# Takahiro Mitsui Project 2049 Report Vol.0: Yohaku and Diving Deep: Japan's Thought of Dissolution

- Author: Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央)
- Published: Friday, October 2, 2026, 12:00 p.m. JST
- URL: https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0
- Publication: Project 2049, a weekly essay by Takahiro Mitsui (https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049)

> Takahiro Mitsui on leaving the platforms to restore Yohaku, the anemoia drawing young people to Showa Japan, the psychedelic dissolution of the self, and why diving deep, not transcendence, is Japan's gift.

This newsletter is a weekly report from Takahiro Mitsui, delivered every Friday (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.

## Contents

1. LIVING QUESTIONS
2. JAPANESE THOUGHT

## 1. LIVING QUESTIONS

*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.*

This week, I moved my newsletters onto a system I built myself. My photo blog [TAKAHIRO MITSUI](https://takahiromitsui.com), which already goes out in five languages, my Japanese-language [TM MAGAZINE](https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine), and [JIHAN JINKO](https://jihanjinko.com/en), the company I finished registering only yesterday, have all left the platforms and no-code tools they used to run on. All of them now run on infrastructure I made from scratch.

Less than a month has passed, but something interesting has already begun to grow inside me. It is Yohaku. Now that generative AI can turn out long texts, images, and video in vast quantities, anyone who keeps handing their days over to existing platforms will not survive the flood of information. Until recently, in the social sense at least, a human being's competitors were other human beings. That is already a story from the past.

Rather than wearing yourself out competing with generative AI, a contest you cannot possibly win, it makes more sense to step half a pace away from it first. Not a full step, but half a step. I think that sense of distance will matter more and more in the years ahead. In other words, this is not a call to withdraw completely into seclusion, and behind it lies a conviction I hold deeply.

To slow down, you must speed up.

How we read that line may change the future a great deal. Simply slowing down, or the return to analog that has become such a strong current lately, may matter as a way of finding temporary calm, but it makes moving forward difficult. Young people from all over the world are flocking to Japan to consume the Showa era (1926–1989), the good old analog age, with city pop records as its emblem. John Koenig coined the word anemoia for nostalgia for a time one has never known, and we are now living through what could be called an age of anemoia, a curious spectacle in which Showa, when the Japanese carried an almost unbelievable energy, is being exported to the world.

Just as we feel anemoia watching Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story or the films of Wong Kar-wai, worlds we never lived in, time and space are gradually beginning to dissolve. The true significance of anemoia, then, is not mere nostalgia for an age or a place we were never part of. What we need to see is that a great wave, the first of its kind in human history, is beginning to form, a wave in which time and space themselves are starting to dissolve.

What matters here is that this dissolution of time and space is not happening on its own. I see it as the moment when the acts of people's daily lives began communicating with one another at unbelievable speed. The state closest to it is the psychedelic one.

Ordinarily, the brain runs a central network called the Default Mode Network, or DMN, which governs the ego, the recall of past memories, the prediction of the future, and stray thoughts. It narrows the enormous flood of incoming sensory information and stages each person's everyday life. In other words, our daily life is a governed one, and order itself could be called a vision produced by the DMN. But when psilocybin or LSD binds to the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor, the activity and connectivity of the DMN drop sharply. The boundaries of the self blur, and information and sensations from below consciousness surface in raw form.

What follows is a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. It is a rebooting of the DMN, and from there the brain begins rebuilding itself over days or weeks, and in some people over months or years. Put plainly, it dissolves and then reconstructs. Dissolution is not loss but a way of seeing things as they are, by dissolving the split between subject and object. What bears most deeply on the path from dissolution to reconstruction, then, is something utterly fundamental, how you have lived until now and how you will live from here, and this is what I call the context of place.

The context of place can also be read as roots. As our genes make clear, every person is truly different, and no two are alike. I felt this deeply myself while digging into who I am through the most advanced genetic testing available. At the same time, the context of place is shaped very strongly by environment and acquired factors, by how one was born and raised. Rebooting the DMN loosens those habits for a while and opens up rich time, and a real chance, to rebuild them within that Yohaku.

To me, this feels the same in kind as the anemoia that draws young people to Japan in search of Showa, and in both I sense time and space being dissolved. It is neither stagnation nor retreat but people's trial and error as they try to restore Yohaku to their daily lives. Still, it must not stop there. As Showa itself showed, that sensibility is in fact what ended up producing the present. No generation understands this better than mine, born in the early Heisei years just after Showa ended.

