Vol.12
Forest of Thought
Treasury Secretary Bessent's Repeated Visits｜Japan Cannot Sell U.S. Treasuries and Has No Fiscal Sovereignty
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has visited Japan three times in about a year. Japan is the world's largest creditor of US Treasuries, yet neither the Japanese government nor the Bank of Japan can sell them without American permission. The Japanese government is not looking at its citizens. It is looking at Washington.
Kunitsukami Project
How Atsutane Hirata's Fukko Shinto Broke the Yoshida and Shirakawa Houses' Licensing of Shinto Priests
In the Edo period, only two houses could issue licenses to Shinto priests: the Yoshida and the Shirakawa. Edo "Shinto" was a system of control by license before it was a doctrine. Atsutane Hirata expanded Shinto into a single cosmology and broke the hegemony of both houses with the single word "restoration."
KINEMA 2400
Kashiko Kawakita Put "Conveying" into Practice Through Film Preservation and the Founding of ATG
AI and no-code tools have opened making to everyone, but nothing has changed about conveying. Kashiko Kawakita, who conveyed Japanese film to the world, went on to take up film preservation and the art-film screening movement, and in November 1961 the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) was born.