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.3
July 29, 2026
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1｜LIVING QUESTIONS
2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT
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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

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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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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

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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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Read more

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.2
July 22, 2026
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1｜LIVING QUESTIONS
2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT
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1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

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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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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

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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.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Read more

From the Tideline Newsletter

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Vol.1
July 15, 2026
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1｜LIVING QUESTIONS
2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT
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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

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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.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………

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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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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Read more

Yuishiki is an advanced form of Buddhist scholarship that clarifies the structure of mind. The thought itself has its source in Yogachara. This school arose in India around the fifth century and is known in Japan as Yugagyo-ha [瑜伽行派]. The Indian brothers Mujaku (Asanga) and Seshin (Vasubandhu) of the fourth and fifth centuries are regarded as the figures who brought it to completion.

The school set out at the moment these brothers took the inner observation of India’s ancient meditators who sat in meditation and forged it into an exceedingly refined analysis of mind rather than reading it through religious explanation. From the very start Yuishiki carried the aspect of an intellectual movement for laying bare the structure of mind, and its temper is more that of scholarship than of religion. This way of investigating the mind as a matter of study is what resonated with the elite of the Nara period.

The theory rested on two works. One was the Sandhinirmocana Sutra that lays open the deep layers of how the mind works. The other was the Treatise on the Stage of Yoga Practice that Mujaku systematized. Building on his brother’s achievement, Seshin wrote two works of his own. His Thirty Verses on Manifestation Only condense the entire system of Yuishiki into a single text. His Twenty Verses on Representation Only mount a sharp refutation of belief in the reality of an external world.

At the core of the claim lies the idea of “Yuishiki-Mukyo” [唯識無境]. This is the insight that everything we take for the reality of an external world is nothing but a representation drawn out by Shiki [識]. Nothing exists as an object apart from Shiki. The Shiki of Yuishiki means the workings of the mind. This thought crossed from India to China through the seventh century journey of Genjo (Xuanzang).

Genjo (602–664) was a monk of the Tang at the height of its prosperity. In search of Buddhist scriptures he traveled overland to India and studied under Kaiken (Śīlabhadra, 529–645) at Nalanda Mahavihara. Kaiken was the central figure of what was called the Yogachara in India, and when the thought passed from him to Genjo, a thread was born that would draw the teaching eastward across the continent.

Genjo acquired the teaching of the Yogachara and carried a great mass of Buddhist texts home. Back in China he rendered an enormous body of sutras and treatises into Chinese and made an immense contribution to the monks of the Tang. Above all, The Treatise on the Demonstration of Consciousness-only that he compiled around Dharmapala’s interpretation of Seshin’s Thirty Verses became the standard of East Asian Yuishiki.

The Cheng Weishi Lun is the work in which Genjo selected and compiled the theories of ten representative scholars who had commented on Seshin’s Thirty Verses. It is a culminating work of the Indian Yogachara packed with teachings crucial to Chinese Yuishiki.

At this time Genjo also transmitted Inmyo [因明] (the study of Buddhist logic and demonstration), and this would later carry an important wing of the religious movement Japan came to call the Nanto Rokushu [南都六宗]. From here Genjo’s chief disciple Kuiji (632–682) organized and established the school as a formal sect. It came to be called Faxiang from the sense of fathoming the marks and forms of all dharmas, and in Japan the same characters are read Hosso. Japanese Yuishiki was practiced under the name Hosso, and it began by taking over Kuiji’s teaching almost exactly as he had left it.

The Yuishiki teaching had been polished and refined in the Tang, yet it did not reach Japan in a single transmission. It came in four stages and was gradually integrated. The first to bring Yuishiki was Dosho (629–700). He had studied abroad as a member of a mission to the Tang. Dosho entered the Tang in 653 and studied directly under Genjo. When he brought the heart of Hosso back to Japan, he set up a meditation cloister at Gangoji in Nara as his base.

Gangoji stands today within the city of Nara, but it was originally in the Asuka region to the south. This was because in Dosho’s lifetime it was Asuka rather than Nara that flourished as the capital of Japan.

Dosho did more than transmit Yuishiki to Japan. He traveled through the regions and devoted himself to public works such as digging wells and building bridges over rivers. What I personally find fascinating is that he is remembered as the first person in Japan to be cremated.

Chitsu and Chitatsu came next. In 658 they crossed to the Tang on a Silla ship and received the teaching from Genjo and Kuiji. Chitsu is said to have been one of the most renowned monks in Japan of his day. After returning he built temples, and in 673 he is said to have been appointed to the leading monastic rank of Sojo. Because almost no records survive from this period, most of his deeds remain unclear.

Next was the Silla monk Chiho. He is said to have come to Japan around the turn of the eighth century. Before that he had crossed to the Tang and studied under the eminent Tang monk and Faxiang successor Zhizhou (668–723). Last came Genbo (?–746), and this is the most important figure in the history of Japanese Hosso.

Genbo crossed to the Tang at the beginning of the eighth century and studied under the same Zhizhou who had taught Chiho. He returned in 735 carrying more than five thousand scrolls of sutras and treatises along with many Buddhist images. By this era the capital had already been moved to Heijo-kyo in what is now the area around Nara city, and this became his base. After his return, the lineage that Genbo transmitted to Kofukuji became the mainstream of Japanese Hosso. This context is the key, and I want to read out its meaning from here.

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First, in Japanese the two words are both known as terms that mean “to see,” yet their posture is altogether different. Ken [見] is the eye receiving an object, the passive forming of an image. Kan [観] expresses observing in detail. It is an active word for concentrating the mind toward an object and going to grasp its principle. Kan is to fix the mind and gaze intently at the object, and it does not mean seeing with the two eyes. This is why monks have a history of expounding Kanpo [観法], Shikan [止観], and Kanso [観想]. I will set out from this premise and integrate it with a different line of thought.

Kanpo [観法] is a practice of meditation or discipline in which one calms the mind, concentrates on an object, and uses wisdom to observe things as they are. The expression differs by sect, but in broad terms it is to unify the scattered mind and to still the body and the mind. In characters it is composed of Kan [観] and Ho (Po) [法], and it is written as observing Ho. Ho is the action and working by which all creation exists, so it can be rephrased as gazing with the mind at the invisible law of life and grasping it with the mind.

Shikan [止観] is made up of two parts. Shi [止] carries the meaning of calming the agitation and disorder of the mind and concentrating it on a single object. Kan [観] observes truth with that concentrated and calmed mind, activates correct wisdom, and discerns the essence of things. Leaning to either side will not do. Because leaning takes one away from enlightenment, the teaching holds that the Buddhist way reaches completion only when both are activated and unified within one’s own body and mind. Because Shi [止] also carries the sense of stopping, it is easily mistaken as stopping Kan. That is not the meaning. It means holding Kan fast. In other words, it is to activate wisdom while continuing to concentrate the mind on a single object, and to discern the essence of things. And this “single object” is not a separated thing, not I or you, but the heavenly principle that I will detail later.

Kanso [観想] is to concentrate the mind on a particular object, the figure of a Buddha, or truth, and to picture its essence and form deeply. It expresses an act in which one is not caught by surface phenomena but concentrates contemplation to discern the true form and the deep meaning held within. Through Kan one concentrates contemplation. It can be called a practical teaching that truth comes to stand forth within that.

I will return to these later.

Now, the Yijing contains a hexagram named for Kan. It is called the Kan hexagram [観卦]. Its basic idea is to look up at what is above from below and to observe what is below from above. The fundamental meaning here is to realize stillness by observing deeply and reflecting on oneself. What becomes clear in this is the subtle principle the word Kan holds. Kan does not hold only the one-directional meaning of “observing and examining.” At the same time it holds the double meaning of “being observed and showing.” This is the important point. Within the context of Buddhist meditation one inevitably leans toward this single direction, and the bidirectional flow of “being observed and showing” often drops away. But the fundamental meaning of Kan is that we do not only observe. It also carries the meaning of letting the other see, or showing. In other words, the words and deeds of those who stand above are observed by those below, and at the same time the conduct of those below becomes a reflection of the conduct of those above.

As I deepen my thinking on this double sense, I feel that the concept of Toku [徳] sits deep within human words and deeds. So its influence spreads quietly and surely even when nothing is spoken in word or deed. It moves the way wind soaks into the earth. Seen in this way, our world has reached the height of absurdity.

Those who stand above us and style themselves the leaders of the world and of humanity have degraded to an unprecedented dimension. Their words and deeds are transmitted to people through a mass media that has itself fallen into the abyss of degradation. Around that axis, the statements of individuals on the side of social media interlace above and below and left and right. The degraded words and deeds of those who stand above become standardized, and those below argue over matters from within the abyss of degradation in a complete inversion of priorities. So however much the Western world severs the “I” from the group and places the individual in a separated realm, there is no great structural change in the very act of taking the words and deeds of those who stand above as the axis. What must not be overlooked here is that Toku has vanished. Discussion without Toku is meaningless. It bears no fruit, and it contributes nothing to the future.

It is also a great mistake to speak of Toku as mere social ethics. Toku is the real brightness that the substance of the mind possesses. The opening of the Confucian classic The Great Learning records that the way of great learning lies in making bright virtue manifest. This bright virtue, Meitoku [明徳], is what matters. Put plainly, it speaks of Toku as light. If each one of us reaches the substance of the mind and unifies everything, that itself is light, is wisdom, and is truth. Yet countless problems arise here.

As a fundamental premise, the point that demands caution is that this state is not fixed by attainment. Even if one grasps truth once, the next moment it transforms. That is its constant nature. So setting enlightenment itself as the aim is a fundamental error from the start. If one believes instead that truth is single, absolute, and universal, and that grasping it once secures the eternal, that expectation is betrayed all too easily. Because truth is not single, is not absolute, and grasping it once secures nothing eternal. How to face this is the task.

This teaching is certainly cruel to some. When a person faces this cruelty, the path divides. Either one keeps facing it throughout a whole life, or one makes excuses and flees. Sadly, the majority choose the easy latter path. On bright virtue, the Song dynasty Confucian Zhu Xi (1130–1200) began from the premise that the Ri [理] (the principle of things) a person obtains from heaven is clouded by temperament and desire. As the remedy, he taught that human cultivation lies in seeking Ri in the external world, exhausting it there, and clearing away the cloud. In other words, Zhu Xi grants that the light is within, yet holds that the knowledge for polishing it is accumulated from the external world. At this moment Ri is placed outside as knowledge and experience.

But here I want to question this again while overlapping it with our own present situation.

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The word Onmyoji first calls to mind a special class of technicians operating in the unseen world. The abilities ascribed to the image of the Onmyoji are diverse, but activity staged in the unseen world is the premise. They manipulate the gods, see through the forms of demons, drive people to death through curses, inflict calamity, or conversely avert it. These were the duties assigned to them, and for more than a thousand years they permeated the core of Japan’s structures of power.

In other words, when we turn to the historical influence of the Onmyoji, we can say that the cultural inheritance or spiritual inheritance they left has still not vanished from Japan. It has merely been covered over within us. The keyword for understanding them lies in the curse, but the curse is not negative in meaning and must be seen from many angles.

In speaking of the Onmyoji, the most famous in history is a single sorcerer named Abe no Seimei (921–1005). Famous enough that every Japanese person knows his name, Abe no Seimei is still enshrined today at the Seimei Shrine built in a corner of Kyoto. Yet the image generally told as Abe no Seimei was idealized by later ages. Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries when Abe no Seimei died, the “ideal Onmyoji” that the people inside Heian-kyo at the time pictured was syncretized under the name of this man of immense influence, and the image took form. The outline of the Onmyoji in historical fact and the image of the Onmyoji conveyed through Abe no Seimei as continually retold content carry a decisive divergence. The point is not to be misled here.

Personally, the Onmyoji who actually operated are far more interesting than the Abe no Seimei told as story. They were rare people who cut deep into the core of the court and religion and the worlds of nobles, royalty, monks, shrine priests, and commoners, and yet went on existing quietly. Such people are rare even historically and have no parallel. What is told as the image of the Onmyoji is sorcery, but the true ground on which they held quiet hegemony for centuries does not lie there. Then what exactly was the wellspring that let the Onmyoji go on operating in the open and behind the scenes? It was the calendar.

Let us begin here by changing how we think about the calendar. The present calendar has standardized the cycle of a seven day week with Sunday as the fixed day of rest. Three reasons mainly account for why this calendar took hold. Christianity and Islam, both strongly influenced by Judaism, expanded explosively as world religions. The seven day span was convenient for managing workers in a world where capitalism had taken hold. And the seven day period sat well with the lunar calendar based on the waxing and waning of the moon. These three reasons spread together with the expansion of modern industrial society. We must not forget that behind this lies a history in which the calendars indigenous to each region were destroyed. The key to achieving modernization in fact lies in destroying the calendar used until then.

In other words, if an intense negation of modernization were to arise from each country and people, the most effective method would be first of all to return the calendar to what it was before the new calendar. In Japan, for instance, the present calendar is called the new calendar and what was used before it the old calendar. Considering that Japan received no influence from Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, discarding the new calendar connects to a movement of recovering sovereignty after modernity. But there is an interesting episode.

Back in 2011, as shifts in the climate began to change greatly, the Japan Weather Association set up a preparatory committee aiming to create new twenty-four solar terms suited to the climate of modern Japan and solicited opinions from the public. Around the autumn of 2012 it announced the “Twenty-four Solar Terms of the Twenty-first Century” and showed its intent to establish them. Then a certain organization pushed back fiercely. That was the industrial world.

Industry argued that it would confuse the sense of season cultivated until now and applied intense pressure on the government and others. As a result the plan was abruptly canceled. Industry speaks of a sense of season, but in essence this is worker management. Its disturbance is inconvenient for them, and so the logic is that no matter how the climate fluctuates, they will not permit any alteration of the new calendar adopted since the Meiji period.

