Bappon Sokugen［抜本塞源］

Miwa Shissai, a Confucian scholar of the Edo period, was the figure who first tilled the soil for the spirit of the Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming to take root in Japan. He was active a full century after the Tokugawa Shogunate, established in the new era of 1603, had adopted the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi as the orthodox philosophy of its regime. A genius of precocious insight, Shissai discerned the limitations of Zhu Xi’s doctrine while still in his early twenties. He foresaw that if the Shogunate continued to career blindly down the path of this singular orthodoxy, governance would eventually destabilize, anxiety would shake the hearts of the people, and anti-regime movements would inevitably rise. Thus, Shissai judged that Wang Yangming’s philosophy—Yangmingism—would not spread in his own time. Instead, he poured his life into laying the cornerstone of this teaching for a future yet to come. Without his solitary labor, Wang Yangming would never have been loved in Japan with such fervor—perhaps even more so than in China, the very cradle of Confucianism.

In times of tranquility, the mindless expansion of knowledge is lauded by the masses; this is a constant across all eras. Our contemporary age is no exception. This doctrine of meaningless knowledge-capitalism, riding the great tides of globalization since the 1990s, has spread to a planetary scale. The result is a state of affairs where those who know nothing, armed with knowledge expanded to no purpose, have come to possess the voice of the intellectual. Because these vacuous voices possess a high compatibility with mass media and social networks, they are diffused instantly. As we approach 2026, we stand amidst a century symbolized by the crude, the haphazard, and the mass-produced.

In the void where meaningless voices echo, everything is inverted. Here, those who say nothing are enabled to amass wealth, and those who do nothing acquire social status. Thus, saying nothing becomes saying something, and doing nothing becomes the act of doing something. When these inverted individuals—agents of a reverse reaction—gain international influence, they naturally know they are devoid of true knowledge. Consequently, they form factions with their own kind, constructing a world solely for the preservation of their social standing and the maintenance of exorbitant salaries they do not deserve. How long do we humans intend to participate in this farcical performance?

The time has come to strangle the breath of this current. Ozu Yasujiro, the director who steered early post-war Japanese cinema, had experienced the catastrophic runaway train of the Army during the Second World War. In his films, through the dialogue of his characters, he offered a critique: while the experience of defeat was bitter, it was “still better than wartime, if only because the idiots aren’t bossing us around anymore.” The situation is now identical on a global scale. Idiots are bossing us around, and—crucially—they cannot solve a single problem. Or rather, these fools, lacking the capacity for resolution, parasitize the system and refuse change solely to maintain their status and income. As a result, the lives of the multitude are threatened and sacrificed.

Whenever I witness this ridiculous spectacle of fools gathering to act out their plays on the world stage, I am reminded of a critical concept expounded by Wang Yangming.