Vol.23
★★★ A new blog, and this newsletter now published in-house ★★★
To push further away from the platforms, I have rebuilt everything from scratch on my own. The newsletter is now published directly by us as TM MAGAZINE, and its archive is easier to browse. The content and the way it works remain the same, and there is nothing you need to do.
TM MAGAZINE: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine
I have also started a blog built around photographs rather than text alone. It appears irregularly and in five languages. Here is an excerpt.
I have decided to start a blog again, for the first time in twenty years.
Looking back, before the iPhone and social media arrived, those of us who were in high school were absorbed in blogs on our flip phones. Low-resolution photos taken on those phones, photo-booth stickers, and the outpourings of an adolescent heart that kept changing its mind made blogging the craze of our generation.
Then everyone came to use smartphones, a decade began in which social media swallowed enormous amounts of our time, and now generative AI floods us with every kind of information. For those of us who lived through all of this, letting platform companies hold our creative work feels cramped and somehow uncomfortable. So I built a blog myself from the ground up, a place for my work where I decide my own relationship with readers.
We live in an age when everyone has begun to suspect, “Could this be generative AI?” In such an age, the only thing that can prove a work is truly one’s own is a photograph taken by someone who was once, without doubt, standing in that place and pressing the shutter.
The theme of the blog is “For the nation-building to come.” I hope you enjoy these records of places I went to myself, photographed, and thought about in writing.
It is available in Japanese, English, Spanish, German, and Simplified Chinese.
TAKAHIRO MITSUI: takahiromitsui.com
At the same time, we have rebuilt the JIHAN JINKO website in-house. We will press on, more than ever, toward the building of the nation of Japan.
JIHAN JINKO Inc.: https://jihanjinko.com
Forest of Thought
To Slow Down, We Have to Speed Up｜Leaving the Platforms in the Age of AI
In the age of AI as automaton, merely slowing down only leaves us behind. Deceleration and acceleration are in essence inseparable, and to decelerate we must accelerate. Keeping your own place for what you create and building AI automation into daily life is the preparation.
Kunitsukami Project
The Yayoi of the Doigahama Site Were Mostly Immigrants｜A Genome That Overturned the Northeast Asian Origin Theory
About 300 skeletons of Yayoi people more than 2,300 years old have been excavated from the Doigahama site in Yamaguchi Prefecture. A 2024 whole-genome analysis showed that the Doigahama individuals carry very little Jomon ancestry and are overwhelmingly immigrant-dominant. The view that the Yayoi originated in Northeast Asia was overturned.
KINEMA 2400
Masahiro Shinoda's Clouds at Sunset｜A Film Changes with the Season and Place in Which We See It
Clouds at Sunset, which Masahiro Shinoda adapted from Tsutomu Mizukami's novel in 1967, intertwines deep feeling and a nostalgia never experienced. Perhaps many films are better seen at the right time and in the right season. Depending on when and in what setting we see it, a work gains a different effect.