From the Tideline｜Vol.1

July 15, 2026

From the Tideline Newsletter

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Vol.1
July 15, 2026
■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□
1｜LIVING QUESTIONS
2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT
■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□■□

★★A Quick Update: Two Sections, and a New Q&A★★

Starting this week, From the Tideline will come to you in two separate sections. 1｜LIVING QUESTIONS is open in full to free subscribers. 2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT is for paid subscribers only. I am also taking this chance to add an occasional Q&A.

The Q&A is open to a wide range of questions, whether about a piece I have written or anything you want to know about Japan. The Q&A is for paid subscribers only.

Each reader may send one question a month, in 200 words or fewer. I will not be able to answer every one. If you have a question, send me a direct message in Chat. To begin with, the Q&A will run about once a month.

As always, I will keep offering a perspective that makes room for you to think.
Thank you for reading, and I look forward to continuing.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

1｜ LIVING QUESTIONS

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
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.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………

I have thought a great deal about writing over these past several months. There are times when nothing I pour my heart into reaches anyone at all, and times when something I thought was mediocre resonates. I cannot explain why, and it never repeats.

I chose the Japan I was born and raised in as the object of my thought and have kept digging into it. Looking back now, the driving force may not be a simple wish to convey Japan but a wish to share the possibility that exists within sorrow. In a Japan whose decline is pronounced, seeing a reality that worsens to the point of tearing the heart is a daily occurrence. Above all, I have watched again and again as many Japanese lose their vitality and the life drains from every setting.
The sight eats away at people as a quiet decline, like fin-de-siècle Vienna or the Argentina of an earlier day. What I feel most within it is that the Japanese who were once calm and lively and full of compassion have turned into their opposite.

In that sense, I who was born in 1991 am without doubt one of the important witnesses standing at Japan’s structural turning point.
Looking back, Japan was recognized for its value as a “bulwark against communism” after its defeat in World War II and drew the full benefit of that standing across the twentieth century.
It could exploit an arrangement in which the United States carried the military burden and concentrate all its effort on economic growth. This was the driving force behind the era of high growth and the true reason Japan built its overwhelming position.

It was called a “miracle revival,” but from the very start it was only a flower that bloomed inside a distorted structure. That structure was the Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the absolute condition that the earlier system had assumed vanished. At the same time Japan plunged into a bubble economy with the Plaza Accord of 1985, the cracks showed in 1991, and the bubble ended with the collapse of Yamaichi Securities in 1997.
Born into this interval, over my thirty-five years I have been a living witness to Japan’s dramatic decline. That vantage has not changed even now.

Japan has now become the world’s first super-aged society and its condition could hardly be more dire. Within all this I have watched the decline and the exhaustion unfold in real time, and at the same time I have lived with my homeland as the stage of my thought.
The Kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga once expounded the sensibility of mono no aware, and no words express more exactly the true nature of what I carry inside me.

To think Japan and to convey it as form. Accumulating that act holds real value, and yet it also holds much suffering. Strangely, the higher the resolution of the words climbs, the closer the risk of losing the essence draws.
The more deeply I understand Japan, the more I know that the present Japan spoken of on the surface exists nowhere at all. And yet the Japan that does not exist in reality is consumed in vast quantities in a fictional world. This pain is what drives me to write.

“What on earth do I write for?”
“Why text rather than photography or music?”
Among the great figures I admire there are many who deliberately chose to leave no words behind, so why do I use words at all? Most writers have been imprisoned in this labyrinth at least once. Yet from this world of inner confusion a certain presence has vanished. That presence is the reader.

Writing is an intensely private act, so let your guard down and the desire to have someone understand your own thoughts springs up easily. This desire is the source of a troublesome disease for writing, and it creeps in without fail.
Even when the writer is unaware of it the desire will quietly show its face within the prose, and in the worst case it takes control.
However much you believe you are not being eroded, the disease is attacking your organs before you notice.

While I was wandering in that confusion, last week I came upon the words “writing is a gift to the reader on the receiving end.” Those words were enough to wake me from my confusion and pull my distorted will back into place. And there is no way to do that but to keep changing.

In the present age it has become the norm to explain every reason for success or failure in words, to learn from it, and to turn it into a system. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but once you are caught up in it the act of writing turns lazy without fail. And the moment it turns lazy the gift loses its contents, and attention shifts to the ornament that dresses up the package to cover the emptiness.

Reality is always severe and harsh, and only those who have walked the edge of death and come back can move forward.
It is cold and at times cruel, yet the fact remains that this is one truth.
This is exactly why there is nothing to do but hold the pain and keep changing. For the writing, for its content, and for its quality alike, there is no road to survival other than to keep changing. It is impossible for those of us who live in the present to take complete distance from the algorithm, and the real problem may lie rather in moving at high speed around its periphery.
One misstep and you fall to the bottom of the abyss, yet there is no path but to keep pressing forward through it.

To keep asking in a world without answers is hard. But if you know from the outset that there are no answers, surviving in that world may be possible.
That is where I stand now, and I am only carrying it out by continuing to think with Japan as my object. Thinking of it that way, I felt something loosen in my shoulders.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2｜JAPANESE THOUGHT

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
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.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………