Japan’s Present Reality And Near Future Through The Bear Crisis

Bears, Climate Shifts And Japan’s Lost Digital Future

Recently I have been moving between Osaka, Bangkok, and Tokyo, and what weighs on me most in this season is the drastic shifts in climate. The gentle autumn that once eased Japan into winter is already a thing of the past. Now, instead, we plunge into an unstable winter as the weather swings violently from summer to winter and back from winter to summer. Even if you normally take good care of your health, this kind of rapid oscillation exerts a massive impact on both body and mind. Of course, climate fluctuations themselves have their own cycles, so this is not something that began only in our time. But if we limit ourselves to the context of what the world today understands as “Japanese culture,” then the source that nurtured it was the presence of four distinct seasons, each shifting into the next with a nuanced, gradual sense of transition.

Now that those four seasons have effectively been lost, I find myself constantly wondering what will become of Japan and of Japanese people in the future. Put another way, the form of Japanese culture that everyone thinks they understand is already over. When I come to Tokyo, I see large numbers of tourists rapidly consuming the culture of 1990s Japan—a culture that was, in many ways, thirty years ahead of its time globally—but to my eyes, this looks like the debt left behind by our failure to create a new Japanese culture.