An Age Steered by Observation, Not Forecast｜Ippen in the Latter Days of the Law and the Bank of Japan at a Crossroads

We have reached Hakuro, the season of white dew, when the climate swings wildly and the gap between hot and cold days wears down the nervous system all the faster. From here I gradually begin preparing for winter, but since summer in Japan these days leaves one barely able to move, this is also the season when my research journeys begin in earnest.

Seven years have already passed since I began traveling the Japanese archipelago in earnest. In that time, with the pandemic in between, the world has changed completely, and AI has been built into every corner of our lives. I remember fondly how I lived out of my car and moved quickly around the country, believing that the trick to traveling in an age of epidemic was never to stay in one place even for half a day.

Then there is the collapse of a world order dominated by the United States alone, and the struggle over who will inherit its vested interests. In Japan’s case, there is the bill for the simultaneous collapse of public finances and the currency that the second Abe government brought about in the 2010s. From here, we are tumbling toward a full-scale collapse, and everyone will face situations that bear directly on survival.

Traveling around Japan, I have more and more often felt that seven years ago and today are different worlds. Especially in the provinces, under the weight of a super-aging society, I can feel that people have vanished. More areas have gone to ruin, and more often I find shrines I once could enter now so overgrown that I cannot get in.

Above all, because the satoyama, the managed woodlands at the edge of villages, have collapsed, the range of bears, wild boar, deer, and other animals that once lived deep in the mountains has spread enormously. In the northern Tohoku region in particular, it has become difficult simply to wander into mountains where no one goes and keep exploring, as I used to.

From these experiences, I feel that making each decision on the premise of an environment that has collapsed entirely is becoming an essential element of survival, and not only for travel. AI is updated roughly every three months, and each time it replaces skills that had been thought impossible to replace. Seen against this, the world we live in is caught in an unprecedented whirl of confusion in which no one can tell what the world will be like three months from now.

In such a world, every forecast and prediction has lost its meaning. The foremost example is the weather forecast.

On my earlier journeys, I would plan where to head next while glancing over the weather forecast, and whenever a typhoon approached I would rearrange my schedule to avoid it. But with phenomena such as linear rainbands, which can strike anywhere at any time, and with one area after another cut off by disasters from torrential rain, what one must watch while traveling is no longer the forecast but the observation. In other words, I need the skill of reading the weather radar and deciding how to move as I go.

At the same time, I switched all my gear to waterproof equipment and changed my way of life so that I own nothing that does not fit in my backpack. Come to think of it, this way of traveling was unimaginable when I first set out. But from now on, I cannot help feeling that without this gear and, above all, this way of thinking, neither travel nor work nor daily life will survive. With that in mind, I spent last weekend making arrangements to set up a company.

Interestingly, it is not only in the weather that forecasts and predictions have become meaningless in a world of confusion. The foremost example is public finance and the currency.

The US consumer price index is due out this week, on September 11, Japan time, and together with the US employment report, which has already shown a sharp increase, it leads into next week’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on September 15 and 16. Right after that, on the 17th and 18th, comes the meeting of the Bank of Japan.

Treasury Secretary Bessent is already putting fierce pressure on Japan to raise interest rates, while in the United States, President Trump has openly warned the Federal Reserve on Truth Social that cutting rates is the “patriotic” thing to do. Yet because the August employment figures came in well above expectations, expectations of a US rate hike jumped from 55 percent to 65 percent. A fierce struggle continues on the American side, the side that keeps Japan on its leash.

The Bank of Japan’s announcement that follows will carry great weight. On one side is the United States, which wants to narrow the interest rate gap with Japan at all costs ahead of the midterm elections in November. On the other is Japan, whose public finances will be blown apart by interest payments if it raises rates, and whose currency will be blown apart the wider the rate gap grows.

Our homeland may at last be taking a step toward handing over to a foreign power not only its resources but the very power to decide its public finances, the foundation of the people’s livelihood. Will the Bank of Japan be able to keep its independence? Or will it bow to either Nagatacho or Washington? Either way, the livelihood of the people is moving steadily toward ruin.

On this trip, I am circling all of western Japan in about two weeks, from the Pacific side to the Sea of Japan, and from there I will come out onto the Seto Inland Sea and enter the Kansai region. By the time the trip ends, the verdict will have been handed down. As I was thinking about this, a certain figure suddenly crossed my mind.

He is Ippen, the monk born in the province of Iyo in the middle of the Kamakura period, the age of Mappo, the Latter Days of the Law, when people lost their sanity and fell into the abyss of despair. Later, Soetsu Yanagi, the founder of the Mingei folk craft movement, said that Ippen’s life was one in which he “cast away the priesthood, cast away the temple, cast away the world, cast away his robes, cast away food, cast away his body, cast away his heart, and offered everything up to the one and only Name (Namu Amida Butsu).”

Yanagi went on to say that “whatever the age, that very age is the age of Mappo, the most evil of ages.” Rather than seeing things as separate, he taught, one must express a single source in words (Namu Amida Butsu), and by chanting them, find a connection in all things and arrive at non-separation. In this way, one finds the salvation of the Buddha within oneself, even while living in the Latter Days.

Ippen was a man who, in an age of despair, practiced odori nenbutsu with the people, chanting the nenbutsu, the invocation of Amida Buddha’s name, as they danced, and who cast off his own possessions so thoroughly that it could be called madness. And tomorrow, September 9, is the anniversary of Ippen’s death. Will the uneasy atmosphere and the despair that eats away at people see a light beyond them? Or will this become a historic step toward a future in which “Japan” and “the Japanese” become extinct?

The twenty years in which the postwar era comes to an end have at last begun to show themselves. The real fury is still to come.