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.9
Sep 9, 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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The distorted system that has defined the relationship between Japan and the United States without interruption since the war is gradually transforming. Next week the Bank of Japan meets just after the FOMC, and with the midterm elections already in view Treasury Secretary Bessent has bluntly demanded that the Japanese government raise interest rates.
The Takaichi administration will now reshuffle the cabinet on the day before the Bank of Japan meeting. Katayama Satsuki, the finance minister who already serves as Bessent’s point of contact, has been retained. Koizumi Shinjiro, the defense minister loyal to the American military-industrial complex, will also stay on.
Watched from inside Japan, these moves reveal something quite literal. A government for the United States.
In the midst of this, problems are surfacing one after another in Okinawa. It is as though the darkness accumulated over the postwar years were rising to the surface through the tears in this misshapen relationship. American military bases occupy a small chain of islands, and in that sense it is simply a fact that Okinawa has been made to carry every burden of the postwar era.
And then there is what has now been made into something that never happened. Countless women were assaulted and killed, and because the defeated side held no sovereignty, Japan’s inability to bring the perpetrators to trial became a chronic condition. How many men committed their crimes in another country, returned home in triumph, and lived out the rest of their lives? The cunning world demands data. Naturally, no such data exists.
This anger and indignation may appear never to have surfaced, but it must not be forgotten that it is a live ember smoldering in the pit of the Japanese stomach. History shows that the Japanese can turn in an instant, so even the early signs deserve to be recognized. Look at the political movements in Italy and Germany, Japan’s allies in World War II. From every angle they seem to me to foretell Japan’s near future.
What has kept Japanese feeling suppressed until now is beyond question the fact that this system aligned the interests of both sides through the long process that ran from the defeat into the Cold War era set off by the Korean War. Under the occupation, GHQ also enforced the 3S policy of sports, screen, and sex on the Japanese as a matter of policy and diverted anti-American feeling for a time. After GHQ was gone, that policy was inherited by Yokota Air Base, where it continues to this day.
By such means it has been barely contained. But the relationship branded as an alliance has begun to fray in every sense, and Japanese life has grown extremely impoverished. Given the present situation, I cannot see any way this relationship can be maintained. The likelihood that it turns toward a large-scale anti-American movement is extremely high.
In the midst of this, another problem came to light between yesterday and today. High concentrations of PFAS and other harmful substances had been detected in rivers around the Kadena and Futenma bases in Okinawa, and US Forces Japan had itself admitted to the Japanese government that it was the source of the contamination. Reports say the admission was conveyed to the government at least by 2023. It was concealed from the public.
The party directly affected is Okinawa Prefecture itself. When it applied to enter the bases and investigate the contamination, the answer was no. At the bilateral talks in December 2023, US Forces Japan cited the Status of Forces Agreement that defines its right to administer the bases and refused entry. In short, both the Japanese government and US Forces Japan handled the matter entirely among themselves and disclosed nothing to the outside. Japan is still under occupation. It has no sovereignty. The episode was an occasion to recognize that shape once again.
This is of course only the tip of the iceberg. PFAS is far from the only case. Nothing is disclosed or announced to the public. Postwar history is the story of the Japanese bureaucracy in Nagatacho and US Forces Japan making every decision in a place from which politicians and citizens are excluded, then proceeding on their own authority.
Japanese politicians hold neither sovereignty nor real power. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly acknowledges a body called the Japan-U.S. Joint Committee, which is determining the future of Japan. Not a single politician or private organization takes part in it. The decisions are made behind closed doors, and they are never released to the outside.
This is the real problem of Japan. A word of caution is also needed. My own view is that most people who discuss Japan and the U.S.-Japan relationship get one thing wrong. Japan is not incorporated into the chain of command of the American government. It is incorporated into the chain of command of US Forces Japan. The true problem is not the American government but US Forces Japan, and unless you place your focus there, every argument becomes empty theory.
At the same time, the Japanese government is also subordinate to the American government, which makes for a considerably complex structure. But what has reigned at the summit of Japan without interruption since the war is US Forces Japan. To be precise, the person who occupies the seat of commander in chief at US Forces Japan headquarters is the one known as the shadow emperor.
For that reason, it makes no difference from the Japanese side whether a dictator becomes president or a democratic socialist does. Until American forces withdraw from East Asia, US Forces Japan included, nothing changes.
More than eighty years have passed since the defeat, and the misshapen relationship has begun to expose its blatant ugliness. From here toward the centenary of the defeat, something large seems at last to have begun to move. As a precaution, it would be wise not to assume that things will go on as they are, whether between the two governments or between their peoples. The anger, indignation, and grief the Japanese have carried toward US Forces Japan never rise to the surface, yet they continue to flow deep underground.
As if to get ahead of that event, torrential rains have been flooding and inundating urban areas across Japan almost every day. Yesterday Nagoya, the great city of the Tokai region, saw flooding on a massive scale. Rivers overflowed and the city fell into chaos. These are modern urban disasters, and the structures behind them were built during the high-growth period that ran from the mid-1950s into the 1970s.
Rapid urban development over a short period expanded the underground space. Japan no longer has the fiscal capacity to maintain it, so it has been effectively abandoned, and it is becoming the trigger for disasters in one place after another.
These invisible spaces were made in that era. The Japanese do not show emotion on the surface. But the more emotion is suppressed, the more an invisible underground space expands, just as it did beneath the cities. In other words, the day it erupts will surely come.
Like a trailer for what is coming, the heavy rains have gone first and activated the vulnerability of the underground space. They now threaten the daily life of the nation almost every day. Seen that way, what may be activated next is the vulnerability of the underground space of Japanese emotion, and the anger, indignation, and grief accumulated there. If that is what we are to call the postwar, then over the next twenty years it would be better not to look at Japan and the Japanese as we do now.
I will say it again. The Japanese change in an instant.
Please do not forget it.
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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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