But the present calendar is a dry and tedious thing. After all, we human beings were not born to be managed as workers, and there is no reason to be bound to a calendar on such a premise. If it were religiously or devotionally reasonable that would be one thing, but outside of that there should be no need to obey. Building on this point, the original calendar is a conversion of the “time” surrounding us into the visual. In the ancient China that greatly influenced the Japanese calendar, the calendar recorded the past and was at the same time a tool for predicting the future, and this character makes the calendar familiar and commonplace while at once making it a profound and difficult presence.

Just as the modern calendar standardized along the lines described above, there has always existed a world line in which “the one who holds the calendar grasps the world.” Perhaps what humanity must turn its eyes to is “who holds the calendar.” Remote work and the like took hold out of the pandemic, for example, yet the framework of the calendar as “worker management” itself has not changed at all. In every era the calendar carries a character reflecting the self display of those who rule, and because it holds this character, the particular group able to manipulate the calendar can hold power. In the case of Japan, that was the Onmyoji.

The work of the Onmyoji lay in making a calendar suited to the age and judging the daily fortune and the directional taboos. As a result, as technicians who managed “time,” they could go on sitting inside Japan’s structure of power for more than a thousand years. Yet why the Onmyoji could enter the core of power, how their influence persisted so quietly, and what flowed from there into the substratum of the present are never spoken of. So let us first turn to their origins.

As a fundamental premise, the source of the Japanese Onmyoji lies in China. In China too there were people called School of Yin-Yang [陰陽家], and the duties they carried closely resemble those of the Japanese Onmyoji. The reason is plain. Onmyodo [陰陽道] is the art of the Onmyoji and a way later born uniquely in Japan, and its essence has its origin in a distinctive Chinese technique that encompassed everything from the mathematics of “number” to magic. Yet the Chinese School of Yin-Yang did not simply cross over and become the Japanese Onmyoji. An interesting history lies hidden here.

The important point is that the Onmyoji as a class of technicians did not arrive from China. The wisdom held by the Chinese School of Yin-Yang was transmitted to Japan in fragments and in succession, and the Japanese Onmyoji were born independently through a final integration and elevation. Because of this, surprising as it may be, the first carriers who brought the divination, calendrical methods, and sorcery attached to the Onmyoji into Japan were the monks attached to the Buddhism that arrived in the sixth century. At first glance the Onmyoji and monks seem to bear no correlation, but in Japan the two were in fact bound together at a deep level.

At the temples for propagating the newly arrived Buddhism, observances such as the Buddha’s birth ceremony and the nirvana ceremony had to be held on particular days and their hours fixed. This precision did not exist in earlier Japan, and the era of judging by the movement of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon was greatly updated. But here the first problem arises. Historically, the East Asian calendar was a Chinese led lunisolar calendar, and its calculation was not as simple as the present Western solar calendar.

Unlike a unified state such as China where a web of power already ran across the whole land, early Buddhist Japan had not realized governance to that extent. As recorded in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki compiled in the first half of the eighth century, the court holding the emperor of the time had partially subjugated and allied with other countries, but most were not under its rule, and the range its influence reached was limited.

And so however much the court based mainly in Yamato (the south central area of present day Nara Prefecture) tried to spread the influence of Buddhism, the calendar did not circulate across the whole country. Even when it tried to hold Buddhist observances nationally on the same day, naturally that could not be realized. From these circumstances arose the need for the temple monks to calculate the calendar themselves, and what they adopted here was the water clock invented in China and called the rokoku [漏刻]. By building this rokoku, the monks carried out a provisional means of announcing the time.

Beyond the matter of expanding propagation, the monks also had to treat the sick with medicine and sorcery when illness appeared, chant sutras to remove disaster, and predict national crises through astrology. In a Japan that had no connection to Buddhism, this was an indispensable stage for a foreign religion to penetrate. The royalty, nobles, and clans of the court, and the commoners besides, had no need to go out of their way to take refuge in a foreign religious organization without practical benefit. The benefits that mattered in particular to those who ruled were the stable expansion of their reign, the prevention of internal revolt, and the absorption of the not yet subjugated countries under their own rule.

Whether or not they could meet this demand. The key to Buddhism taking root in Japan lay here, and because trial and error had already been repeated on the Chinese side, problems of this kind were steadily solved. Personally, I consider that the greatest reason the Christianity preached by the missionaries who poured into Japan one after another in the Age of Discovery did not take root lies here.

Many monks who sensed these circumstances of the court took on even what was not originally a monk’s work and were pressed by the need to acquire the advanced techniques flowing in from the Chinese side. But they had a strength. It was their command of the kanji that were precious at the time, for the sake of reading scripture, and the concept of number they had acquired by way of China.

The knowledge of the early Onmyoji was “quiet” and tends to be overlooked. Behind this lie two things. First, “letters” and “calculation” were a form of power only a few specialists could handle. Second, monks living inside Buddhism carried the role of the early Onmyoji, and this peculiarity too kept them from view. But this quiet era of the Onmyoji shook greatly, and an opportunity for them to rise all at once was born. The key man was Emperor Tenmu.

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If I dare to speak of god, I think it is primal experience. God is not something thought with the head. To put it another way, god does not exist in the realm where the head does its thinking. In the realm of primal experience that holds no language, god exists in plurality and without number. Once you grant this nature, it becomes clear that understanding god is impossible for anyone who does not hold primal experience. Yet this is not a matter of some people being able to understand god and others not. Primal experience is open to everyone. Whether or not one is granted that primal experience depends on each person’s life. In this sense god is open to all and is never closed off to some limited stratum alone.

Looking back, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki of the early eighth century that compiled the old traditions contain neither the question of what god is nor any definition of it. The ancestors of Japan up to at least the early eighth century very likely held no question or doubt about god. This was not because god did not exist for the ancestors of the Japanese. It expresses that god did not exist in the realm where human beings pose questions. Primal experience gained by the individual or within a pair or communal relation once filled worlds beyond number. There was one for every place. Putting this into words gave rise to the idea of the eight million gods. The Japanese call it Yaoyorozu no Kami [八百万神].

The Yaoyorozu no Kami are spoken of as the root nature of Shinto. In my own words this expresses that god dwells within primal experience. It is also the reflection of countless worlds where god differs according to the differing nature of primal experience from place to place. In a sense the moment it turned into the words Yaoyorozu no Kami, a boundary line began to be drawn through the once living world where gods and human beings coexisted. What followed was a history of separation and closing off. Perhaps we are suffering here and now because of it. To speak frankly, a personal question lies here. Can human beings go on living at all once they lose faith and prayer?

So at what stage did the question of god rise to the surface in the history of Japan? It is impossible to pinpoint this with precision. There is a paradox here. The moment the question of god began to be felt within each person, god hid its form. The moment the question of god sprouted within us, god vanished from before us. If we suppose this to be the reality of god, then within the range of what we can think, god does not exist after all, or it has been diluted.

In fact Japanese mythology holds an expression that hints at the sensibility of this age. Read the opening of the myth generally called the creation of heaven and earth and five gods appear. They are Amenominakanushi [天之御中主神], Takamimusuhi [高御産巣日神], Kamimusuhi [神産巣日神], Umashiashikabihikoji [宇摩志阿斯訶備比古遅神], and Amenotokotachi [天之常立神]. In the myth these gods are a special existence called Kotoamatsukami [別天つ神]. Japanese mythology divides the gods broadly into two kinds called Amatsukami [天つ神] and Kunitsukami [国つ神]. The countless gods that fall under neither hold no names and are expressed as animals and the like. At this level the gods who connect to the emperor in mythological terms are the Amatsukami. The highest divinity among the Amatsukami is set in the imperial ancestral god Amaterasu.

The Kotoamatsukami at the opening are different. They are shown not as Amatsukami but as koto [別]. The word marks them as set apart. They are not an existence tied to the genealogy of the emperor. They look rather like a provisional form given substance so that the primal gods of the people who worshipped the Amatsukami could be placed within the myth. The five gods who appear as Kotoamatsukami are recorded in the myth with the expression [隠身] (kakurimi). It says they hid their bodies. I felt a question here. Why did the compilers have to use such an expression?

In other words the Kotoamatsukami conceal their form and never appear before people. This does not mean appearing with a body or any other substance. It means holding as their reality an existence prior to all human definition, before anything that words symbolize. This is why they are described as hiding their bodies. To say more, this does not even reach the level of natural objects such as tree and leaf or earth and sea. It seems to speak of an old memory in which god was sensed in a primal form before even that. When I consider why the early gods had to hide their bodies, the background suggests that a historical upheaval gave god substance in Japan. The turning point is the arrival of Buddhism.

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The meaning of these words is to observe what shines in the country, the society, and the people one visits, and to learn as an outsider. What matters is carrying through the awareness of being an outsider. From there one steps into a foreign world calmly and neutrally and deepens one’s learning. To observe the light is at the same time to observe the shadow. Leaning too far toward either one makes the essence vanish from view. For this reason tourism is the moment when the daily discipline of the heart is laid bare and an occasion to examine one’s own inner reflection. Whether it ends as mere tourism for consumption or deepens into learning put to use for the future of one’s homeland and the future of the world is always left to the choice of each individual traveler.

Living in the West you would not feel it, but I sense that East Asia has recently begun to move greatly and rapidly. From my own perspective, in this article I want to peer a little into the near future I learned through Seoul.

To put the wave beginning in East Asia plainly, it is a movement to take distance from the United States and to search for a twenty-first century relationship with China. Until now Japan, Korea, and Taiwan were placed under American influence, so while treating China as an imagined enemy they were held to no more than economic cooperation. However, Korea grew distrustful of recent American conduct and passed the limit of its patience. It moved first to search for the next era. Of course no such statement is made officially. But once you set foot in Seoul, you can feel everywhere that the ground beneath Korea has already begun to shift.

On the other hand, Japan is not like this. It still cannot break free of dependence on the United States, and the government leadership hesitates and cannot bring itself to decide on distance. While Korea across the sea makes decisions with its survival at stake, Japan decides nothing and only mills about in confusion. This figure of Japan will mark an important turning point even in historical terms.

In fact, in just three days of walking through Seoul, you feel everywhere that Japan has been overtaken by Korea in every respect over a short period. The pace is fast. By my own sense Japan was overtaken within a single generation. To my eyes Korea forcibly overwrote the twentieth century framework of its cities with a twenty-first century one. That is, without greatly changing the hardware structure of the city itself, it kept upgrading the software to the latest version. Korea can be said to have succeeded brilliantly in rewriting the OS within the city of Seoul. Advancing a city to the twenty-first century type would demand development extensive enough to renew the conventional urban structure, and that costs enormous budget and time. So Korea carried out limited renewal of offline space while dramatically pushing forward the renewal of online space.

By contrast, Japan failed badly at this latest OS update. In Japan both the hardware and the software of the city remain fundamentally twentieth century, and it has become a world with the déjà vu of an old OS still running. There is no will there to boldly build a twenty-first century city. I see behind these bold Korean decisions a driver that is rarely considered.

First, in 2022 Korea surpassed Japan in nominal GDP per capita for the first time, and over these past few years state led digitalization has accelerated through society. In purchasing power parity GDP per capita as well, Korea overtook Japan in the late 2010s, and the gap widens year by year. At the same time, in 2024 Japan was overtaken in nominal GDP per capita by Taiwan as well. While the countries of East Asia leap toward the near future, Japan alone is accelerating its relative decline. This is data borne out by the many Korean and Taiwanese travelers you see when you visit Japan’s tourist sites.

Looking at passport ownership rates among citizens, as of the end of 2025 Japan stands very low at 18.4 percent, while Korea is very high at about 60 percent. The Japanese passport boasts some of the greatest strength in the world, yet in actual ownership only about one in five people holds one. Korea and Taiwan are both smaller nations than Japan, yet each exceeds 60 percent. Reading this data merely as enthusiasm for travel or study abroad misjudges the essence. Rather, the passport ownership figure reflects citizens searching for a future on the premise of a life that cannot be completed within the country alone, while also spreading risk across many directions.

In Korea’s case this owes to neighboring North Korea as a national imagined enemy. Taiwan likewise holds China as an imagined enemy, and there too the passport ownership rate is high. For people living in these countries, the choice to hold a passport is not merely a matter of overseas travel or overseas expansion. It can be reread as proof that citizens do not overlay the future of the nation with their own future. With this perspective, the true cause of why Japan alone keeps declining in East Asia surfaces.

The low passport ownership rate of the Japanese is by no means because people are “inward looking.” To my eyes it appears as proof that many citizens still depend on the late twentieth century illusion of “safe and secure Japan.” Japan uses its own era names based on the reign of the emperor, and each era name expresses a distinctive character of its time. For example, the present is Reiwa 8. Before it came Heisei (1989–2019), before that Showa (1926–1989), before that Taisho (1912–1926), and before that Meiji (1868–1912).

I was born in 1991, so in the Japanese reckoning I was born in Heisei 3. These thirty years are called “the lost thirty years.” They were an era when Japan steadily declined. This structure is hard to grasp, but in essence the illusion formed in the mid to late Showa period had supported Japan from the postwar years through the era of high economic growth. Over the thirty years of Heisei, Japan could not dispel that illusion, and as a result it spent those years prolonging the life of Showa. To put it more clearly, Japan remains caught in the structure of the Cold War era and has still not managed to escape it. On Japan’s timeline it is as though the Berlin Wall never fell and the Soviet Union never collapsed. As a result, when Reiwa began in 2019, the debt accumulated in Showa came to weigh heavily on the lives of citizens and drove an overall decline at an accelerating pace.

