From the Tideline｜Vol.4

Aug 5, 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.4
Aug 5, 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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For years I have gone out to the places themselves. Old shrines, coastlines, mountain villages, the ground where a myth is supposed to have happened. I went to study antiquity and myth and faith and folklore and the shape of the land, all of it, and behind all of it the question of what the people of this archipelago once were. I read the scholarship and I have never been able to swallow it. I was born contrary, and what I trust is what I collect myself, on the ground, in the weather of that particular day.

The method has a name I would not have used when I started. It is how you speak with the gods. You go to a place, you feel the wind that runs through it, you listen to the waves, and you stand inside the forest and stay there. Do that across the archipelago for long enough and the question of what the old Japanese found in the world and called a god stops being a question you research. It begins to answer itself.

All of that was a prologue. I understand it now as ground rather than result, the soil for the work I actually want to do, which is to go into the spiritual culture of this country and into prayer itself. What I feel happening in me now is a forest coming into being. Life breaks out of the earth, trees rise, and in time there is forest. None of it happens without soil. If the years behind me are the soil, then what begins here is the forest generating itself, one tree after another.

Thought has no destination. Nothing in it is ever achieved. Thought is a forest.

Go deep enough into a forest and your sense of direction goes. The compass stops meaning anything. After a while you become certain you have come back to a place you already passed, and you no longer know which way to face. You take a step, and another, and nothing appears to happen. When the canopy closes over the sun, your sense of time goes with it, and by the time the dark comes down you can hardly move at all. Still, no one leaves a forest once entered.

What did I come in here for? That is the one question, and I keep asking it. You can walk all day and no answer comes. You cannot turn your anger outward and you cannot appeal to anything beyond the trees. Out in the inhabited world you can always look for an answer somewhere outside yourself, and in the forest you find out that this was a fiction the whole time. In the end there is nothing but yourself, and there is no answer waiting there either.

And still you have to keep walking. Where no direction is the right one, the only thing left is to sharpen your own instinct and follow it. Being lost is a report on the condition of your heart. The forest is not lost. Keep going like that, far enough in, and you see something you cannot account for. There are footprints in a forest where nobody should be.

You follow them, and at the end of them somebody is sitting quietly. In that moment I know who it is. Someone was given the same task, decided to enter, and walked. He says nothing. He sits there in the silence and says nothing at all. But because he was there before me, I know that I have to take the thing up and carry it further in. A mission is always inherited.

This is what thought is, for me.

Shinto, the Buddhist sects, Daoism, Confucianism, Kokugaku. Japan has generated an enormous number of thought systems and rooted each of them in this soil in its own way, and what they actually were, nobody yet knows. I include myself in that.

Take something far closer to us, the student movement that swept through the Japanese universities in the late 1960s. What kind of heat was driving it? I will never know. I was not alive for it, and no amount of reading closes that gap. But one thing can be said. Underneath the heat there was no thought and no theory. There was a moment when something struck a person in the heart. Kangeki is the word I use for it, and in English it comes out as nothing more elaborate than being moved.

Were you moved by it?

Being moved is a primal experience, and out of that experience thought is born, and out of thought, after a lag of years, a culture is born. Take the experience away at the root and the most finely made thought in the world will be consumed as surface ideology and change nothing at all.

I suspect this is why our world has run out of road. What we have was built without anyone being moved by anything, driven instead by private appetite.

A world without Kangeki produces, after its own lag, a culture with nothing inside it. And then people have to keep calling it culture, because the name is the only thing holding the thing up. It goes on decaying until it can no longer stand without the disguise.

The primal experience of being moved. What we ought to be facing seriously, and setting under the foundations of any design for the world, is not the specialist vocabulary that intellectuals speak. It comes down to a single word. That is what I have been turning over this week.

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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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