Yet it is possible to transplant the sensibility of that era while taking in the acceleration of our own. To avoid sinking into mere nostalgia while continuing to walk toward the next world, I believe we need to keep our distance from the platforms, prepare our own place to put our work, and cultivate relationships with readers directly there.

That is why I am not selling a newsletter. I am selling time in which a relationship grows. What I always hope as I write is that, in a world full of noise, the time you spend reading this newsletter can be quiet and rich, a time to face yourself.

You might read it in the sun with a coffee you took your time brewing, or at night indoors with a record playing. Creating even a little Yohaku in people's lives is one of the reasons I keep writing.

For me, leaving the platforms is not a stand against social media. It is the building of a place that makes time for relationships with readers, and the keeping of a place where my work is neither compressed nor converted to suit the platform owners.

I hope you enjoy the new relationship that begins here.

## 2. JAPANESE THOUGHT

*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.*

Why should digging into Japan and the Japanese be of any use to the world, or to the people in it? In this week's Vol. 0, I want to set down how I think about roots.

I am probably more driven than most people in Japan to understand where I come from, and that drive has kept me doing fieldwork across the entire archipelago. Underneath it sits a doubt. The Western tradition has held, with remarkable consistency, that if the world and humanity are ever to come together for the common good, they must rise above the opposition of subject and object and arrive, finally, at a single absolute point. Behind this lies a deeply rooted faith that truth, the universal, and genuine harmony all reside at that point.

History suggests the method rarely works. Look at the times we ourselves have lived through, and the strain is obvious. A people can reshape itself to fit a standard devised by some outside party, but the split between subject and object does not move an inch. Few countries are better placed to see this than Japan, which went through Meiji Westernization and postwar Americanization more fully than anyone. As long as that foundation stays where it is, we never truly escape a structure in which one side imposes itself on the other, and this, I believe, is where every problem has its root. When the side doing the imposing has enough authority and power, the arrangement appears to function. The moment it begins to fray, it carries within it the forces that tip everything into reaction. Seen from here, what worries me comes down to a single question.

Have any of us ever truly looked at where we come from?

Take my own case. I am a Japanese person, born in Japan, and no one would question that. To be more precise, I am someone born in Japan and counted as "Japanese." Most people never doubt the nation or the ethnicity they were born into, but I know well that both are products of modernity. So while I feel a deep love for my country, I have tried all along to refuse blind faith in it.

The only method I have ever used is to dive deep. Diving deep and the Western idea of transcendence look like movements in opposite directions, one downward and one upward, yet the difference goes beyond direction. Their structures are entirely different, because diving deep requires that the opposition of subject and object, which is to say separation itself, be dissolved.

This thought of dissolution is what I regard as Japan's greatest asset, and I take it to be the heart of Japanese cultural sensibility. It may also be what some Japanese can offer the world and humanity in the years ahead. Only by dissolving the split between subject and object does it become possible to dive deep at all. Diving deep, then, is not a descent carried out by the will or consciousness of a subject. It is the state in which you sink of your own accord, by practicing the dissolution of subject and object, and of every other separation, in the middle of ordinary life.

To keep diving is simply to keep performing acts of dissolution day after day. Transcendence sets a goal, the single absolute summit, but the practice of dissolution has no end, because there is no goal to reach, no ideal, no guiding principle. There is no linear line of growth at all, only the condition of abiding somewhere nonlinear. What remains is to keep diving for as long as you live, and the diving itself becomes life.

However deep you go, there is no goal and no point of arrival. I compare this sensibility to a deep forest. The further you walk into it, the less your compass helps, until you lose your sense of direction, and as the dense canopy shuts out the light, you lose your sense of time as well. Seen from outside, this would be called being lost. In truth, it is the place where you are asked whether you have the resolve and the readiness to keep walking on toward the next path.

Where do you want to go? In the deep forest, with time and direction gone, the question reaches you from nowhere in particular. More precisely, it surfaces out of a place you could not see before. There you learn that the values, the identity, and the career you believe you earned through social life are useless when it comes to facing the formless unease of the forest. Humans sit, after all, somewhere in the lower middle of the ecosystem, and anyone who clings to such things cannot survive among the trees. Then, little by little, something about society begins to look plainly wrong, the way it turns others into objects, examines them, and evens them out through transcendence or argument.