Because I reread the passport ownership rate as proof that citizens do not overlay the nation’s future with their own, in this context it becomes clear that the Japanese do overlay their own future with the nation’s future. When most people speak of “Japan’s future,” for example, they point to Japan as a bureaucratic system of state centered on the government. Certainly the future of Japan within this system is shrouded in dark clouds, and its eventual collapse is self evident. But there is no inherent need to overlay that onto one’s own life. Living for the future of one’s homeland may be necessary, but that does not equal protecting Japan’s bureaucratic system, and one should never fall into such a framing. The Japanese have strong patriotism to begin with, but troublingly they cannot make this distinction. In other words, their patriotism is basically nothing more than a convenient tool for the rulers who run the state, and it has drifted away from the essential heart that thinks of and loves the country.

On the other hand, the citizens of Korea and Taiwan divide this clearly.

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But is that truly the road to mutual understanding? In the very moment we feel we cannot understand one another, we often make our own side alone the sole correctness without realizing it. No, in nearly everything we do this. We tie the world we see to the world itself and affirm it, and in the end we regard the other as an inferior being who has strayed from it. The trap of dualism typical of right and wrong or good and evil is always a problem of the self. It is not a problem of others or society or government or the world. The more certain we become that we are right and that we are good, the narrower the world actually grows. The more we believe this is correct, the more suffocating it becomes. Certainty was supposed to be taught to us as strength, yet it inverts and works as a cage that locks us in.

The worst form of this is when blind faith that one alone is good and right leads a person to cut off the very existence they assume as their counterpart. This cutting off always happens when one’s own world has narrowed to its limit. It never happens because that world is universal. When the world has narrowed to its limit, such people mistake whatever clear thing remains for something they must protect, so they inevitably close off dialogue themselves. By closing off dialogue, they can preserve the self-serving convenience that the other is evil and the other is wrong.

For some reason people do not notice this inverting action. To those who look at history, or who have spent a lifetime refining how to receive and how to dialogue with the discomfort of an entirely different cultural sphere, the sight of people trapped in this inverting action is hard to comprehend. We were taught that the human being is a noble form of life, but the reality is nothing of the sort. There is the single relation between you and me that modernity has erased. That single relation holds high density and concentration, and heat dwells there, and a soul dwells there. For this single relation to work, a place is needed. Because a place is born first, you and I can face each other sincerely from the heart and bring forth a single relation through great struggle. That place is the precondition for a relation to be born, and it is created in the relation of heart to heart.

If people had truly grasped correctness and goodness as they claim, then why do they become not free but cramped, or to put it more precisely, narrow-minded? Why has the present age become something like a den of the narrow-minded? They hold no answer to this question. The reason is plain. They are searching for truth as something that lies outside themselves. Somewhere there is a single truth, and if you discover it and grasp it, everything is solved. This is not conviction but blind faith, and without noticing it people go off to search for truth in the outer world. To beautify this, a story is prepared. For things, for others, for society, for the state, and for the world. Yet in fact the more we go searching for truth on the outside, the further we move from ourselves, and the chance to grasp the fruit of life never arrives to the end. And this is the wasted toil of a life.

Let me put it another way. The closer we draw to the world, the more we fall into the inverting action of moving away from ourselves. This is a principle and an inevitability. And the further we move from ourselves, the more the world narrows to match. Anyone who has tried even a little to explore the spiritual world in their life will have some memory of this strange and delicate discomfort as an unnameable and curious sensation. Yet one truth is suggested here. Why does drawing closer to the world move us away from ourselves? Why does moving away from ourselves narrow the world? If you press through to this question, the truth becomes unexpectedly clear. What is misunderstood is the idea that the closer we draw to the world, the more our own existence is fixed. This widespread way of thinking is plainly wrong and false. What we must consider is by what this inverting action is caused.

When you take a bird’s-eye view of the present world, you notice that people blindly believe they are right even as they rush about in search of “something.” Viewed calmly, nothing is stranger or more foolish than this. After all, people somehow justify themselves even though they do not know what the “something” they seek even is. And without realizing it they force this so-called correctness on people of a different cultural sphere and disturb the order of that different cultural sphere. Even from my own experience, this is hard to avoid from the standpoint of crossing cultures, and however conscious we become it cannot be completely dissolved. The reason is that the context each of us was born and raised in is different. The world is not one, humanity is not one, and not everyone is a friend. Such things are obvious. This is not illusion or fiction or story. It is simply obvious.

For the context to differ means that the whole of the history, spirit, culture, conduct, and daily activity one takes on is different, so we never reach the state that “mutual understanding” means in the way the term is used now. Because at that dimension “mutual understanding” is not possible. The mutual understanding we assert is in the end nothing more than something realized by setting someone’s standard as the implicit or deliberate default value and then excluding, unconsciously or consciously, whatever deviates from it. This is not mutual understanding, and it is not a dimension in which the existence of the other is acknowledged in the heart. Because the foundation remains dualism as ever.

What I want to raise here is this. The world that we who have undergone modernity speak of is in fact only a minority position when seen across humanity, and the overwhelming majority of the humanity that exists on the earth now does not share the world we speak of. This is the first point. People still speak calmly of the world and humanity and the human being, yet they are not aware of this fundamental problem. Whether or not one has undergone modernity matters more than people think, and however one defines modernity, it lies at a base layer that must be considered seriously. And now, in a time not of modernity but of the collapse of modernization, we who have undergone modernity inevitably speak with this world as our premise. Unfortunately that is blind faith and falsehood, not truth. Because the greater part of humanity, entirely apart from how we wish to believe, has not undergone modernity. Of course there are differences of degree. And what matters is that modernity is by no means right or good. The very idea that this is the world exposes the grounds for why we cannot understand one another, yet a design to keep us from seeing that is at work socially and at the level of the state. Seeing through this far is not easy, and that vast matrix cannot be changed. For people in certain regions that hold the historical context of civil society some kind of transformation may be possible, but even that is only a small part of the earth and not the world. The correctness or goodness within one’s own context holds only within that context, and it must never be taken outside it. This is the principle of invasion. Mutual understanding in its present meaning is therefore invasion and deprivation, and it must be treated as a quite serious problem.

When people fall into this inverting action, they always affirm their own world reactively, justify it, treat it as good, and then force it on the other without fail. In earlier eras this hardly surfaced. It was relatively confined to areas such as international politics and diplomacy, so there was room to examine it in contexts like post-colonialism. But now this entanglement caused by the inverting action has been taken over by countless people who are neither politicians nor diplomats. The symbol of this is the tourist. Unfortunately only a handful of tourists face this question and confront other countries and other cultures with awareness. Most give it no thought and, without knowing, erode and strip away other countries and other cultures. Even if the other’s culture and spirit are lost, to them it is no concern. This is the principle of the invader. The invader is by no means an obvious evil. The terror of the good person lies here. And the problem is how this designation of the good person has come to be decided.

The Confucian Analects holds an old teaching. It is the line [郷愿は徳の賊である], that the village worthy is the thief of virtue. The village worthy is the good and upright model student who does nothing bad, makes no waves, conducts a social life, and lives a well-rounded life. In short, it is the person who tips into hypocrisy out of an excess of trying to be a good child and to be virtuous. Confucius warned that the standard of good and evil is gutted by such people. He argued that the supreme human good that Confucianism has prized as “virtue” is stolen by these good people. In other words, obvious evil can be guarded against, but the true problem is the hypocrite wearing the face of a good person. They eat away at the whole while no one guards against them, and in the end it always collapses. This old teaching of more than two thousand years now echoes within me.

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In a world that has lost the power to suppress problems already surfaced, we should be probing the root causes and the essence and moving toward problem-solving suited to the distinct troubles of each country and people. Yet this conception is absent. Many people besides me likely feel that every morning when they see the news, the day begins in an unpleasant mood in endless repetition, and some may be in despair. But what I want to ask this time lies here.

“Is that truly despair?”

The empty and powerless sensation spreading through the world, the sense that “there is nothing more we can do,” was not in fact born from a lack of ability on our part. I consider this an inevitable sensation that arises in an era when two frameworks have simultaneously lapsed. For us who live the present situation, this sensation is the inevitability of the era and cannot be avoided by our own will. We must therefore accept that sensation ourselves and act after taking on the responsibility.

The two frameworks I speak of here are these. One is the premodern framework in which “place, ritual, and community” gave people the meaning of life. The other is the modern framework in which “labor, progress, and career” promised a future. I have simplified greatly, but the character of the eras can be condensed here. The problem is hidden here. Why?

Because these two frameworks have now collapsed simultaneously.

People born and raised in countries that have reached the impasse of modernity all face this problem. This problem is in truth occurring in a limited way to particular countries and peoples, yet people are under the illusion that it is occurring simultaneously on a global scale or a human scale. Careful attention is required here. For countries and peoples who have been able to retain one of the two frameworks, many people do not feel this emptiness and powerlessness in the same way that those who want to think “everyone is the same” assume. They do not share it. Being aware of this distinction is important. The true inquiry begins from understanding that “the world is not one.”

To lay out the elements, they are place, ritual, and community, and labor, progress, and career. Anyone who lives a life that strongly retains even one of these does not in fact fall into the despair that can be called the greatest problem of the present. The essential problem is that “two frameworks have now collapsed simultaneously,” but for people able to retain these, this problem is void. This voidness is proportional in particular to the strength with which the premodern character is retained. They have something to lean on. Many people have now completely lost this thing to lean on.

The premodern framework was mercilessly destroyed and trampled by modernization. I was born and raised in Japan and have conducted research on Japan, so regarding this destruction by modernization I likely understand more than people of any country. Modernization destroyed all of “place, ritual, and community.” As its replacement, the modern framework designed “labor, progress, and career,” but the endpoint of this ironically resulted in the wholesale replacement of the very workers who had carried “labor, progress, and career.” Regarding AI and automation, many people until last year still had the composure to scoff, but that is already a thing of the past. The extremity of modernity was the nullification of human beings conducting social life, the rendering of human beings useless within the frame called society.

Here many people, out of anxiety and impatience, or irritation and anger, invert this problem in an easy direction. AI, automation, and algorithms are certainly problems, but the true problem is that even now with the two frameworks collapsed, many people still design their lives on the premise of “society.” No one speaks of it, but the true problem lies here.

Since the modern era destroyed “place, ritual, and community,” it is hard for us to picture, but society did not exist in the premodern era. It is a new space of governance born in the modern era. The modern framework of “labor, progress, and career” consists of elements that can survive only in society, and the premodern framework of “place, ritual, and community” does not in fact exist in society. This is the key point. If you feel you are confusing this distinction, that expresses the strength with which you are socialized. Contemporary technology has begun to occupy “the framework of society.” It does not have the power to occupy place, ritual, and community.

I do not want to speak of some outdated notion of returning to the premodern. In Japan too, a trend of people exhausted by city life moving to country life advanced after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, but what I want to consider is not there. To keep thinking this through, I want to consider what exactly we have lost, what is truly precious, and how we can find and nurture the next sprout from within now that the two frameworks have collapsed. To put it more clearly, the inquiry is “what was the most precious of the things we lost?” Continuing to think through this single point thoroughly is important.

As a first step, what must be corrected first is that we are not in despair. We are merely feigning despair. For people living in a world where the two frameworks have collapsed, there is not even room for despair in the true sense.

The reason I want to consider this meaning is that many people misjudge it here. We are not in fact suffering from having “dropped out” of these two frameworks. Because by rights, beyond the point of dropping out there should still remain another framework. Looking back even on the twentieth century, everyone should be able to agree that beyond dropping out there always remained many yohaku [余白] in the world for forming another framework. The disappearance of this yohaku beyond the drop-out point from the world may perhaps be a matter of only the past decade or so. Human beings invariably fall under the illusion, when their present painful situation continues, that the situation has continued from long ago, but this is not actually so. From this perspective I propose that the true problem lies not in dropping out but in the disappearance from the world of the yohaku for making another framework beyond the drop-out point.

Dropping out itself is not the problem. But the matter is different when it concerns the modern framework of “society” (labor, progress, career). Dropping out of society was possible after the Second World War but is now impossible. Society has filled the world’s yohaku to that extent. The true problem lies here. What filled the world’s yohaku is society. What I want you to consider again is why it is called “social” media.

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Starting this week, this publication has changed its name from Shitsurae to From the Tideline.

The name has changed, but the root of what I think about has not. If anything it feels closer to this. What I have been writing toward all along has finally come together in a single word. A tideline is a boundary that no one fixes, where land and sea meet and the moon and the tides redraw the line again and again. The stance of this place, which is to look at flux and difference as they are and to think from there, is exactly what the name From the Tideline carries.

Thank you for staying with me, as always.

Wa [和] does not equal mass conformity. I position Wa as the invisible action and working that generates mass conformity. These two easily confused domains must be clearly distinguished in thought. What Wa requires to generate mass conformity is not the government, society, or any specific leader or group. Wa transforms by its own will, and we continuously suffer the influence of that transformation. It is therefore impossible for human beings to intentionally correct or modify Wa. This recognition is the foundation for understanding Wa as the invisible force that generates mass conformity.

Building on this premise, I will begin the continuation of the Transformation of Wa released last week. The original plan has changed, and the history from the Meiji Restoration through the modern and contemporary periods that I had intended to discuss in this Part 2 of 3 will be split into broader sections. What I will cover this time is the period from the late Edo era called Bakumatsu leading up to the Meiji Restoration through the success of the Restoration itself. Since I will proceed on the premise of the content in Part 1 of 3, please read Part 1 first if you have not done so.

The era I focus on in the transformation history of Wa is the period around the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The direct cause of the structural turning point born in this era can be read through the perspective of the transformation of Wa. The theme this time is the movement in which Wa began a great variation aimed at unification.

