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.12
Sep 30, 2026
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1｜LIVING QUESTIONS
2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT
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★★★ Announcing My New Blog ★★★
With an eye on where the times are heading, and to speed up my move away from platforms, I have rebuilt most of my projects myself. The centerpiece is a blog built around photography rather than text alone. New posts will appear on no fixed schedule, in Japanese, English, Spanish, German, and Chinese, five languages in all. Below is the introduction to the blog.
New blog: takahiromitsui.com
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For the first time in twenty years, I’ve decided to start a blog.
Back in the mid-2000s, before the iPhone and social media arrived, I was a high school student utterly absorbed in the blog I kept on my flip phone. Low-resolution photos taken on the phone, purikura photo-booth stickers, and the outpourings of a teenager’s restless, zigzagging heart were what those blogs ran on, and blogging became the thing everyone my age was doing.
Then everyone started carrying a smartphone, and a decade began in which social media swallowed enormous amounts of our time. Now generative AI floods us with every kind of information. Having lived through all of it, I find it cramped and uncomfortable to let a platform hold what I create. So I built a blog of my own from scratch, a place to make things where I decide for myself what kind of relationship I have with the people who read me.
We live in an age when everyone has started to wonder, “Could this be generative AI?” In an age like this, what proves a work is truly mine comes down to one thing, the photograph I took when I once stood in that very place and pressed the shutter.
Alongside From the Tideline, I hope you’ll enjoy my blog, where I go to places myself, press the shutter, and write down what I think.
TAKAHIRO MITSUI: takahiromitsui.com
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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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Slowness is now valued as a kind of luxury. Yet slowing down and doing nothing more simply means being left behind by the times. I have felt this in my own work. Until recently, I was building everything with no-code tools, and in the past few days even those have started to feel dated. That is how staggering the speed of AI has become now that it runs as an automaton. Almost every day, working alongside it, I sense that human beings have already been written out of its ecosystem entirely.
If we are going to raise the value of slowness in a world like this, I don’t think the answer is to lock things down with the regulations now being debated around the world. The individual has to become fast as well. The key is to build automation into your own daily life. I have come to feel that this is the lifeline that makes a slow life full, lets you enjoy it, and lets you earn a living from it.
That is why I launched a new blog this week. It is a way of savoring the value of slowness to the full, and it is also preparation for the great upheaval I believe is approaching. I built the blog from scratch, and I have used it as the base to rebuild my company website, which I had previously put together with no-code tools, as well as the newsletter I publish in Japanese.
It has only been a few days, but I already feel lighter. When I ask myself why, I think it may be because I have stepped out of my dependence on platforms, whether total or partial, and put some distance between us. Strangely, stepping back from them has given rise to a new way of thinking, in which I tend my own world slowly and with care.
As this post shows, I still use Substack to publish my work in English, but I plan to move off it completely at some point. The first reason is that what I publish is my own work, and precisely for that reason I think it matters that I take full responsibility for it. In a sense, it is by deliberately keeping a convenient platform at a distance that I can move forward. The second reason is decentralization. When something goes wrong, a moment will come when everything depends on the preparation you made beforehand, and I am speeding up the work of spreading things out now so that I am ready for it.
As everyone knows, social media and other conventional platforms lighten your data and compress your images at will, to suit themselves. You have no freedom of design, of course. And the readers you want to reach are not really your readers at all. They count as the platform’s users, and the platform simply harvests them.
We may not need to fix all of this. But addressing it is essential if we want to build new relationships while truly slowing down, and when you measure it against the time it takes to nurture a relationship, relying on platforms simply does not pay. Over the long run, there is no escaping the scramble every time they change their terms, change their algorithms, go public, go bankrupt, or get bought and sold.
We can already see AI rapidly sweeping away much of what creators once considered indispensable. In an age when AI has become an automaton, it looks to me like a basic rule of survival to take responsibility for your own content and to see it through yourself, from making it and publishing it to building a relationship with the people who read it. That is what I mean by using AI to the full.
Today’s arguments over whether AI is good or bad are hopelessly out of date, because they treat slowing down and speeding up as separate things. In truth, the two cannot be pulled apart. To put it another way, to slow down, you have to speed up. Try to slow down by slowing down the individual, society, and the nation, and you will be left behind in no time. Even if society and the nation slow down, the individual has to keep accelerating. Only from there can you finally enjoy a slow daily life.
This much, at least, I can say. It matters to have a place of your own for what you make, a place where no platform can convert it without asking. I would be glad if the photographs on the blog let you feel something of that first step.
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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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