Takahiro Mitsui Project 2049 Report Vol.1
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.
Takahiro Mitsui Project 2049 Report Vol.1
/ , 5:00 p.m. JST /
■ 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 we have left behind the last days of shubun (the autumn equinox) and the stretch that leads toward kanro (the cold dew), which this year falls on October 8. It is also the time when Japan, a long, narrow archipelago running north to south, changes season at different moments from one region to the next. In western Japan, where I live, the days still carry something of summer’s heat, but the mornings and evenings have cooled, and autumn has begun, little by little, to reach the body.
A few years ago I began preparing for winter as soon as September arrives, a step ahead of the season, and my body is now gradually switching into its winter mode. In places where winter daylight is short, northern Europe among them, taking vitamin D3 has long since become an ordinary habit, and it is one I keep up myself. By its nature, vitamin D3 takes two to three months to build a proper reserve in the body, which in Japan means starting around September.
Having begun these preparations, my body is now, in the pleasant autumn wind, recovering from the fatigue of summer. Holding on to that calm, I want to write this week about Project 2049, the name I chose for this publication.
Hearing the words Project 2049, you probably picture some global goal, or a national strategy. But set in a Japanese context, the name has a particular forecast of the future standing behind it. It began with a book published in April 2019 by Tsuyoshi Takashiro, a man who keeps accelerating at the very front edge of his time. Its many predictions, delivered as though he had already been to the future and come back, have won strong support from some Japanese, myself among them.
What, then, does it say? Takashiro boldly put his proposal into the title itself: 2049: The Day Japan Joins the EU. It is a book that reads the future thirty years on from its publication in 2019, and today, if you told almost anyone that Japan would join the EU, they would laugh and say nothing so absurd could ever happen. What I would add is that, yes, if your premise is “today’s Japan” and “today’s EU,” it could not.
But this is what Takashiro argues. The EU will lose its present form and strength, head first toward ruin, and in the course of being reborn find itself isolated in the world; to forge new ties, it will need a partner who understands it, beyond its existing frameworks. Japan, too, looking thirty years ahead, will certainly see distance open up between itself and the United States, and can expect a future in which it is, inevitably, left completely isolated in East Asia. For a Europe isolated in the West and a Japan isolated in the East, then, joining hands as each other’s best partner will become essential to survival.
You can see as much from where we stand now. The main battlegrounds of advanced technology, AI, robotics, genetics, medicine, are already concentrated in the United States and China, and neither the EU nor Japan, for all their former glory, has left any mark there. As emerging nations rise all at once and the United States declines, Europe and Japan, long sheltered by the structure of the Cold War, are losing the attractive position they once held in the global market.
To put it in my own terms: taken as a whole, Europe and Japan are unlikely to make their presence felt in advanced technology in the years ahead. They will become the stage for all manner of geopolitical problems, and as waves of aging push them toward conservatism, they will remain stuck, wanting to change and unable to. Meanwhile the countries and regions with young populations will rise, and Europe and Japan will become something like the parents of an adolescent: necessary, but a nuisance.
Takashiro’s claim that Europe and Japan will join hands is not without grounds. As early as 2019 he foresaw that democratic socialism, starting in the United States, would become the world’s new current, and he interviewed the AfD and the National Rally, which were still not being taken seriously, predicting their rise in the near future. Through all of this, he saw that a Europe and a Japan isolated over thirty years would have one decisive reason to join hands: cultural maturity.
To today’s American-style global sensibility, cultural maturity is surely an unnecessary element, even something sinister that holds back growth. But a culture needs a great deal of history to grow, and it does not make a great leap every three months the way AI does. Nor does cultural maturity mean only so-called traditional culture. It is reflected across a wide range, in the values, ethics and morals of the people who live there, all the way to the design of their society. Europe and Japan are both in uproar over immigration right now, for example. The sudden rise in numbers is part of it, but a greater source of friction is that the immigrants do not understand the cultural maturity of Europe and Japan. The truth is that people who understand it and can enter into dialogue on that basis remain few, even in the late 2020s, after globalization has ended.
That is why Takashiro concludes that the two regions, both culturally mature and both deep in history, will together form a single framework. Its shape, he writes in closing, will not be the EU in today’s sense, but a forerunner of a GU, a Global Union, and an important precedent on the way to the twenty-second century.
I named this newsletter Project 2049 with one thought in mind. The future will probably move in the direction he describes. But, as he himself says, those who join hands will not be “today’s Europe” and “today’s Japan.” This must not be misunderstood.
What joins hands will be a “future Europe” and a “future Japan,” moving from destruction toward rebirth, and for that to happen, today’s Europe and today’s Japan must first be dismantled. In fact, both have plainly reached their limits, and the dismantling has begun. The extreme swings to the right and to the left, and the problems with inequality at their head, are, seen from a distance, that dismantling. And I believe the forms of the future will be fundamentally different from the two as we now understand them.
Given all this, how can the cultures and histories that each has nurtured over its long past come to work in concert? That is why I chose this title. As everyone knows, Japan and Europe, lying so far apart, spent long ages with almost no contact, each growing its own history and culture. From the Age of Discovery onward, however, exchange began in earnest, and in the modern era, which Meiji has come to symbolize, Japan fell under the powerful influence first of Europe and Britain and then, after the war, of the United States.
Nothing in Japan’s history compares to foreign influence so extreme in so short a time. In the East Asian order before then, Japan had never once been invaded, and the influence of China and Korea had been limited, and absorbed slowly over long periods. Then, all at once, the rules changed. Asked whether Japan and Europe, in their present forms, which lie along the extension of that history, can become good allies, I have to say I do not think so.