This era ended the three hundred years of the Tokugawa shogunal house’s Edo shogunate and has been beautified as the structural turning point of modern Japan that led to the establishment of a new government backed by the Western powers. Yet the people who carried out the Meiji Restoration did not share a single thought or purpose. They were in essence a miscellaneous armed group brought together by the drift of the era. In this respect they differ greatly from the unity of the later Imperial Japanese military. The form of Wa in the two eras is entirely different. In modern history this context has been considerably beautified, and the Meiji Restoration is defined as having been consistent under the cause of “Sonno Joi” [尊王攘夷] (revere the emperor and expel the foreigner). The substance was “overthrow the shogunate,” and not many people genuinely believed in this kind of grand cause.

The great majority participated for practical reasons such as earning money, seeking position and honor, or selling their names to gain employment with some domain. People like this are always opportunists who swing right or left according to the conditions of the era. For the portion of people who advocated overthrowing the shogunate, the problem became how to bring these opportunists to their side even temporarily, execute the revolution, and govern them afterward. The era just before the Meiji Restoration is called Bakumatsu [幕末] in the sense of the late Edo shogunate. The principal forces that carried out the Meiji Restoration and built the Meiji government from Bakumatsu were Choshu Domain (present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture) and Satsuma Domain (present-day Kagoshima Prefecture).

The Edo period in its broad flow can be thought of in three dimensions. These are the shogunate in Edo, the imperial court in Kyoto, and the domains in each region. What is easily misunderstood is that no “unified Wa” existed across the three hundred years of the Edo period. A monolithic conception like “Japanese Wa” or “the Wa of the Japanese people” did not exist in the Edo period. It is a “new way of thinking” formed in the history after the Meiji period. My own view is that the Edo period was the form on the Japanese archipelago of what is now called a multipolar world in geopolitical terms.

The upheaval of the Meiji Restoration is often simplified, but Choshu and Satsuma were not necessarily the sole driving force. The essential point occurring in this turbulent era comes down to one thing. How would Japan resist the external Western forces that were trying to occupy it? In the process of declining centripetal force toward the shogunate, when the imminent crisis of occupation by the West was at hand and unless the shogunate, the domains, and the court joined together, Wa varied first toward a state of unification. This variation over years became transformation and was eventually reflected in the era as history.

The people who lamented Japan’s future at the time threw themselves into a new problem. How could they shape Japan as one when no consistent force was acting upon it? This is the critical point. As we decipher this, it becomes a problem of how to unify the countless dispersed forces of Wa into one and to exclude the West that was trying to intervene in that unified Wa. The movement here was not the integration of multiple Wa as in a multipolar world but an attempt to drive back the West through the force of unification. From this a new perspective of “one force” was born.

If Wa is to become one force, the problem becomes “who” holds the initiative. The Tokugawa shogunal house and the shogunate no longer had that power, and the emperor did not have that level of power either. Everyone at the time was aware of this. The problem then shifted to “which domain” would hold the initiative. This is one of the truths of the Meiji Restoration as a contest over hegemony.

Let me explain why this distinctively Japanese perspective was born. The leading figures of the Meiji Restoration were samurai who carried the practice of the martial arts (Japanese Budo). In Japanese Budo, victory and defeat are decided by whether one can unify the scattered Ki within oneself. Combat ability has nothing to do with victory. This principle had soaked into the samurai throughout the Edo period, and the teaching of Confucianism as the regime philosophy of the shogunate since Tokugawa Ieyasu had been carried through the warrior class. The important transformation that occurred among the samurai in the Bakumatsu period was that they took the unified state of the warrior’s body and spirit as a model for the healthy form of “the nation” and interpreted it independently. They acted toward the realization of that ideal nation. The intent to form a nation in resistance to the West was born here and transcended the previous dimension of each samurai’s way of life. The samurai-specific techniques of Budo and Confucianism intervened in the flow of nation formation.

The problem is that this thinking was specific to the samurai class in the Edo period and unrelated to people of other classes. However, in the swirl of the militarism of Imperial Japan this samurai-specific technique appeared in the form of coercion of the populace. A strange phenomenon occurred. Although the samurai status had been only a small portion throughout the Edo period, in the Imperial Japanese era every member of the populace was transmuted into the samurai class. This can be read as the influence of the intervention of Bushido (The way of samurai) into Wa during the Bakumatsu period.

What they treated as a special problem was the complete split between the shogunate that held up the shogun and the court that held up the emperor that left the force of Japan ununified. To form a nation with one force, the unification of shogunate and court was the basic premise. The conception that holds the key is the idea of “Kobu Gattai” [公武合体] (union of court and shogunate) particularly asserted in the Bakumatsu period. Kobu Gattai was the very attempt to fuse the court and the shogunate and forcibly produce a single force. This Kobu Gattai is hidden within this article’s theme.

To put it clearly, unless Kobu Gattai as a single force could be realized, it was visibly certain that Japan would become a Western colony. The idea of “Saisei Itchi” [祭政一致] (unity of ritual and government) advocated by Aizawa Seishisai of the Late Mito School in 1825 was typical. For the people of Bakumatsu these had become hollow slogans and were interpreted only as a problem of where sovereignty over the force would belong. The split was between realizing a “unified state” in the form of updating the shogunate and realizing a “unified state” under a new regime that overthrew the shogunate. These were not cleanly bifurcated, and both flowed together into the Meiji Restoration. Wa began to transform toward the unification of Japan’s national territory, and the movement of Wa containing this force aimed at unification was further altered by the provocative acts of the West in the waters around Japan.

Let us read the movement of Wa that gave birth to modern Japan. The first point to recognize is that at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the cutting-edge thinkers of the Late Mito School had all died. Meanwhile, the sweeping domain governance reform carried out in Mito Domain in 1829 had formed a new current of the era. The thought nurtured in the Mito school had at last begun to transfer to practical action. The leader of that reform was Tokugawa Nariaki, the ninth domain lord. While carrying out major reform as the lord of Mito Domain, he shifted to a policy of giving opportunity to the lower and middle samurai who had been ignored until then if they had ability. This reform by the domain lord was welcomed by the young samurai. Filled with vigor, they responded to expectations with action and swore loyalty to their lord as reformists. They drew strong opposition from the conservative faction within the domain who valued the old samurai status order. The Mito conservatives used the word “tengu ni natteiru” (becoming a long-nosed tengu) to despise the reformists, a Japanese expression meaning “getting carried away.” The reformists liked the ring of the slur “tengu” used by their political enemies and later became the matrix of the radical organization “Tengu-to” [天狗党] that connected to the Meiji Restoration.

The Mito reformists, enraged by the provocative acts of the West in the waters around Japan, strongly asserted that the Sonno Joi of the Mito school must move from thought into the execution stage. Tokugawa Nariaki’s sweeping reform influenced other domains as well. The lower and middle samurai who had been inconspicuous throughout the Edo period began seeking opportunity for themselves and traveled to Mito Domain to study. Yet the rulers of the shogunate did not move. The symbolic events of the gradually beginning turbulent Bakumatsu period unfolded.

Around the mid-1850s, the sickly thirteenth shogun Tokugawa Iesada had no heir, and shogunal politics split in two. One side prioritized traditional bloodline above all and pushed the young Tokugawa Iemochi of Kishu Domain (present-day Wakayama). The other side asserted that governing talent was more important than bloodline for surviving the national crisis and pushed the brilliant Tokugawa Yoshinobu. The former was the conservative “Nanki faction,” and the latter was the reformist “Hitotsubashi faction.” This split was the moment at which the problem of political dynamics that had continued since the start of the Edo period surfaced, and it gradually came under the influence of Wa moving toward unification.

In the midst of this bifurcation of the shogunate over the question of the shogun’s successor, the conclusion of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States arose as the issue. The shogunate which had already lost its power to control indicated its intent to sign, but to avoid the impression that the shogunate had yielded to the United States, it appealed directly to the imperial court that held up the emperor. The intent was to transfer the locus of responsibility from the Tokugawa house to the imperial house and to position the court as having yielded to American pressure. This issue became the spark that deepened the antagonism between Edo and Kyoto. The shogunate’s intent was shattered by Emperor Komei who thoroughly detested any future of Western intervention in Japan. Emperor Komei rejected the shogunate’s request and showed the position of absolutely never yielding to American coercion, and the shogunate was driven into a corner. This decision by Emperor Komei was more than sufficient grounds for the rapid rise of the Sonno Joi faction, and the tone of overthrowing the shogunate as the quicker path became increasingly conspicuous.

Within this unsettled era, the elder of the Nanki faction Ii Naosuke appeared. Ii Naosuke became “tairo” as the highest authority of the shogunate, ignored the emperor’s command, signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States by his own authority, and decided the next shogun would be Tokugawa Iemochi of the Nanki faction. Tokugawa Iemochi was installed as the fourteenth shogun, but he was only twelve years old at the time. A child shogun could not possibly handle the chaotically collapsing shogunal politics, and resistance against Ii Naosuke’s dictatorial hard-line measures became active in many places. Seeing this as their chance, the Sonno Joi faction of Mito Domain that held up the anti-Ii Naosuke banner rose all at once. Ii Naosuke declared that he would sweep away his opposition and began a campaign of extreme suppression. Through the suppression that continued from 1858 to 1859, the daimyo (powerful feudal lords) of the rival Hitotsubashi faction were dismissed one after another, and people who criticized the shogunate were executed in succession. This major incident is called the “Ansei Purge.” It was a major turning point. The selection through which Wa would unify had gradually begun. I suspect this is the reason no dictator ever emerged in Japan. Wa uses those who hold particular ideologies but never pushes them up to an absolute position. Here lies the basal layer related to Japan’s distinctive reception of other cultures.

Ii Naosuke positioned the lord of Mito Domain who led the Hitotsubashi faction Tokugawa Nariaki as his greatest enemy and ordered him to lifelong house arrest within Mito Domain. This humiliation toward their lord was more than sufficient cause for the young samurai of Mito Domain who had cultivated Sonno Joi thought to radicalize. Holding up the cause of restoring honor to their lord, they gradually threw themselves into underground activity. The Mito samurai who made the decision to abandon the shogunate at the first stroke of the Ansei Purge left their domain on their own initiative so as not to cause trouble for the domain or their lord, hid in Edo, and set the assassination plan against Ii Naosuke into motion. To leave a domain meant to remove oneself from the domain’s registry and become an unaffiliated ronin. This action by the Mito samurai dispersed and weakened the Wa of Mito Domain that had been inherited as the spirit of the Mito school, flowed into underground activity, and was eventually transmuted into the principal thought of the radical faction. At that moment the lofty Wa cultivated in Mito Domain lost its potential to become the force of unification. From this point Mito Domain fell from the stage of the hegemonic struggle, and these samurai came to be called the Mito ronin.

On March 24, 1860, the Mito ronin succeeded in the assassination of Ii Naosuke. The shogunate’s conservative faction having lost its leader completely lost the power to rebuild. This incident opened the turbulent 1860s. What is interesting about Japan is this. The state of Bakumatsu that appears at first glance to be chaotic and lacking unity actually held considerably unified movement. I think this is the influence of Confucian teaching having soaked into the body and spirit of the samurai throughout the Edo period. Seen differently, in the Bakumatsu period Confucian teaching was elevated in a way that transformed Wa, and Wa began to encompass as one those people who appeared to be split into enemies and allies. By this era Wa had already unified the people of differing positions and beliefs across the land, and the problem was only where the final point of belonging would be decided. As noted, that point of belonging was neither the shogunate nor the court but a domain. The single force of Wa that the shogunate and the court had been forming was reaching the transitional fate of being swallowed by one of the domains. This process itself took more than a thousand years to occur, but the Wa that would unify the Japanese archipelago had at last begun to show its form.

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Given the unilateral runaway behavior of the United States today, it is a rational survival choice for every country including Europe that has long been protected by American military power to reexamine its postwar history. Japan too is steadily moving toward rearmament, nuclear armament (likely as a lease from the United States), and the restoration of conscription under American intent. Slowly the rights and interests in Japan that the United States once held are being transferred to China. The United States likely wishes to retain a degree of influence in East Asia while delegating actual operation to China for reasons of cost, but this movement suggests a future in which the suzerain of postwar Japan shifts from the United States to China as the new suzerain.

Because this movement is being steadily sensed by the population, the LDP leadership and the pro-revision camp very much want to make China the imagined enemy. Through the mass media they scatter crude anti-China news day after day while pushing for constitutional revision. The self-destruction of the United States therefore works to the advantage of the pro-revision camp and to the disadvantage of the constitution protection camp.

Now that the population has at last begun to face the obvious fact that “America will not protect us,” the option that clearly gains voice is to arm the country with its own hands. At present the constitution protection camp holds the majority in public opinion, but the Japanese government invariably ignores public opinion, so such data is of limited use as a reference. My own view is that the very fact that the debate over constitutional revision has fallen into the binary of “revise” or “protect” is the real problem. Neither side differs greatly in terms of a future complicit in war. They are accomplices. The meaning of this will become apparent in Japan some twenty years from now.

In practice, international interest in the direction of Japan is rising. To present a path forward, I want to look at a certain characteristic of Japan that is extraordinarily difficult to read. That characteristic is “Wa”. I will set out what kind of future Japan is heading toward through the perspective of Wa.

If I were to put the current “unsettling atmosphere” into language, the word that emerges is Wa. Yet without an understanding of the essence of Wa, considering Japan’s direction is impossible. From this piece I am beginning “the transformation history of Wa.” My current plan is for this piece to serve as the axis covering the Asuka through Edo periods, the next to cover the modern and contemporary periods, and the last to read Wa from an ancient perspective and present the next world beyond both revision and protection of the constitution. It will likely become a trilogy. Please deepen your understanding of Wa as the most difficult element to grasp and yet one with an extraordinarily Japanese character. Since the work is to read the transformation of Wa, all articles will be released as long form essays.

