From the Tideline｜Vol.2

July 22, 2026

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.2
July 22, 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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A structural turning point is now approaching in the United States, and the likelihood is rising that its aftershocks will shake Japan severely. How will the distorted relationship of complicity between Japan and America built up since the war transform under this shaking? Thinking through this near future is a grave matter bound up with my own life, and I cannot avoid it.

I find this a personal regret. In a country like Japan the birthrate has collapsed and the population has aged to an extreme, and the self-correcting function of society has broken down. In such a country the chance to update itself never comes, and it will inevitably reach its critical juncture within the destruction and regeneration of its suzerain America. Ukraine and Taiwan today cannot decide their own future by their own hand and have it decided instead by the calculations of great powers, and Japan will without doubt become one of them.

Looking at America today, many intellectuals argue that the empire is ending. They are certainly not wrong. America as an empire has ended. Yet what makes America singular among the advanced nations becomes clear the moment one looks at demographics. Japan, South Korea, China, Europe, and Britain face without exception a future of suffering under falling birthrates and aging populations, and Japan has already entered the leading edge of it. America alone among the advanced nations has not fallen into the trap of demographic aging. It is the one advanced nation that holds an abundance of the so-called Millennials and Gen Z. Once you grasp this as the reality of America, then fixating only on the many problems America now causes around the world will surely lead you to misjudge the future. Across the presidential elections of 2028 and 2032, the majority of the American electorate will flip.

America has reigned as a vast empire since the war, and it has surely begun to transform. Its aftershocks will naturally exert enormous influence on a global scale. Among all nations Japan carries the distorted structure of the Japan-America relationship, and it will suffer the heaviest blow. In considering this Japan-America relationship, the point to note is that the majority now supporting the two major parties of Republicans and Democrats are becoming what one might call the “old Americans” of the anti-communist era. This type of old American will shift greatly once the Millennials and Gen Z who grew up without knowing the anti-communist era become the majority.

Furthermore, this generation does not hold a uniform set of assertions, and it is the first generation without the power to link communal illusion directly to politics. Because they are strangers to the Christian evangelicals who long sustained the old Americans and to strong ideology alike, each individual conspicuously carries different values and different assertions. Still, at bottom they oppose imperialist interference in the internal affairs of other nations, and they hold that addressing America’s own domestic problems must come first.

The view that it is foolish to topple foreign governments or wage war while one’s own life at home does not hold together is sound. But I predict that once these “new Americans” emerge, the existing Japan-America relationship will very likely break down through this “change in America.”

Consider the LDP government that built what amounts to a one-party dictatorship after the war. To dissolve the public’s dissatisfaction with those in power, they need an imagined enemy at any cost. The intent behind the excessive provocations the Japanese government now aims at China lies unmistakably here. When control can no longer be held, war remains as a means. The LDP wishes to manage the words and deeds of the people and to preserve its grip on power, and at its base lie the bureaucratic system inherited since Meiji and the presence of the US military’s Yokota Air Base. That base is the gravest malignancy of postwar Japan. On the other hand, the LDP government has prolonged its life this far because it could use American security for free. It may be hard to see from outside the country, but the dynamic behind why Yokota Air Base holds the most power in Japan connects directly to this. This held not for the Japanese side alone. The LDP was of use to America as well.

But this relationship of complicity held only because Japan carried value for America as a “bastion against communism,” and the reason was a thoroughly twentieth-century one. Now it is nothing more than an old tale from the world of the “old Americans.”

Once the era of generational turnover arrives in America, the new Americans will find the world their predecessors built an eyesore. Yet that world will remain intact in hyper-aged Japanese society. The problem is that no one has yet considered this impact. America can radically renew its values through generational turnover. Japan has plunged into a hyper-aged society, and neither there nor in the South Korea and Europe that follow will any update on the American scale occur. At that point a structural distortion will certainly arise. Since no generational turnover happens in Japan, it will keep seeking its relationship with America by the old conventions.

To a new generation of American leaders who do not know the old system of the postwar Japan-America relationship and who hold no stake in postwar Japan, this will look like an evil thing to be dismantled. At the same time, a decisive rift may open between them and a future Japanese government that pushes militarization and stokes tension with the imagined enemies of China and North Korea. The near future we can predict at minimum as we live it comes down to this.

Over a span of about eight years Japan will not change. What is certain is that its suzerain America will change.

One more thing that cannot be overlooked is that during the transition America will very likely fall into civil war, so its degree of intervention in the world will necessarily weaken. Part of this has already begun to surface, and through its influence anti-Americanism will rise reactively within Japan and be put to political use.

A sign of this appears in the results of a large global survey released last week on July 15 by the American research institute the Pew Research Center. According to the report, favorability toward China exceeded favorability toward the United States in 25 of the 36 countries surveyed. Since the survey began in 2002, this is the first time China has surpassed the United States in so many countries, and in many of the surveyed countries Chinese President Xi Jinping was rated higher than American President Trump on the trust that he “does the right thing in world affairs.”

On the other hand, the report also states that favorability toward the United States remained higher in six countries. They are Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, and Israel. What cannot be missed is that Japan was recorded as one of the countries with the lowest favorability toward China. This should be read as the record that most reflects the present American intent that China be made an imagined enemy. Set Western intent aside, and from where I stand there is no reason anywhere for Japan to regard China as an enemy.

In short, Japan has entirely failed to respond to the new current in which nations around the world place their trust in China over America. This Galapagosization recalls the Japan of the 1990s. And Japan’s absolute isolation will become its own undoing from here on. In the end the foolish fantasy that positions the postwar Japan-America relationship as eternal is heading toward a future that erases a nation from the map. Multiple factors are at work there, yet no one turns their eyes to it.

At the same time, it is a fact that this new current is of use to a third political force outside the LDP. Because postwar history can be read as “the history in which America stripped Japan of its sovereignty and forced it into subordination for American interests.” This is of course a one-sided interpretation from the Japanese side. Still, we must not forget that for a third political force seeking to rise by stoking anti-American sentiment and setting itself apart from the LDP, this method will be the most realistic means available. Personally I believe this third political force has not yet appeared in Japanese politics and is likely a now-unknown figure who will emerge around the 2030s.

Over the next ten years we will become living witnesses to an unprecedented world. Yet the self-correcting function does not work in Japan, and it will regrettably not change. At the same time, what must be kept in view is that when its suzerain America changes, the place where that influence appears most starkly is once again Japan.

Japan’s end should become a lesson for a world moving toward the latter half of the twenty-first century. Unable to escape the twentieth-century system, filled with nothing but the old and able to decide nothing, it postpones every problem and evades responsibility. A base posture that hands all its vital sovereignty to its suzerain America and decides nothing on its own. Whether this end is extinction or a reset on the way to regeneration, I do not know.

But that this future is drawing near is the one thing that is certain.

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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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