What would it achieve to make objects of the tree in front of you, the rock, the moss, the squirrel, to examine them, and to flatten them into sameness by transcendence or thought? The forest presses its essential questions on you without mercy, and there is no escaping them. Here, I think, lies a future toward which part of humanity may move. I say part because, unfortunately, this is not a place everyone can reach together.

At this point many readers will grow uneasy about the risk that looking at one's origins leads to nationalism or ethnonationalism. I will say flatly that it does not, provided each person looks at their own origins, brings the thought of dissolution to bear on them, and digs all the way down. I say this from my own experience, with one condition. You must not stop growing. Stagnation, here as anywhere, always ends in some simple and extreme ideology.

It is true that people who dig into Japan and the Japanese as thoroughly as I do tend to lean toward nationalist or ethnonationalist positions. I feel myself wavering toward them almost every day. What sets me apart is that I do not run from the wavering but keep facing it. It is intensely painful, and I believe the future lies inside that inner struggle.

Why go on with this? Because I see a real problem in the way the liberal world has kept running from this reality. Everyone carries an origin, and no two are the same. You can pretend it does not exist and wrap everything in a clean package of ideals, but the effect lasts only a while and changes nothing in any real sense. That is why I propose not diversity but mutual existence, a condition in which those who stand opposed to one another live side by side. It is a different place entirely from the diversity that accepts others. To get there, you have to cut into yourself without mercy and come to know what is there. Diversity, one might say, is a gathering of people who cannot perform that painful act on themselves, and I am convinced that the values it produces, however socially meaningful, do not give birth to a future.

This is why I have kept stressing the importance of introspection. Put simply, it means facing the wavering honestly rather than fleeing it. Nation, ethnicity, religion, and every other value we collide with are not realities to be wished away with closed eyes. They live inside every one of us. The task is to confront them as they are, without denying them. Flight only lets beautiful ideals be reproduced in new forms, and nothing changes.

Interestingly, as you go deeper, the wavering gradually fades. It turns out to be temporary, much like the moment in the deep forest when you stand face to face with your own social values and identity. It is a strange feeling. Yet the fading is never complete. When trouble enters daily life, the unease you were relieved to think gone rises again with ferocious energy, set off by things as ordinary as lack of sleep, stress, or a disordered diet. Because I look at all of these as inseparable from the rest rather than as separate matters, I am rigorous about managing my health.

As long as we stay fixed on transcendence, we have no choice but to produce a homogeneous universal out of a subjective will that does not exist and the calculations of the intellect. We are caught in a trap of endless production and reproduction that demands infinite growth, and that trap has exactly the structure of capitalism. That structure has now reached its limit. It can of course be updated, and capitalism has already begun its next update. But what lies at the end of all that updating? Whatever it is, it is the future of capitalism, and that is not the same as the future of each of us as human beings. To look at that difference honestly and keep moving to make our own future real, isn't that what it means to be truly human?

What I am looking at is not the world or humanity. It is simply a state in which each person finds their own happiness, and that happiness serves not only themselves but those around them. Most people today are looking instead at ideals and goals of enormous scale, such as solving the world's problems. Those matter too, but what matters most lies at our feet, in our own daily lives. I think the past few decades have been a period in which many people overlooked exactly this. Did it make them happier? In the end, that is the question that remains.

Let me be blunt. How can someone who cannot make a single person happy, neither themselves nor the people they deal with every day, solve the world's problems? This is precisely why people who boast about "problem-solving" ring so false. Seen calmly and from a little distance, it is obvious, and thinkers across every age and culture have said it many times. The world's problems, in other words, are a religion, and nothing more than an illusion. What we truly need to look at is daily life. I will stress this as often as it takes, because the world's problems are reflected in daily life, and people who cannot solve them there will never solve them in the estranged realm called "the world."

So I advocate not transcendence but diving deep. Yet this is not something anyone can do today or tomorrow. That is why Project 2049 is built on a long-term plan, as a way of delivering thought that connects to my future and to yours, and of delivering it fresh. Just as produce shipped straight from the farm has become ordinary, I believe that one's own words must now travel straight from where they grow.

Next week, in Vol. 1, I will reveal what "Project 2049" stands for.

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Takahiro Mitsui Project 2049 Report Vol.0 — Friday, October 2, 2026. Written and published by: Takahiro Mitsui.
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