I have come to regard the modern concept of [和] (Wa) as equivalent to “Japanese totalitarianism” within the contemporary context, and I have been exploring how it has been used as a regime philosophy for governing the populace. The conventional historical view holds that with the 1945 defeat in the Second World War, the “old system” collapsed and Japan welcomed a “new system” under GHQ leadership which is then beautified as having led to prosperity. This new system is described as “a future as a Western style democratic state.” But history does not move according to the textbook. What every commentator has overlooked here is the fact that Wa transformed itself in order to survive. Systems may be old or new, but the spirit that generates a system does not bend to such categories.

The point is that the postwar Japanese government and GHQ did not transform Wa. Wa itself transformed in order to survive. This perspective is essential. As I have written several times in Shitsurae, Japanese has no grammatical subject and no copula, and the modern conception of the subject does not exist within it. To put it as plainly as possible, Wa transforms as a subject of its own.

The problem lies in the history of Wa. Because the origins of Wa go far back in history, I consider “the history of Wa” almost equivalent to “the history of Japan.” If the surface of history is Japan, the underside is Wa, and the two are virtually identical. Following this context, Wa has been considered “the virtue of Japan” from antiquity, and this is something every Japanese person is taught. I want to begin from the question of whether this is actually true. Discourse that praises and beautifies Wa has not ceased even today, but it is impossible to believe that those who champion it understand the reality of Wa. Of course the critics do not understand it either.

Let us start from the basics. The earliest textual origin of the concept of Wa is the first article of the Seventeen Article Constitution established by Shotoku Taishi (574–622). According to the Nihon Shoki completed in 720, Japan’s first constitution promulgated in 604 records [和を以て貴しと為す]. To break the meaning down, this is the teaching that “harmony without conflict is the most precious thing.” This reading would shift its meaning across each era through the transformation history of Wa. Why did Shotoku Taishi offer this kind of proposition in a constitution?

Worshipped as the greatest figure of ancient history, Shotoku Taishi was once even printed on the ten thousand yen note and is a deeply familiar figure to the Japanese, yet his actual nature is shrouded in mystery. This is a very strange situation. What should be asked here is the source of the reasoning behind venerating a person of unclear identity from 1400 years ago. To state the reason simply, Shotoku Taishi was treated as the architect of “a state centered on the emperor.” But it is critical to note that Shotoku Taishi himself did not propose this. It was later generations who came to see him this way. The origin of this beautification severed from the actual Shotoku Taishi lies with the de facto ideologue of the Nihon Shoki compilation project Fujiwara no Fuhito (659–720).

What is fascinating is that the beautified image of Shotoku Taishi has begun to collapse rapidly. The extreme view even claims that “Shotoku Taishi did not exist,” and that voice has been growing. At present his existence remains established, and the question has moved to the credibility of the deeds transmitted in his name. What deserves attention is that the debate over Shotoku Taishi’s existence began with a single book proposed in 1999 by the Chubu University historian Oyama Seiichi. Through the history that runs until the end of the twentieth century, there is no trace of the deeds of Shotoku Taishi having been questioned. What does this mean?

Oyama argued that the image of the superhuman politician and thinker known as “Shotoku Taishi” did not exist. His point converges on the claim that the imperial prince called Umayado given the title “Shotoku Taishi” did exist, but he was merely one of several influential figures of the time and not the superhuman person spoken of today. Oyama further indicated that the de facto leader who selected this Umayado and deified him as “Shotoku Taishi” within the Nihon Shoki compilation was Fujiwara no Fuhito.

Why does the question of Shotoku Taishi’s deification relate directly to the structure of Japan? Because this era is regarded as the foundation of the first state formation in Japan. To shape the modern image of a state centered on the emperor, this era’s veneration is indispensable. Personally I agree with Oyama’s argument while interpreting it more from the standpoint of communal illusion. Shotoku Taishi was not a substantive person but the alienated realization of various deeds carried out by the court at the time, configured as communal illusion. The various court led enterprises called the foundations of Japanese state formation were consolidated under the powerful figure of the Nihon Shoki compilation period Fujiwara no Fuhito, and the image known as Shotoku Taishi was formed within the realm of illusion. This is difficult, but the transformation of Wa is occurring here.

In short, Umayado existed but Shotoku Taishi is a creation. Yet this is not a problem that can be dismissed as simple fabrication. By creating Shotoku Taishi, a step toward the establishment of a unified state called “Japan” within the dimension of illusion was born. Shotoku Taishi is an illusion that consolidates the deeds of the court around the seventh century and alienates them in the early eighth century. However, in Japan this illusion carries substance.

Seen from this perspective, the reason Shotoku Taishi has been the most beautified figure in Japanese history becomes visible. Because he was not a real person but a communal illusion, the room to beautify him has always remained. Various spirits and thoughts can flow into Shotoku Taishi, and he carries the capacity to transform with each era. The records concerning Shotoku Taishi are extremely sparse. According to the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, he was the imperial son of the 31st Emperor Yomei (r. 585–587), and both parents belonged to the bloodline of the 29th Emperor Kinmei (r. 539–571). The fact that Emperor Kinmei was the emperor at the time Buddhism arrived from Baekje must not be overlooked. Shotoku Taishi was a member of the imperial family but merely one of several influential candidates with rights of imperial succession. The title of “emperor” did not exist in Japan at the time, so the era in which Shotoku Taishi lived precedes the existence of emperors. The title of emperor began around the time of the 40th Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686) and the 41st Empress Jito (r. 690–697).

To organize Shotoku Taishi’s deeds based on the Nihon Shoki account, the list runs as follows.

574: Born as an imperial son of Emperor Yomei.
593: Becomes regent upon the accession of his aunt Empress Suiko and leads national governance as the de facto political leader on equal footing with Soga no Umako.
603: Establishes the Twelve Cap Ranks.
604: Promulgates the Seventeen Article Constitution.
607: Dispatches Ono no Imoko as envoy to Sui and sends a state letter to Emperor Yang. Devoutly protects Buddhism and builds Shitennoji and Horyuji.
622: Dies at the age of forty nine.

This is the Shotoku Taishi generally understood by the Japanese, and within the swirl of these deeds, the concept of Wa was elevated together with the illusion of Shotoku Taishi. Reading [和を以て貴しと為す] simply as “harmony without conflict is the most precious thing,” it cannot have been unrelated to the era when fierce conflict over the reception of Buddhism was occurring. In this era the triangle of pro-Buddhist leadership composed of Soga no Umako, Empress Suiko, and Shotoku Taishi was established, and Buddhism penetrated rapidly. The one who praised this era’s policy of making Buddhism a state religion and judged it politically useful was the later Fujiwara no Fuhito. One more person was involved. That was the monk Doji (?–744).

Doji’s life is shrouded in mystery. He went to Tang as an envoy in 702 to study Buddhism, returned in 718, and is said to have been the leading figure involved in the activity of Daianji. He sharply criticized the Japanese Buddhist world’s tendency to discuss Buddhism in independent and arbitrary terms unlike the Tang Buddhism that followed scripture. He left traces of active work, including the proposal to invite monks from Tang to raise the quality of the Japanese priesthood. There is also the view that he was involved in the Nihon Shoki compilation project, but the actual situation is unknown. What can be said is that he likely participated in the beautification of Shotoku Taishi together with Fujiwara no Fuhito.

Famous temples such as Shitennoji in Osaka and Horyuji in Nara are said to have been built by Shotoku Taishi, and he has been spoken of as a substantive political leader. Yet the power structure at the time was not simple. The visible political leader was Shotoku Taishi, the real authority over ritual lay with Empress Suiko, and the hegemonic power behind the scenes was held by Soga no Umako. Soga no Umako was the leader of the pro-Buddhist camp at the time and was the de facto leader who united the naturalized immigrants flowing in from the continent and the peninsula and formed an overwhelming force in Yamato (the south central area of present day Nara Prefecture). The Asuka period began with the accession of Empress Suiko, and the triangular structure of the Asuka period can be positioned as the first era in which Japan displayed a totalitarian tendency. The foundation on which ancient Wa began to transform lay in the Asuka period. Of course it could not extend as totalitarianism across the entirety of Japan. It was only within the small sphere of Yamato.

This alone makes the claim that Shotoku Taishi’s deeds were fabricated by later generations persuasive. At the same time, the question becomes what the present collapse of the image of the proponent of Wa in antiquity brought about through the reexamination of Shotoku Taishi suggests for the near future of Japan. As I noted, since I view this movement as a problem of communal illusion, it cannot be settled simply by saying that Shotoku Taishi’s deeds were lies. The advance of the reexamination of Shotoku Taishi necessarily accompanies the transformation of communal illusion itself. Let us read this carefully.

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For the past several years I have been moving through every part of Japan while contemplating the essence of tourism. The voices that seek a uniform shared experience mediated by social media still hold persistent influence. At the same time it is also true that there are travelers who feel discomfort with that mainstream, and one must not speak of them simply as tourists.

In Japan, traveling to various places to see and learn is called [観光] (Kanko). The term derives from a passage in the Chinese I Ching that reads [観国之光 利用賓于王]. It loosely translates to observing the light of the country, the society, and the people one visits, and learning from it as a guest from elsewhere. To observe the light is at the same time to observe the shadow. One must not lean too far toward either side, and the traveler is required to exercise self restraint and respect for others and other countries.

Placing the thought of yin and yang at the foundation of travel, and bringing oneself into the middle within the streets one has come to. Through this practice one acquires genuine learning, unlike the self serving traveler of the present age. The original meaning of Kanko is learning, not unilateral consumption.

What one learns will differ from person to person. It varies according to each person’s nature, and it must not be swayed by the discourse of others. The original Kanko is input, but it always presupposes output. Output is often misunderstood. It is not posting travel photographs to social media.

After the journey ends and you return to the country, the society, the community, and the relationships in which you live, you take what you have learned and put it into practice in pursuit of a better future. This is the essence of Kanko.

Earlier this year I was approached by people in the tourism industry who had reached an impasse and were looking for ideas to think about “the next form of tourism.” Centered on the Kansai region, I have been making new proposals. The foundation I work from is the essence of Kanko described above, and it differs from the conventional perspective that pursues “numbers” such as visitor counts and sales figures.

For example, the major tourist areas of Osaka where I myself live, including Namba, Shinsaibashi, Umeda, and Shinsekai, were historically beneath the sea. Almost every tourist visits these districts, but the real Osaka is not there.

Here I want to look at the flow generally narrated in the founding history of Osaka, from my own angle.

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The first thing to recognize is that the common belief that Japan possessed an indigenous Shinto before the arrival of Buddhism and Confucianism does not speak the truth. It is more reasonable to see that Shinto acquired its religious quality over a span of more than a thousand years through the influence of Buddhism and Confucianism, both of which had been completed as religions on the Chinese side. In other words, for Shinto to acquire the aspect of standing in opposition to foreign religions like Buddhism and Confucianism, it required strong pressure from Buddhism and Confucianism. Yet no matter how strong the external pressure, faith never disappears entirely. This is the essence of faith and is not limited to Shinto.

Through the On Dogen series I have presented from various angles the transition from the aristocratic government of the Heian period to the warrior government, and an understanding of this era connects directly to Shinbutsu Shugo. From the early period of Buddhism’s arrival, Shinbutsu Shugo had been gradually advancing, but it cannot be said that the “relationship between gods and buddhas” was clearly conscious at that point. It would be more accurate to say that this consciousness emerged gradually over the course of several centuries. The greatest turning point was the appearance of [本地垂迹] (Honji Suijaku).

But this Honji Suijaku doctrine is a difficult problem. Stated simply, it is “the thought of regarding gods as incarnations of buddhas.” Yet through the process of its understanding, propagation, and reception, problems arose one after another, and the situation can rightly be called a period of confusion in faith. Within this confusion of faith, however, lay the seeds of what was to come. These seeds are not limited to Shinto and Buddhism. They are a wellspring that flowed even into cultural-spiritual currents like the way of tea, and they require very careful examination. They are, in a sense, the source of “the heart of Japan.”

The character of the conception of the gods from the Heian into the Kamakura period reveals this confusion vividly. To put it plainly, the incarnation of buddhas as gods was thought to be the ultimate expression of the buddhas’ salvation of sentient beings. Put differently, while holding up the fundamental Buddhist idea of the benefit of sentient beings as the underlying logic, the visible signboard set up not the buddhas but the gods. As you may already sense, the natural question arises of where the superiority of the buddhas lies in such a structure.

In fact this was the most serious problem of the time. The teaching was developed with Buddhist doctrine as its skeleton, and yet what stood at the front was not the buddhas revered by Buddhism but, somehow, the gods of the Shinto side. If one could simply link Buddhist doctrine with the buddhas through faith, that would suffice. But this was not possible. Conversely, this shows how deeply the faith in the gods was rooted in place. For the monks, resolving this problem became the first priority, and from here a complex and convoluted history begins. The Honji Suijaku doctrine within Shinbutsu Shugo was not a goal but the beginning of confusion.

From the Buddhist side of the time, the buddhas and bodhisattvas had already appeared before sentient beings in their own forms and were in fact bestowing various benefits upon them. Yet the monks of the Buddhist side were facing an essential problem that this alone could not solve, and they devised the Honji Suijaku doctrine in an attempt to break through. What were the monks treating as a problem? Honestly, the truth is that they themselves did not know.

What must not be overlooked here is that the Honji Suijaku doctrine, beyond bringing benefit to the Buddhist side, in fact opened a direct opportunity for the Shinto side to take the path of independence. As the name Shinbutsu Shugo suggests, this was actually a complex phenomenon that produced benefit on both sides. It was the greatest occasion through which Shinto in particular acquired doctrine and theology. Without this process, modern Shrine Shinto and State Shinto could never have been born.

