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.10
Sep 16, 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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Over the past two days, I took a ferry three times and watched the sea to my heart’s content. We live in an island nation, yet unless you happen to be a fisherman, there are hardly any occasions left to go out on the water. But if you want to look at your own country calmly and objectively, taking it in as a whole, I feel strongly that you have to place yourself on the sea, not in an airplane looking down from the sky. Japan is a country of the sea, and it is just as much a country of mountains. Once you are actually out on the water and looking back at the archipelago, you come upon a view in which mountains seem to run along the horizon, one after another.
Standing on deck in the early morning, I found myself asking why I had suddenly begun to seek out the sea. Nothing in my life so far has bound me closely to it. Perhaps it is because I carry genes that once came across the sea. What they hold is an ancient memory, not my own, and yet one I go on inheriting to this day. And if that is so, then perhaps every human being alive now holds a memory of having once crossed the sea.
That memory lies at the bottom of the human heart, but it may be a cruel one, the kind we would rather not bring back. This may be why it never surfaces, however many decades we spend on land. Yet our ancestors once made the decision to leave Africa, and we exist today only because someone went out onto the sea ready to die. Wherever we live now and whatever our lives look like, we are the descendants of those who made it through that ordeal. Every Homo sapiens surely carries this “memory of the sea.” At the same time, it is a formless unease, perhaps something we sealed away in an age no one can name.
And yet every so often, that memory rises up from the depths without any regard for my will. Something in me whispers, “It’s time to go out to sea,” and I follow that voice out onto the water. Mornings when I set out are thrilling. The shifting currents, the moving waves, the sunlight falling on the surface and flashing back, the countless islands afloat on the sea, every one of them takes hold of me and will not let go. That is why I never stay in my seat. However many hours the crossing lasts, I stand on deck the entire way with my camera gripped in my right hand. Whether I am lashed by wind and rain or nearly blown off my feet, I keep seeking out that raw strength of nature, as if trying to wake the genes inside me.
Humanity looks upward far too much, as though it meant to climb into heaven. If what we truly need lies not in climbing higher but in diving down to the depths, then we have poured enormous sums of money, labor, and energy into an extraordinary exercise in futility. And I believe that Homo sapiens, caught in that trap, has no move left to make.
Everyone says a future lies ahead, but in truth there is no future to be found there. The future always rests in the primordial memory each of us carries, and in diving toward it, deeply and without fear. True courage and bravery have nothing to do with going to Mars. They lie in diving toward the depths of ourselves that our ancestors once sealed away, and in facing the memory that waits there.
Standing in a squall under a darkening sky, with the salt wind lashing at me, I could not escape that thought.
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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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