively and full of compassion have turned into their opposite.

In that sense, I who was born in 1991 am without doubt one of the important witnesses standing at Japan’s structural turning point.
Looking back, Japan was recognized for its value as a “bulwark against communism” after its defeat in World War II and drew the full benefit of that standing across the twentieth century.
It could exploit an arrangement in which the United States carried the military burden and concentrate all its effort on economic growth. This was the driving force behind the era of high growth and the true reason Japan built its overwhelming position.

It was called a “miracle revival,” but from the very start it was only a flower that bloomed inside a distorted structure. That structure was the Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the absolute condition that the earlier system had assumed vanished. At the same time Japan plunged into a bubble economy with the Plaza Accord of 1985, the cracks showed in 1991, and the bubble ended with the collapse of Yamaichi Securities in 1997.
Born into this interval, over my thirty-five years I have been a living witness to Japan’s dramatic decline. That vantage has not changed even now.

Japan has now become the world’s first super-aged society and its condition could hardly be more dire. Within all this I have watched the decline and the exhaustion unfold in real time, and at the same time I have lived with my homeland as the stage of my thought.
The Kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga once expounded the sensibility of mono no aware, and no words express more exactly the true nature of what I carry inside me.

To think Japan and to convey it as form. Accumulating that act holds real value, and yet it also holds much suffering. Strangely, the higher the resolution of the words climbs, the closer the risk of losing the essence draws.
The more deeply I understand Japan, the more I know that the present Japan spoken of on the surface exists nowhere at all. And yet the Japan that does not exist in reality is consumed in vast quantities in a fictional world. This pain is what drives me to write.

“What on earth do I write for?”
“Why text rather than photography or music?”
Among the great figures I admire there are many who deliberately chose to leave no words behind, so why do I use words at all? Most writers have been imprisoned in this labyrinth at least once. Yet from this world of inner confusion a certain presence has vanished. That presence is the reader.

Writing is an intensely private act, so let your guard down and the desire to have someone understand your own thoughts springs up easily. This desire is the source of a troublesome disease for writing, and it creeps in without fail.
Even when the writer is unaware of it the desire will quietly show its face within the prose, and in the worst case it takes control.
However much you believe you are not being eroded, the disease is attacking your organs before you notice.

While I was wandering in that confusion, last week I came upon the words “writing is a gift to the reader on the receiving end.” Those words were enough to wake me from my confusion and pull my distorted will back into place. And there is no way to do that but to keep changing.

In the present age it has become the norm to explain every reason for success or failure in words, to learn from it, and to turn it into a system. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but once you are caught up in it the act of writing turns lazy without fail. And the moment it turns lazy the gift loses its contents, and attention shifts to the ornament that dresses up the package to cover the emptiness.

Reality is always severe and harsh, and only those who have walked the edge of death and come back can move forward.
It is cold and at times cruel, yet the fact remains that this is one truth.
This is exactly why there is nothing to do but hold the pain and keep changing. For the writing, for its content, and for its quality alike, there is no road to survival other than to keep changing. It is impossible for those of us who live in the present to take complete distance from the algorithm, and the real problem may lie rather in moving at high speed around its periphery.
One misstep and you fall to the bottom of the abyss, yet there is no path but to keep pressing forward through it.

To keep asking in a world without answers is hard. But if you know from the outset that there are no answers, surviving in that world may be possible.
That is where I stand now, and I am only carrying it out by continuing to think with Japan as my object. Thinking of it that way, I felt something loosen in my shoulders.

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