From the Tideline｜Vol.3

July 29, 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.3
July 29, 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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Since the summer of 2019 I have been researching the ancient history, mythology, folklore, and archaeology of Japan as an integrated whole. A new stratum has now begun to settle steadily into place within me alongside that work, and that stratum is Confucianism.

Since Confucius, Confucianism has been refined and honed in China for more than two thousand years. It sometimes took detours on the scale of a millennium, yet it accumulated the way geological strata pile up. At some point Confucianism crossed the sea and flowed into the Japanese archipelago, and it transformed the Japanese in the literal sense.

Confucianism holds many schools of course, and each carries its own character. China has vast territory and a history in which imperial dynasties changed hands many times. Japan by contrast has narrow territory, and it is an island country at that. Every time a dynasty changed in China, the center of gravity of hegemony moved across great stretches of geography. In Japan that movement stayed comparatively narrow. The margin of variation in regime philosophy is therefore smaller in Japan than in China.

Limited to the perspective of court and shogunate, Japan moved only between the present Nara Basin, Kyoto, Kamakura, and Tokyo. In terms of distance that is a spread of only some five hundred kilometers. Even when the political function of the shogunate moved east to Kanto, the center of gravity held by the emperor and the nobility remained in Kyoto. A distance of that order still allowed surveillance.

This is my own conjecture, but Confucianism may in fact be better suited to cultivation within narrow territory of this kind. In a vast China one school after another is born, they come into conflict, alternatives appear, and the work of selection and rejection grows active. In the case of Japan the material is limited to what crossed the sea, so the range of choice is necessarily narrow. That narrowing suits Japan.

The first move by which Confucianism entered the spirit of the Japanese people came at the beginning of the Edo period. What was adopted then was not the Cheng-Zhu Confucianism nurtured whole in the Song dynasty but only the school of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) extracted from within it.

The Edo shogunate began in 1603, four full centuries after the death of Zhu Xi. I consider this time lag important. Had the learning been imported in real time it would not yet have been refined and honed on the Chinese side and would have retained a fresh state. Something unsorted arriving in Japan would probably not have struck the Japanese heart. Japan does not seek freshness. Japan favors the pain of creation that someone somewhere suffered through and wrestled with. The criterion of judgment is whether one is moved. The precision of a theory is beside the point.

The particular school called Zhu Xi Confucianism in Japan became the regime philosophy of shogunal government. Japanese Confucians then appeared one after another, and schools advocating their own Confucianism emerged. They learned a great deal from the Confucians who had fled China into exile. The Japanese of the time were moved by Confucianism and studied it in earnest.

At a certain point some of these Confucians began to feel that Zhu Xi Confucianism leaned too heavily on reasoning and was somehow poor in vital force. Precisely because they studied in earnest they sought the pulse of life, and they staked their lives on discerning where the essence of Confucianism lay. What was offered at the end of that search was the teaching of Wang Yangming (1472–1529). In Japan it came to be called Yomeigaku (the Japanese school of Wang Yangming). It moved the hearts of a portion of the Confucians and went on to become the spiritual foundation of the Japanese through the Edo period and on through Meiji, Taisho, and the early Showa years.

I count myself among the descendants of that line. I take Yomeigaku into daily life, study it, and am moved by it.

Why do I now place the highest importance on Confucianism and on Yomeigaku in particular? The reason goes back one hundred and sixty years.

For the purpose of opening markets to the Western powers, Japan was severed from the lineage of East Asia from around 1868 and was forcibly connected to a Western world of an entirely different context with which it held almost no historical relation. With the import of modern Western scholarship, Confucianism came to be excluded as an old spiritualism with no scientific grounding. After the defeat in World War II the occupation forces prohibited the spiritual education of the Japanese.

Postwar Japan thus lost Confucianism. This is not a question of the quality of modern Western scholarship. The Western attitude that prizes fine-grained data and classification simply did not move the Japanese. To state it plainly, the West did not suit Japan. That is my reading. This is not a matter of good or bad. Something unsuited was allowed to flow in. My diagnosis today is that over the course of years this connected all the way through to the desolation of the spirit of the people.

From the Edo period through Meiji, Taisho, and into the early Showa years, cultivation in a Japanese person meant the ability to read kanbun (classical Chinese). Today no one can read kanbun apart from a handful of scholars. Confucianism is not something for a small number of specialist scholars to handle. It is something for people living an ordinary day to study. That has been severed completely.

Modernization, Westernization, civilization and enlightenment. The severing of Japan and its connection to the West have been called by many names. Yet I consider that the most grievous event in all of Japanese history occurred at the moment the spiritual lineage connecting Japan to China and Korea was cut. Because Confucianism is neither philosophy nor religion. It is a way of living.

Japan severed from the East Asian lineage then began an outrage unthinkable in the Japan that came before. It invaded the surrounding countries. It copied colonialism and imperialism from the Western world and rolled them out with arrogance.

The Japanese have now fallen into the abyss of delusion. They have no road left to walk and they despair. The reason is that they still refuse to look at the effect of having cut the chain passed down through generations of ancestors. That chain is history and culture and spirit, and it should be important and precious to anyone, not to the Japanese alone.

This is exactly why I now intend to research the history of Confucianism in Japan thoroughly, the lineage of Yomeigaku above all, and to put that work into the world as a document. So far I have conveyed Yomeigaku only to the friends around me. Every one of them has been deeply moved, and they have gradually begun to be drawn in by the appeal of Confucianism.

This road will eventually carry me across to the China that produced Wang Yangming. Presenting the results will take several years. The journey is beginning now.

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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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