Where then is the origin of Shinbutsu Shugo placed? In general, it is placed in the Nara period (710–794). The capital at that time was Nara, which had entered the golden age of Buddhism. Temples were built one after another and Buddhist statues were produced in great quantity. In the midst of this, an interesting phenomenon called [神身離脱] (Shinshin Ridatsu) was occurring.

Shinshin Ridatsu is the thought that the gods themselves had given an oracle declaring that “we suffer in our state of being gods and wish to be saved by the Buddhist Dharma.” It is the doctrine of gods seeking salvation from the buddhas, and it is the key to understanding the later Honji Suijaku doctrine. At this point, however, just as the phrase “gods seek salvation from the buddhas” indicates, the gods were clearly placed as beings inferior to the buddhas. The gods were also placed as one type of sentient being suffering within Buddhist samsara, where they were depicted as beings who heard the Dharma and wished through practice to escape their state of being gods. It is fascinating, but a great many problems are visible. It expresses the early confusion of Shinbutsu Shugo.

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In practice, when you visit a shrine and ask the priest “what is a shrine?” the answer you usually receive is the fixed response “a dwelling where gods are enshrined.” But this is the correct answer for “Shinto” and says nothing about the origin of the shrine itself. Why does everyone give the same answer in unison? No one explains.

The background involves the existence of only two universities in Japan where one can train to become a shrine priest. One is Kokugakuin University in Tokyo and the other is Kogakkan University in Ise, Mie Prefecture. The two appear to be independent, but in fact they are priest training institutions directly under Jinja Honcho. At these universities students study Shinto, classical texts, and ritual technique in accordance with the doctrine established by Jinja Honcho, and upon graduation they are granted the qualification of shrine priest by Jinja Honcho. Only by passing through this process can one become a priest. In other words, it has nothing whatsoever to do with faith.

What matters is that Jinja Honcho is not a public organ of the government. It is clearly a religious corporation. Jinja Honcho is a new religious movement that “reveres the Grand Shrine of Ise as its sovereign shrine,” and it contains none of the pluralistic tolerance of faith that Shinto originally possessed. It is an organization with a pyramidal power structure that places the Grand Shrine of Ise at the absolute apex and oversees eighty thousand shrines nationwide directly beneath it. From this alone the reality emerges that Jinja Honcho, which holds the licensing system for priests, is carrying serious problems. In fact, Jinja Honcho uses this vested interest to provide quite direct backing to conservative Liberal Democratic Party legislators and deploys the Shinto Political League as its lobby organization.

In plain terms, they collect funds from shrines across the country and channel them into political movements aligned with their own religious doctrine. The logic of the conservative camp, including that of the current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, fundamentally stands on their intentions, and they still hold considerable influence. But what this article seeks to question is not the political problem of Jinja Honcho. Rather, the issue is that the existing content disseminated in line with Jinja Honcho’s intentions can answer “what is a shrine?” but has no power to answer “what was the shrine?” I want to open a path for resolving this discomfort.

To state it clearly, the answer to the question above is the textbook answer taught at university institutions. Directly, it is the view of Jinja Honcho. Seen from a slightly sharper angle, the answer strongly embraces the history of modern Shinto and retains remnants of early modern Shinto, but carries the problem of being virtually devoid of the history, culture, and spirit that preceded it. What I find discomforting above all is that their answer defining a shrine as “a dwelling where gods are enshrined” is incapable of saying anything about the Shinto that existed before. To give a more striking example, it is completely severed from the historical phenomenon of Shinbutsu Shugo (the syncretism of gods and buddhas). This fact reveals that neither priests nor Buddhist monks actually possess an answer to this fascinating phenomenon.

Viewed from the perspective of Japan, against the “buddha” as a later arrival there was the “god” as the originary presence. Everyone agrees on this. The problem is that when a shrine is defined in the modern sense as “a dwelling where gods are enshrined,” the history of how heterogeneous beings crossed becomes invisible. To give the example of Shinbutsu Shugo, Amaterasu enshrined at the Kotai Jingu within the Grand Shrine of Ise (the sovereign shrine of Jinja Honcho) is considered the incarnation of Dainichi Nyorai on the Buddhist side. The logic of this claim is clear. But what I truly wish to know is the following.

Why was it possible for such heterogeneous beings as god and buddha to syncretize?
What was the cultural spiritual soil at the origin that made this possible?

Laid out simply it is brief, but the moment one attempts to discuss it, it becomes extraordinarily difficult. Put differently, when considering the reception and interpretation of the heterogeneous arrival of Buddhism in Japan, what must first be illuminated is the reception and interpretation of the gods that formed the soil. Yet few people turn their thinking this far. The reason is clear. The reception of the gods by the Japanese as an ethnic people is taken for granted as a tradition continuous from antiquity. But is this really so?

If even that answer is merely the view of Jinja Honcho, then the inconvenient fact emerges that in truth no one knows anything. No one knows anything, yet everyone acts as if they do. This is the typical method of new religious movements and says nothing about the essence of Shinto itself. To know Shinto truly, one must move toward a world in which the enormous illusion called Jinja Honcho has been extinguished. As far as I know, the people who have touched the essential horizon of Shinto in modern and later history can be counted on one hand.

Conventional Shinto logic assumes that the act of venerating gods has been practiced across Japan since antiquity. Even where no shrine existed in its present form, in prototype the trees of the forest, rocks, and mountains were regarded as shrines and underwent historical transformation to become what we see today. This is the so-called faith of Yaoyorozu. Typically, the moment this mind that regards nature itself as a shrine underwent transformation is placed with the influence of the transmission of Buddhism, which arrived with the structure of the temple.

Certainly, once the construction of temples began, the construction of shrines to enshrine gods began in opposition. But this happened only in certain regions and cannot be generalized to all of Japan. The theory that an indigenous Shinto worldview was erected in opposition to the foreign Buddhist worldview is also quite suspect. Because this idea depends on the unverifiable fantasy that Shinto existed from antiquity. Stated skeptically, it is an ideology.

The idea that countless gods dwell within nature itself contains a certain truth, but I feel discomfort with making this the origin of Shinto. That trees, rocks, and mountains themselves were divine bodies and the prototypes of shrines is likely fact, given that traces remain across the country to this day. But even this nature faith must have had an origin of its own. When you reach this discomfort, you must confront an extremely troublesome body of thought. That is the history of interpreting Shinto as Kamunagara.

The modern reading of [神道] as Shinto is a new convention that took hold only in the modern era. In the past it was read in various ways, including Kamunagara and Kannagara. The orthography itself derives from the Nihon Shoki (completed in 720) which uses the notation [惟神].

Regarding the meaning of [惟神], the original annotation in the Nihon Shoki explains it as [惟神者 謂隨神道亦謂自有神道也]. Because the Nihon Shoki is written entirely in Chinese style classical Chinese, this kind of notation becomes the original source. Monks, priests, and scholars from before the early modern period have proposed various interpretations of the term [惟神], so it is a fact that the term was historically valued. The interpretation cannot be translated into English, but forced into approximation it reads as follows. “Kamunagara means following the way of the gods. It also means the state in which the way of the gods exists naturally.” Put differently, this conveys the form of Shinto, but the understanding is extremely difficult.

First, the troublesome quality of the Japanese must be resolved. The point of focus is a single term in the original annotation, the character [自].

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No word conveys the heart of the Japanese as they once were more vividly than Fudo. Conversely, any account of Japan or the Japanese people offered by someone who does not understand Fudo and has never known Fudo is nothing more than armchair speculation. When I consider Japanese history as a whole, I notice without exception that the Japanese history conventionally narrated has been constructed by people who do not know Fudo. And people who do not know Fudo have for some reason always thought about history, the very foundation of a people’s identity, behind closed doors. Whether those doors belong to a university, a parliament, or anywhere else, the people who speak of history from Fudo with sincerity have always been few. In most cases the history of a people has been decided and narrated in closed rooms. This method is practiced worldwide, but it is not history. It should not count as having said anything about a people. My discomfort with this is where I begin.

The Japanese word [風土] is composed of [風] (Fu/wind) and [土] (Do/soil or earth). Conventionally [風] is understood as wind and [土] as soil. I will carefully undo this misunderstanding. As the single compound Fudo conveys, the entirety of a people’s history, culture, spirit, and customs can be understood through [風] and [土]. But that understanding is not an understanding achieved in the head. It is something that happens only when you travel to the land, feel the wind that blows there, and set foot on the soil. Without doing so we cannot claim to have truly understood anything. And yet, strangely, the history we are given in the conventional sense carries neither the comfort of wind nor the smell of earth. History that does not know Fudo is meaningless. It is equivalent to having said nothing. In truth, there is no way to disclose the essence of a people other than by thinking about history and culture from Fudo.

From this perspective it goes without saying that anyone who wishes to examine Japan must feel the wind and tread the soil in every part of the country. This is an absolute condition. Reading hundreds of books on Japanese history amounts to knowing nothing at all. As the Ming Confucian scholar Wang Yangming taught through his principle of [知行合一], a principle that has continued to exert enormous influence on a segment of the Japanese population since the Edo period, understanding cannot be claimed unless knowledge and action are united. In practice, the reason I travel across Japan with various themes in mind is to absorb the Fudo of Japan into my own bodily experience. Sometimes I return to a place many times for this purpose, because Fudo is not something that enters you simply by going there. It permeates slowly, becoming internalized over time. The people who truly understand a country and its people are those in whom Fudo has seeped. What they say about the country and its people can be trusted. In this sense it is clear that understanding Japan or the world is something utterly impossible within a single lifetime.

The problem is that Fudo as it is conventionally discussed in Japan has been reduced since the modern era to a set of tedious scientific markers: the climate, weather, topography, geology, and scenery of a place. That the original Fudo cannot be confined to a scientific category is clear from the following.

When the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki were compiled in 712 and 720, the 43rd Emperor Genmei, who had issued the edict to preserve oral traditions in written form, simultaneously issued an edict ordering that the traditions surviving in each region be compiled into place-specific documents. This project was originally called [解] (Ge) but came to be known as [風土記] (Fudoki) by the Heian period. Tracing its origins, the compound [風土] is a term of Chinese origin. Its original meaning referred to the vital force of the land as it responds to the cycle of the seasons. As early as the second century, Chinese geographic texts bearing the title [風土記] appeared. The term eventually reached Japan. But this does not mean that the idea of Fudo did not exist in Japan. The Man’yoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, suggests otherwise.

The words in the Man’yoshu are written not in the Sino-Japanese vocabulary that was standard at the time but in the distinctive yamatokotoba, the native Japanese language. A complication arises here. Yamatokotoba was not a language used across the entire Japanese archipelago. It was the indigenous language of the Nara region, specifically the everyday language of the court. In the poetry of the Nara period there is almost no room for Sino-Japanese compounds to intrude directly. The poems are composed in yamatokotoba, and from that language arise the yohaku, the breathing spaces.

Because Fudo is a Sino-Japanese compound, the term [風土] does not appear in the Man’yoshu. But the spiritual world of the Man’yoshu is richly inhabited by the sensibility of Fudo. More precisely, the Man’yoshu can be said to be a work that sings of Fudo. The Fudo of the Man’yoshu resides in a geographic and climatic sensibility that sings of mountains, rivers, the spirit of the land, and the particularities of each place. In other words, the Chinese concept of Fudo and the Japanese sensibility of Fudo merged and were refined within the Man’yoshu into a world of its own.

On the other hand, the Fudoki project carried out officially as a court enterprise was primarily structured around five items: changing the names of provinces, districts, and villages to “favorable characters” considered auspicious; cataloguing products; recording the fertility of the soil; documenting the origins of the names of mountains, rivers, and plains; and preserving the oral traditions of the elders. This was partly motivated by the court in Nara seeking to understand the circumstances of other provinces and gather material for policies aimed at political unification. But beyond that, the Fudo of each province was compiled as important evidence of the origins of the ancient clans involved in the court. Because the origins of the ancient clans were dispersed across the land, and the rich memories held within their unique traditions constituted an ineradicable legitimacy of authority. Few records from this period survive, but the very fact that the court ordered the compilation of Fudoki suggests that pressure from the ancient clans was being brought to bear on the emperor. The power of each province was that strong. In effect the court was operated under a system in which it was elevated and sustained by the clans of each province.

According to the ritsuryo system of the time, the court recognized the existence of more than sixty provinces across the Japanese archipelago. It is therefore believed that approximately sixty Fudoki were produced. The great majority have been lost. Only five survive to the present day. The sole complete text is the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki (the Fudoki of the province of Izumo in Shimane Prefecture), the subject of last week’s article. This fact alone conveys how deep the historical faith in Izumo Taisha has been. The surviving but incomplete texts are the Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki (Ibaraki Prefecture), the Harima no Kuni Fudoki (Hyogo Prefecture), the Bungo no Kuni Fudoki (Oita Prefecture), and the Hizen no Kuni Fudoki (Saga Prefecture). The other Fudoki have been lost, though fragments quoted in other texts have been discovered. The Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and a handful of Fudoki have survived to the present, but if all the Fudoki of that era had been preserved, our ability to illuminate the rich picture of ancient Japan would be immeasurably greater. Because the Fudoki project was the act of recording in written form the distinct memories of Fudo that differed from one land to the next.

The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki occupy a clear position as centralized documents of the court. The Nihon Shoki in particular was produced with the intention of imitating the Chinese imperial historiographical system. It is written entirely in classical Chinese. This was intended both to establish within Japan the legitimacy of rule that the Chinese imperial system possessed and to present an appropriate face to the international community. In the East Asia of that era, compiling a history in classical Chinese was proof of civilization. The Samguk Sagi of the Korean Peninsula, completed in 1145, was born from the same impulse. Among the compilers of the Nihon Shoki are two figures who appear in historical records around 691: Tsuzuki no Morugon and Satsu no Hirokaku. They were scholars who had emigrated from China and naturalized in Japan. Their deep involvement in the classical Chinese composition of the Nihon Shoki is documented. Without the practical contribution of Tang intellectuals the Nihon Shoki could arguably not have come into existence.

