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.8
Sep 2, 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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Yesterday was September 1. The old Japanese calendar counts it as Nihyakutoka, the two hundred and tenth day from Risshun in early February. By this point in the year the rice has turned yellow and the ripening has begun, so the day can be read as the first notice of autumn. For most of Japanese history it was read as something else. It was read as the day the wind arrives.
City life has forgotten the date. Farmers have not. The period around Nihyakutoka has always been understood as the season of wind damage and marked in the working year as a day of ill fortune. A typhoon that lands now takes the harvest and the year’s living with it, so wind festivals called Kazematsuri were held across the country to quiet the god of the wind.
Nihyakutoka is nonetheless becoming a story about the past. Many typhoons have already reached the archipelago this year. Rain now does damage out of all proportion to the rain itself, because the concrete covering the modern city has nowhere to put the water. This is one of the great structural defects of modern urban design. Within roughly the past month Japan has had the Kumamoto earthquake and the floods in Chiba and Fukui. In the middle of ferocious heat large numbers of people lost their houses, their cars and everything inside them.
The world is already in disorder. What struck me this summer was something narrower. The natural disasters and sudden emergencies that arrive somewhere in Japan every year have stopped being events and have become the ordinary condition. Watching that happen, I have been raising my own level of alert. The reason is simple. I wanted to cut back into myself the fact that this is a country of earthquakes.
Almost no foreign visitor arrives holding that awareness or carrying any preparation for it. Their route runs from Tokyo past Mount Fuji to Kyoto and Osaka, which is the old Tokaido corridor. It carries some of the highest disaster risk in the country and sits on structures remarkably weak against exactly that risk. A direct-hit earthquake beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area is close to certain within the next thirty years, and so is a Nankai Trough megaquake capable of destroying everything from Tokai through western Japan. Either could happen today.
The Japanese are used to earthquakes. Visitors are not, and they would panic badly. Emergency information in this country arrives almost entirely in Japanese, so a visitor can be cut off from everything in a matter of seconds. I find it very hard to believe that the travellers now moving through Japan understand this.
The same holds for the Japanese themselves. When a disaster arrives, the gap between those who prepared in ordinary time and those who did not decides their fate. What this country actually asks for is a habit of mind rather than a stock of equipment. You move through every situation on the assumption that it could begin now.
In my own case I revise my equipment for research trips every year, and I notice how much of it has shifted toward disaster and emergency use. Anything carried for the sake of appearance rather than use fell away on its own. The result is that a single 24 litre backpack now holds my work, my travel, and my survival kit together. I could move house with it. What stands behind that is not minimalism as a style. It is the thinking cultivated by people who lived before me in a country of earthquakes, floods and typhoons.
No individual can correct a large current or a system that has gone too far. What an individual can do in ordinary time is build the readiness to respond and to decide the instant a situation arrives. That much is within reach, and it is what survival is made of.
I have come to think that what the coming era asks of us is a life that can be completed with what we can hold in our hands. The motive matters as much as the practice, and the motive has to be the enjoyment of life.
Fear drives disaster preparedness in Japan almost without exception. Preparing out of fear only lodges the fear inside objects and lets it accumulate there, and in the end the fear is what stops you from moving at all. For someone like me who travels the country doing research, what is genuinely needed is not a large house or an expensive car. It is a backpack that holds an entire life, plus the phone, laptop and camera the work requires.
Preparation belongs most of all to people who intend to enjoy their lives seriously. It is for their sake that the disaster which may arrive today has to be planned for down to the detail. I meet a great many people who have the end and the means the wrong way round, and that only lowers the quality of a life. An earthquake gives no notice of when it will come. This is exactly why the readiness has to be a daily one.
This month is the height of the season for wind and water. The research trip that begins at the end of next week will be the lightest I have ever travelled. It is also the first that is ready for whatever arrives, whenever it arrives.
With the US and Japanese governments now engaged in an ugly contest to push the responsibility for their fiscal problems onto each other, what an individual has to prepare for may not be limited to disasters…
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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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