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.11
Sep 23, 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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Driving along the coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture, I pass paddies where the harvest has yet to begin. But once the road turns inland and climbs into the mountains, the new rice is already being shipped. Heavy golden rice stands beside fields already cut, where green has pushed up through the stubble. I love this contrast, and out here I can take my fill of a landscape the cities have long since lost.
Roadside signs announce the new rice, and the countryside that spreads out around them looks like something sealed away at the back of memory, though it is still right here. Beyond the paddies in Yamaguchi and the country around it, rows of distinctive tiled roofs look as if they had been coated in a deep brown glaze, and they still preserve a beautiful landscape that feels like the original picture of home.
At this time of year, one flower marks the season. It is the Higanbana (the red spider lily), which blooms in countless numbers along the raised paths between the paddies and belongs to Ohigan, a season now almost upon us. Ohigan comes from a Buddhist observance held twice a year, in spring and in autumn, and it lasts seven days, with the equinox at its center and three days on either side. This year it runs from September 20 to 26.
The Japanese have long said that heat and cold both end at Ohigan, and just as the saying promises, the summer heat now begins to ease noticeably as the year turns in earnest toward autumn. Once I cross from Yamaguchi into the mountains of Shimane, I can already feel the cold as evening comes on.
In the past, farmers began preparing to shut themselves in for the winter as soon as the harvest was done. In the mountains, where travel between villages dwindled and food grew hard to come by, those who came before us created fermented foods, pickles, dried goods, and whole food cultures fitted to the land in place after place. This was, in effect, the last stretch before the farmers’ hibernation. The flower that signals the close of the year’s abundance is the Higanbana, in its faded red.
But all of that belongs to the past. People no longer pass the winter on plain food and modest lives. Large supermarkets, convenience stores, and ramen shops are scattered everywhere, and even in the countryside it is now effectively possible to eat and drink to excess twenty-four hours a day.
The result is a serious health problem that has begun to surface, quietly and steadily. The genes these people inherited from their ancestors were never adapted to eating like this, and the mismatch is causing trouble on many fronts.
Okinawa was once famous for longevity, but its diet changed drastically under postwar American rule. Among Japan’s 47 prefectures, Okinawan men now rank 43rd in life expectancy and Okinawan women 16th, a steep fall. More striking still is Aomori, which ranks last for both men and women.
Colder regions do tend to have shorter life expectancies, of course. But what holds Aomori back more than the cold is how much its people drive. This is not unique to Aomori. Outside the cities, daily life cannot run on public transport alone, so the countryside inevitably becomes a car society.
Yet Aomori sits at the northern tip of Honshu, buried under heavy snow every winter, and its diet was once extremely frugal. When the food environment deteriorated in the way I have described, car dependence came on top of it like a second blow, so that people there barely exercise and have suffered the effects of a worsening diet in their starkest form. I have been to Aomori many times myself, and again and again I have watched people reach for greasy food and pay little attention to what they eat.
Now that Japan has become a super-aged society, depopulated areas keep emptying out, and local supermarkets and convenience stores are closing down. Residents who came to depend on that convenience are watching their lifelines give way. Under these conditions, it is effectively impossible for someone past eighty or ninety to drive to the nearest city for groceries, and everywhere I look I see scenes that cannot possibly be sustained.
Japan is the first country on earth to become a super-aged society, and frankly, the result is wretched beyond words. Villages are breaking down, and as more and more places reach an average resident age in the seventies or eighties, driving naturally becomes impossible as well. Yet amid these harsh conditions there is one strange fact. The paved roads alone are abnormally pristine.
Here is a world where the residents, weighed down by age, have seen their health collapse until nothing works anymore, where the village lies in ruins and its supermarkets and convenience stores have closed, and where the one road passing through is kept spotless. The scene is almost too strange to take in.
Perhaps this is the true darkness Japan harbors, and an advance notice that the system is nearing its end. To my eyes, the scene is like the Higanbana, which tells us that a hard season is on its way.
Even so, the rice fields at harvest are beautiful.
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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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