The Kojiki, by contrast, is not written in classical Chinese. It is composed in a special technique called hentai kanbun and man’yogana. No foreign practitioners were involved in its compilation. It was produced by an intensely Japanese method. My own view is that the Kojiki occupies an intermediate position between the Nihon Shoki and the Fudoki and carries a highly distinctive context. When looking at a single myth or historical account, what you see from the Nihon Shoki and what you see from the Kojiki are entirely different. Even though the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki appear to record the same myths, traditions, and events, their worlds and their thought are fundamentally different. To put it in extreme terms, the Nihon Shoki is a document compiled through the thought of Tang scholars. The Kojiki is a document free from that influence. The fact that the court pursued both projects simultaneously is evidence that a serious attempt at intellectual independence from China was under way. Considering the history of how these texts came into being, it is clear that by the first half of the eighth century the idea of Fudo was already mature.

Above all, Fudo is not a matter of scientific markers. It contains everything about the people who lived on that land. From the will and feelings of unnamed predecessors, their faith, their daily acts, their gestures, their words, their gaze, to the cycles of nature, Fudo transmits an enormous range. It exists in as many forms as there are places on earth where people have lived. But since the modern era we have dismissed and erased this indigenous quality of Fudo. What matters is that Fudo is not simply a scientific account of wind and soil. Fudo is a “transmission device for memory” built up by predecessors, activated only when you feel the wind that has not changed for millennia and set foot on the soil. I believe Fudo is Japan’s true capital and the basis for being Japanese. But this does not mean in the sense of a single ethnic group. The true Japanese are a pluralistic people who have lived on the archipelago and remained connected in a state of non-separation. The world changes depending on which place you look at.

Put differently, Fudo is not activated unless you go to the land, feel the wind, and tread the soil. This is why history that does not know Fudo is entirely meaningless no matter what authority it wears. In present-day terms, because the great majority of Japanese people do not know Fudo, they interpret to their own convenience a “Japan and Japanese people that do not exist” fabricated in the head, and the country is accelerating in the wrong direction. In practice, what is commonly spoken of as Japan and the Japanese within Japan is from my perspective entirely armchair speculation. It exists only in the brains of a handful of scholars. That nearly every person who loudly proclaims Japan and the Japanese today does not know the Fudo of Japan is an enormous problem that is never discussed. Countries that have fallen into xenophobia are carrying the same problem to varying degrees.

First, Fudo is subject to the absolute condition of being regulated by place. For this reason, within the “space” constructed in modernity, the space of Japan as a unified state or the Japanese as a single ethnic group, the true Japan does not exist and the true Japanese do not exist. As I have noted, the space of modernity is always constructed behind closed doors. It exists only in the heads of rulers. It carries no wind blowing through and no feel of soil. In the modern world it is strangely permissible for people who have never been to Japan and have never spoken with a Japanese person to say whatever they please about Japan and the Japanese. But in truth this is an absurd farce. Because what is being spoken of is not Japan, and the sources on which it is based are not Japan. This is equivalent to no one having said anything.

This attitude is prevalent not only regarding Japan but worldwide. The result may be the global confusion of today. People who do not know the Fudo of a country or a people interpret it as they please and plunge the world into chaos. It is a natural consequence. Put differently, the land where you felt the wind and soil and the Japanese people with whom you spoke are your Japan. I believe that alone is wonderful. Even I, a Japanese person, cannot claim to have understood the history and culture despite having traveled across Japan to this extent. Even through a lifetime of research I will most likely never arrive at any answer. I am certain that the idea of Fudo can serve as a valuable resource for the people of every country that has experienced modernity, including Japan, as they search for what lies beyond the present impasse.

At the heart of Fudo’s structuration lies culture. This does not mean that Fudo possesses a specific predetermined structure. Rather, a structured system is what we call Fudo. Multiple pluralistic elements are involved in Fudo, and it is generated through the balance of their transformations and mutual influences. The invisible force that holds these pluralistic elements in a state of non-separation rather than separation is place. This is why Fudo can only be realized in place. The moment you try to think about it within the contentless space of the state, it separates immediately.

In the Japan of an earlier era, leaving one village and entering the next meant encountering a different Fudo. Because Fudo is regulated by place, the same Fudo can never be generated twice. This complex reality is the true nature of the pluralistic world and the essence of a Japan that has now been lost. Modern history ignored and erased this essence. From that point onward, Japan and the Japanese were shaped as molds within a monolithic space. The arrival of the unified state called Japan and the single ethnic group called the Japanese. But such things never originally existed.

Fudo is pluralistic and its complex reality refuses definition itself. Because it has already transformed by the next instant and never settles into a fixed state. And the substance of Fudo also differs depending on which person, carrying which context, activates it. This is why different people feel different things in the same place.

The reason is that the other elements are moving in a way that structures the culture at the core of Fudo. The main forces that generate and nurture this sphere are history, language, body, and technology. Each element acts upon the others in a state of non-separation, vibrating through resonance. Among them, the element that serves as the source of the force forming the sphere itself is language. For example, what kind of linguistic forms a people hold and how they deploy their language in speech become critical. Because these are the driving force that generates culture, and from them history, body, and technology are born. Seen from this perspective, the Japanese language as a unified national language ceases to exist. Because it never existed in the first place. And at the same time, the Japanese culture that most people speak of also ceases to exist. Put differently, Japanese culture exists only within the uniformly prepared space. In place, Japanese culture has no reality.

The reason is that the foundation at the core of culture is place. Beneath Fudo lies place. On that place, human beings who deploy language in every form conduct their daily lives, and what is formed over immense spans of time is Fudo. Whether the place is an office district in Tokyo, a mountain valley in Hokkaido, a remote island in Okinawa, or the deep mountains of Nagano, the Fudo you experience will differ. The Fudo experienced there can never be expanded into a generalized Japan. Here lies the core of the pluralistic world. Put differently, Fudo is the gods of Japan themselves. In this profound world lies the prototype of the ancient faith of Yaoyorozu, the word that expressed the infinite, or rather the totality. In other words, the gods of Japan are not in essence things to be reified or defined. This is precisely why the gods transformed and eventually merged with the buddhas of Buddhism in the extraordinary phenomenon known as shinbutsu shugo.

Let us consider one example. Okuninushi, the deity of Izumo Taisha discussed in last week’s article, is written [大国主]. [大] means great and [主] means lord or ruler. But what is [国] (kuni)?

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When the Meiji era began in 1868, the new rulers of the Meiji government set about negating the entire Edo period in order to lend legitimacy to the hegemony they had seized from the Tokugawa shogunal house through violent revolution. The target was the Japanese-style Confucianism that had wielded immense influence during the Edo period. The government was searching for a new philosophical foundation for the regime. Buddhism had built an era of its own but had rapidly lost its power after the onset of the Edo period. Confucianism was too closely associated with the Edo era to adopt. It was at this point that the Meiji government turned its attention to Shinto. But Shinto had no clear definition then and has none now, and the Meiji government adopted it without understanding it. Only one thing can be said with certainty. The Meiji government adopted something other than Buddhism or Confucianism. This new direction would later transform into Shrine Shinto and State Shinto, opening the curtain on a complex modern history of Shinto.

Having decided to adopt Shinto as the philosophical basis of the new regime, the Meiji government next began demanding centralized control over Shinto. But Shinto, though its origins are uncertain, possessed prototypical forms of faith that long predated the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. Even today the gods are called Yaoyorozu (the myriad deities). The faiths associated with these countless gods exist in as many forms as there are places on the Japanese archipelago and in as many forms as there are natural phenomena. They are far beyond the capacity of any central government to manage in a unified manner. But because this would not serve the new government’s purposes, two coercive measures were imposed. These were the Prohibition of Hereditary Shrine Priesthood in 1871 and the Shrine Consolidation Order of 1906.

Historically the management of shrines took many forms. A specific clan might serve as chief priest and venerate the deity, or a village community might collectively maintain the rites. But at major shrines governing entire regions the influence was powerful enough to resist even government directives. The priestly clans of shrines with particularly ancient origins were assumed to hold lineages spanning more than a thousand years, and because their historical relationships with the imperial house were also involved, they maintained immense influence in their local communities. The Meiji government sought to nullify this regional influence of the shrines and bring them under central control. Its method was to prohibit hereditary succession and thereby absorb faith into the bureaucratic apparatus. This was carried out from the perspective of creating a national populace, which was indispensable to the modern state. As a result, the great majority of shrines lost their regional influence and many were excluded from shrine administration.

Having confirmed the effectiveness of dismantling the influence of major shrines and placing them under centralized management, the Meiji government then moved to concentrate faith entirely within the state. This was the second measure, the Shrine Consolidation Order. It aimed to forcibly merge and reorganize the diverse shrines that had been dispersed across the land into a system manageable by the central government. In essence it was a measure for bureaucratic administration. What matters is that both measures used faith and Shinto as their pretext while the substance was the establishment of a modern bureaucratic system.

These two acts of state-level destruction caused the ancient faiths to enter a state of unease. But without these measures, something as undefinable as Shinto could not have been deployed as a state philosophy. Through this process the great majority of shrines had their hereditary priesthoods prohibited and expelled. The vacancies were filled by central government officials. Eventually the situation reached the point where qualification as a shrine priest required a degree from a Shinto university, and today ninety-nine percent of shrine priests are people who came through this system. But even in such an era, a small number of shrines possessed the authority to refuse the government’s demands. The foremost among them was Izumo Taisha. The clan of Izumo Taisha managed to survive the impact of the Meiji-era prohibition on hereditary succession. In accordance with customs dating to antiquity, a specific clan continues to serve as chief priest through hereditary succession to this day.

This is not possible through mere historical antiquity alone. It requires having gathered deep faith from the local community and having earned the people’s strong trust. In my own experience, having visited countless shrines across Japan, no shrine inspires faith as deep as Izumo Taisha. It remains a source of spiritual support for a great many Japanese people. Geographically it stands in a remote area far from the major cities, yet I visit once a year to pay my respects.

The fact that a small number of shrines survived the pressure of the Meiji government and continue their hereditary succession to this day transmits the strength and resilience of the faith that the Japanese once held. What then is the origin of Izumo Taisha, a shrine of such extraordinary spiritual power?

Regrettably this is almost never discussed. In this piece I will draw on perspectives developed through my own research and unravel the story by crossing mythology with ancient history.

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The common language prescribed by the center is then disseminated to children through a national education system and schools across the country. Simultaneously with the creation of a populace comes the creation of a state. Because the state must present an easily comprehensible narrative to an undifferentiated mass, indigenous character is inevitably discarded. If the indigenous histories, cultures, and spiritual traditions of each place were individually incorporated, a unified modern state could never be established. In the process of modernization, the context of place is ruthlessly destroyed. Place after place is discarded and a fabricated space controlled by the center is erected in its stead. This is the typical method of modern state creation. What is invariably born in this process is what I call “hollow history.” By hollow history I mean a formation in which only the outer membrane of the thing called history has been shaped by the politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars positioned at the center of the modern state, while the interior remains empty. In a sense, modernity can sustain itself only by fabricating a history without content and disseminating it relentlessly. This proved remarkably effective.

Behind the emergence of this structure lies the form of intellectual authority that was rapidly established after the Meiji period. Japan’s modernization, or Westernization, began in the Meiji era from 1868 onward. The core actors who erected the outer membrane of the entity called “Japan” were graduates of the Imperial University, the present-day University of Tokyo. At the time, attending university was itself a rarity, and Imperial University professors held an authority virtually equivalent to divinity. In the preceding Edo period, education was delivered through Confucian study. No national school system existed. Across the country, countless private academies called shijuku operated as places where individual teachers taught the people of their village. This was not education in the modern sense. It was learning between human beings, master and disciple facing each other directly. In the Japanese Confucianism of the Edo period, outstanding teachers who gave each person the opportunity to think existed in great numbers in every region. The university system introduced after Meiji concentrated authority in specific professors. Because it was grounded in elitism and was not open to everyone, it inevitably reinforced hierarchies of authority. In other words, Japan possessed a tradition of excellent education, but the Meiji government forcibly abolished it. The purpose of that abolition was the creation of new authority by the new rulers.

In this process the “Japan” they narrated as hollow history was promoted primarily by Imperial University graduates and professors. It shaped the national image that would lead to the Second World War and eventually became fixed as the common understanding of the populace. The greatest problem of modern scholarship comes down to the blind conviction that its authorities adopted on their own, the belief that there must be nothing they do not know. The results produced by this meaningless delusion were devastating. It became the wellspring from which the rich cultural spirit of Japan was systematically extinguished.

From this point onward, discourse that spoke of “what is not Japan as Japan” was installed at the center of history without question, underwritten by institutional authority. This is a structural problem of academia, but the violence born in early modernity did not exist in the Edo period. Personally, I have always trusted what I feel on the ground when I move on my own feet and arrive at a site, more than any theory advanced by some authority somewhere. I am certain that nothing is more trustworthy. Anyone who goes to the actual site can easily see how far off the mark history in its conventional sense has landed. From this vantage point, the Japanese are not a single ethnic people, and Japan is not a unified state. The essence of what Japan is cannot be disposed of with the word “diversity.” It must be called a “pluralistic world.” To read the richness of Japan as a pluralistic world requires looking at it sincerely from an angle that is not the existing framework of “Japan.” In a sense, this is the negation of the historical image constructed by modern Japan.

Within this problem-consciousness there is one theme I want to address in this article. It concerns the conventional wisdom surrounding the routes by which people crossed the sea to reach the Japanese archipelago. In standard Japanese history, the movement of immigrants across the sea is stated to have departed from the southern Korean Peninsula, passed through Tsushima and Iki Island, and arrived in northern Kyushu. Northern Kyushu was certainly a strategic coastal zone from ancient times, and the area was dotted with multiple powerful clans. Representative among them were the Munakata clan based in Munakata City in Fukuoka Prefecture and the Azumi clan based on Shikanoshima island in Fukuoka. They were descendants of early powers that had mastered the sea, leveraging their geographic advantage to seize trade interests with China and Korea and rise to prominence. Before the prototype of a unified state emerged in the southern part of the Nara Basin in a later era, there was an age dominated by clans who controlled the seas of northern Kyushu. This has been forgotten by history. Most people underestimate the importance of understanding sea routes, but given that Japan is surrounded by sea on all sides, the impossibility of understanding Japan without this perspective is self-evident. This is not limited to ancient history. It is a major theme running through the entirety of Japanese history to the present, and without firmly holding this perspective, the cultural transmissions of every era cannot be decoded.

Since the traces of seafaring peoples vanish beneath the waves, they are difficult to detect through the terrestrial evidence of archaeology and similar fields. Put differently, virtually everything narrated as Japanese history is history seen from the perspective of the land. It harbors the enormous problem of lacking the perspective of the sea, which is an even more critical factor. To touch that world, let us begin with these two clans. The key to understanding the Munakata lies in their enshrined deities. The key to the Azumi lies in the distribution of their name and the form of their worship. And an intriguing tendency shared by ancient sea-related clans must not be overlooked. The pattern of venerating trinities of deities appears repeatedly. To regard this as mere religious ornamentation is a mistake. From the number three, the memory of the very act of crossing the sea can be read.

At Munakata Taisha, the home shrine of the Munakata clan, a goddess is enshrined on each of three islands within the sacred domain. Tagorihime at Okitsu-miya on Okinoshima, Tagitsuhime at Nakatsu-miya on Oshima, and Ichikishimahime at Hetsu-miya on the mainland side. Okinoshima lies 50 kilometers offshore from the Kyushu mainland, Oshima 11 kilometers, and Hetsu-miya was once a separate island but is now connected to the mainland. I believe this arrangement of three shrines is not simply a matter of religious sanctuaries. It transmits in stages the memory of the sea route taken when crossing from the Korean Peninsula to the Munakata side. Arrivals would call at each island in sequence, performing purification rituals at each stage. Only after completing the final purification could they land at the Munakata headquarters. A protocol of “three purifications” existed along the ancient sea route. Only those who had fully purged the defilement of a foreign land could merge with the local deity and be recognized as kin. It goes without saying that the peculiar modern concept of “race” did not exist at the time. A person who had crossed the sea became one with the deity of the land at the moment the purification was complete. The remnant of this concept of spiritual kinship survives today as the three-shrine system of Munakata Taisha. Okinoshima, the site of the first purification, remains a sacred domain where entry is still forbidden.

The Munakata faith is called the faith of the three goddesses, Tagorihime, Tagitsuhime, and Ichikishimahime. The worship of these goddesses extends across the entire country. Famous examples include Itsukushima Shrine on Itsukushima in Hiroshima Prefecture and Enoshima Shrine on Enoshima in Kanagawa Prefecture. These transmit the traces of the Munakata clan’s movements. The fact that the three Munakata goddesses are enshrined in locations throughout Japan reveals that the clan were not merely gatekeepers of the Genkai Sea off northern Kyushu. They were a people who expanded over a wide area through the sea routes.

At Shikanoumi Shrine, the home shrine of the Azumi clan, the approach differs from the Munakata. Rather than enshrining three deities on three islands, they divide the sea itself into three layers, Soko, Naka, and Uha (bottom, middle, and surface), and enshrine a deity at each.

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It was not a single thing. It was born from many tributaries flowing into one. In this piece I want to look at the great current that formed the source itself. The figure who must be spoken of here is not a Japanese painter but a Chinese one. His name is Muqi.

Muqi was a Rinzai Zen monk who lived from the late Southern Song dynasty into the early Yuan period in the thirteenth century. He came from the mountainous province of Sichuan and later moved to Shaoxing, where he is said to have entered the school of the eminent Zen master Wuzhun Shifan (1177–1249). Wuzhun Shifan had deep ties to Japan. He was the master who produced a number of outstanding Japanese monks who went on to spread Rinzai Zen within Japan, foremost among them Enni Ben’en. Enni took the Rinzai teaching transmitted directly from Wuzhun Shifan as his foundation, but rather than adhering exclusively to Zen he blended it with Japanese esoteric Buddhism and spread Zen in Japan from his own distinctive vantage point. His contributions, however, were not limited to religion. After studying in Song China and returning to Japan, Enni founded temples in Hakata on Kyushu and in Kyoto and became one of the leading figures in the propagation of Zen. In his later years he returned to his hometown, and this gave rise to a culture that continues to this day. That culture is Shizuoka tea.

Enni’s hometown was in what was once called the province of Suruga, present-day Shizuoka City in Shizuoka Prefecture. Shizuoka Prefecture still possesses some of Japan’s most renowned tea fields and ranks among the top producers in the country. Shizuoka tea is traditionally said to have begun with Enni. When he returned to his hometown of Shizuoka in his later years, he had the tea he had brought back from Song planted and promoted tea cultivation. Enni himself drank tea daily and followed the belief of the time that tea possessed the power to extend life. Through Zen, Enni exerted a major influence on the cultural development of his homeland. Unlike those driven by self-serving ambition, Enni genuinely wished for the future of the place he came from and lived seriously for that purpose. This was a culture born through Zen, and I feel this perspective is critically important. Zen is the entrance, not the destination. I have long believed that Zen is something that envelops life, not an answer in itself. The spirit of Zen resides in each individual act of living daily life. It is something anyone can practice without undergoing special training at a temple. Historically, outstanding Zen monks have shared this perspective. But behind them, I cannot help sensing the influence of Wuzhun Shifan in China.

What I want to draw attention to here is that among Muqi’s fellow students under Wuzhun Shifan were Mugaku Sogen (Wuxue Zuyuan , 1226–1286), who would later travel to Japan, and Gottan Funei (Wuan Puning, 1197–1276). Both were Rinzai monks and both had a major impact on Rinzai Zen in Japan. Gottan Funei also studied under Wuzhun Shifan and is believed to have interacted with Enni during his period of study. In fact it was Enni who invited Gottan Funei from Southern Song to Japan in 1260. Gottan Funei was appointed as the second head of Kencho-ji in Kamakura at the request of Hojo Tokiyori, the supreme leader of the Kamakura shogunate. Hojo Tokiyori was a leader deeply committed to the spread of Rinzai Zen. Since Kamakura and Shizuoka are neighboring provinces, the influence of Rinzai intensified in this corridor. What matters is that the Zen monk Wuzhun Shifan stood as the spiritual pillar behind this entire religious and cultural milieu. He was most likely a generous-minded leader with a deep understanding of culture, one who did not cling to any single teaching. It is Japan’s good fortune that this Rinzai lineage flowed into the country, and it is no exaggeration to call it the lineage of Wuzhun Shifan. This lineage would go on to connect directly to the history of Suibokuga.

Muqi too is thought to have absorbed Wuzhun Shifan’s generosity of spirit through his interactions with fellow monks. And what is important is that although Muqi himself never visited Japan, the Chinese monks who had studied alongside him were later invited to Japan. Through these connections Muqi’s name became known within Japan. The enormous popularity of Muqi’s Suibokuga in Japan was made possible because the network of Chinese and Japanese monks centered on Wuzhun Shifan had built a direct tributary flowing into Japan. Behind the transmission of Muqi’s paintings to Japan lay not a simple commercial transaction but the existence of the Rinzai Zen religious network itself. In the course of Rinzai Zen’s spread within Japan, Muqi’s Suibokuga achieved such popularity that by the mid-fourteenth century countless forgeries were being produced. And above all, Muqi’s Suibokuga were not valued in China.

To understand Muqi’s Suibokuga, it is essential to grasp the Zen thought that lies behind it. As I have already written, Suibokuga is not simply a product of artistic talent. It is the reflection of Zen as a way of living daily life itself. Without Zen there would be no Suibokuga, and yet Suibokuga is not a tool for propagating Zen either. This sensibility may be difficult for peoples and nations with a strong religious consciousness to grasp, but the essence of Zen resides precisely here. Zen is not something that is taught, nor something that is learned. In the presence of a good master, the true worth of Zen manifests in the smallest gesture of daily life. There is no need for sermons. The history of Zen in Japan is rich with anecdotes of this kind.

One of the fundamental principles upheld by the Rinzai school is [不立文字]. This is the conviction that enlightenment cannot be transmitted through written characters or spoken words but only through the direct encounter between master and disciple. It is fundamentally different from the older Buddhist position that sought to learn the Dharma by reading scriptures and interpreting texts, and it was a reaction against the monopolization of Buddhist teaching by a limited few. Stripped of complexity, the idea is that the truth of the Dharma is already present in the ordinary daily contact of master and disciple, face to face. And this is not confined to the Zen relationship of master and disciple. It is open to everything. I suspect that Wuzhun Shifan understood and practiced this truth more deeply than anyone, and that this is why his disciples emerged and left a mark not only on China but on the history of Japan. In Zen it has long been held that rationalized systems of language and formalized rules are precisely what obstruct the attainment of enlightenment. In the present day this is something difficult to realize. It is not limited to Zen. It is simply a matter of looking seriously at the one person in front of you. But nothing is more difficult in the modern world than this simple act.

The thought of [不立文字] is naturally reflected in Muqi’s Suibokuga. His paintings contain none of the three-distance compositional methods that the orthodox Chinese ink painting of the time prescribed, none of the precise texture-stroke techniques, none of the strict bone-method brushwork. According to orthodox technique, mountains were to be rendered with texture strokes that expressed material quality. Muqi grasped the mountain together with the atmosphere surrounding it using nothing but the bleeding and tonal gradation of ink. To call this simply “a rebellion against form” is insufficient. It can be understood as the result of pursuing a direct apprehension that does not pass through form at all. The very idea of “rebellion against form” may function within the Western art-historical context, but it is an evaluation that does not reach Muqi’s lineage. If Muqi had thought about “form” and intentionally deviated from it, he would not have moved the hearts of Japanese painters. Nor would he have captured the hearts of the Rinzai monks who transmitted his works. The absurdity of thinking about Suibokuga through the lens of form is concentrated precisely in this point. There was no form in Wuzhun Shifan’s Zen.

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All religions, not only Buddhism, carry a certain limit. Whether that limit is covered over by drowning in the lust for power that comes with expanding the faithful, or confronted head on, depends on the person and the institution. This was precisely the challenge that the history of Japanese Buddhism faced after the end of the Heian period and the beginning of the Kamakura. The reality of people dying at a pace that overwhelmed the intentions of powerful monks who had seized control of politics, economics, and military power through the authority of the existing religious establishment could only expose their incompetence to the world.

It is in circumstances like these that the communal illusion disintegrates. The more entrenched a communal illusion, the more sudden its disintegration and the more devastating its impact on the people within it. Because they believed the illusion was the world. And as I have traced through the historical overview in this series, the movement to search for something outside the communal illusion began from within the Tendai school at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, one of the driving forces that had shaped the communal illusion of Heian-kyo for centuries.

Some monks who left the incubator of the communal illusion on Mount Hiei and entered the city were confronted with a world beyond words. They faced the fact that secluding themselves on the mountain to practice was an act of selfishness that ignored the world entirely. They grew disillusioned with themselves. And they began to ask whether there was anything they could do to stand alongside the suffering of the people. The foremost figure in this history was Honen, but given the era, others must have emerged as well.

Why the most important lineage in this context moved toward what would come to be called Jodo (Pure Land) Buddhism is not easy to understand. In terms of the actual force that drove the expansion of this tradition, Shinran of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) contributed more than Honen. Both schools share the word Jodo in their names, meaning they belong to the same broad lineage of Pure Land faith. But the problem is that the crisis of faith in this era was so deep that the relationship between master Honen and disciple Shinran cannot be treated as a simple succession. It was precisely because the situation was so muddled that Shinran alone was able to see through to the essence.

Because we cannot avoid viewing these movements as history, we tend to conduct our examination of Jodo in a continuous line from Honen to Shinran. But I believe the issue lies elsewhere. If the problem of Jodo had simply been a matter of doctrinal gravity, the Jodo tradition would never have achieved its overwhelming position in Japan. What then is the thing that must be perceived in this era? It is in fact not a complex problem. It comes down to answering a single simple question. That question is death.

The movement of a new Buddhist lineage from Honen to Shinran was born precisely to think through this simple question of death with total rigor. Put differently, in the thoroughness with which they engaged the problem of death, the religious worldviews of Honen and Shinran diverge at the root. They cannot be equated. Shinran was certainly influenced by Honen, who had likewise grown disillusioned with Mount Hiei and begun his own independent teaching in Heian-kyo. But to call Shinran the legitimate successor of Honen on that basis is precarious. It is better to consider Shinran as having created an entirely different religion. In what is commonly described as his negation of the Jodo tradition, he pushed the gaze upon Jodo further than anyone.

From Shinran’s perspective, even the master Honen’s thinking about Jodo was sloppy and soft. Shinran systematically negated the Buddhist tendency to reify death, prayer beads, the nenbutsu, and Jodo. This is an ultimate and final position for a religion to take. When everything has been negated and pushed to its furthest point, what form of religion remains at the end? This is the world Shinran challenged, and in this respect he stands alone.

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