To begin with, Japan in particular is extremely weak at speaking for itself. Under the second Abe administration, an enormous sum was spent on a national branding campaign called Cool Japan, and every Japanese person knows it ended in failure and disgrace. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a Japan that was still prosperous to renew its national brand one last time, and Shinzo Abe used it only to line the pockets of his own circle. I feel this as I watch the crowds of tourists now arriving from Europe and America: as things stand, I think it will be extremely difficult for us to join hands in our present form and build a future together. It may be possible on paper, but it will not, sadly, be a model for the future.
What we must think about, then, is a future relationship that cannot be described with the familiar phrase “mutual understanding.” How to truly understand one another, in both directions, to hold each other in respect, to believe in the future that lies beyond, and to build it with each other’s cultures and geopolitical risks in mind. I sense that this carries a deeper reality and meaning than a future in which Europe and Japan merely survive. It matters for humanity.
At one of the roots of the global turmoil now under way, I sense the birth pangs of a humanity trying to move beyond the twentieth-century nation into a twenty-first-century world without nations. The twenty-first century can be called a hard age of trial and error, one that corrects, updates, dismantles and rebuilds the powerful legacy of the twentieth, and it is at the same time the period in which the template for a new age, the twenty-second century, is made. Seen in this context, the future of the twenty-first century will come to be spoken of as “the age of religion and philosophy.”
A future in which Japan and Europe join hands, then, will certainly offer humanity a new model and be a great step toward the next age. But, to say it again, it will not be the Europe and Japan we know now. Before then, an age of great pain will go on for ten, twenty years. We have, without question, already set foot at its entrance. Everyone says this is the hardest of times, but the torrent has yet to pour in.
2049 is twenty-three years away. Given my age, I am likely to live to see it. And by then I will be fifty-eight, at the stage of life when one accomplishes great work. I may even find myself in the front ranks on the Japanese side, working to realize the future Takashiro proposed.
I feel it myself: history and culture are extraordinarily hard to understand in both directions. This mutual understanding, too, will probably not be achieved by any method we know today. To reach a deeper understanding, one that goes to the root, what is truly needed, I have long argued, is to begin not with “dialogue with others” but with “dialogue with oneself.” I once described this through the idea of sohan kyozon (相反共存), the coexistence of things that oppose each other.
No one knows the future. But over a span of thirty years or so, much is certain. In that light, I want to think in my own way about the world of 2049 to come and, guided by my own thought, walk toward it one step at a time.
It was with that will and that hope that I gave this publication its name. Vol. 1 begins this week, and the road runs on to 2049. I hope you will enjoy it.
■ 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.
This year I had my entire genome read through whole-genome sequencing (WGS). What I came to understand is that the question of whether a person is using their abilities in keeping with the traits they were born with is extremely hard to answer. The reason is clear: acquired factors, environmental ones above all, shape the “self” far more than we imagine.
The “self-identity” so often talked about seems to me a problem that surfaces at an edge: the point where these two kinds of traits come apart and one of them is believed to be “the real me,” the edge of what I would call a fiction born of the traits of survival. It is, in other words, a fiction that life produced in order to survive, and seen from that angle, beneath the identity crisis of the modern world there may lie a problem more essential than any social ideology.
Everyone knows it is no easy thing to speak of “the human being.” And no age has understood as well as ours that any attempt to speak of the “universal human,” of humanity as a whole, will always strain. Paradoxically, then, the path to understanding human beings seems to lie in a readiness not to seek the universal in its modern sense. So when we think about the human being in this light, how did the Japanese who came before us put it into words? By exploring this, I was able to find a key. There are countless such keys, but the one I have turned to most is the Confucian scholar Masahiro Yasuoka.
Yasuoka left behind an enormous body of words, and among them is a passage that conveys his conviction about how a human being should live. The concept he uses there is iiku sansan (位育参賛). The phrase joins two ideas, both drawn from the Doctrine of the Mean. Iiku comes from 致中和、天地位焉、萬物育焉: attain centrality and harmony, and heaven and earth settle into their places, and the ten thousand things are nurtured. Sansan comes from 可以賛天地之化育、則可以與天地參矣: if one can assist the transforming and nurturing work of heaven and earth, one can stand as a third beside heaven and earth.
Iiku sansan is, I believe, a coined phrase, but it was already in use in the Ming dynasty, taken up by Wang Yangming’s disciple Wang Gen and others, and it later flowed into Japan, where it lived on as an idea for a long time. Yasuoka’s own words on its essential meaning are hard to translate, so let me put it my own way: “To discover the self within heaven and earth and within human society. Society is an immensely complex thing, and within the system we call society each self exists, at the same time, as a single element of it, or takes part in it. That we live within it in this way is iiku; that we at the same time carry the action, the work, of helping the whole move forward is sansan.”
With this as my premise, I turn to my own reflections. The first thing to be careful of is this: if you take the “self” to be the subject, in the modern sense, your thinking is turned upside down at this very point. For the self, as Japan has spoken of it, stands precisely in the place of iiku sansan. The self is not the subject; the self is what exists within heaven and earth and within society. The human self, then, is not something split off from heaven and earth and society, existing in isolation; rather, the human self is the very thing through which heaven, earth and society are held inseparable. To put it plainly, the true subject lies on the side of heaven and earth and society: on the side of the communal illusion, and of that illusion made real.
With this as a foundation, Yasuoka’s words begin to engrave themselves within me. “To discover the self within heaven and earth and within human society,” as the passage begins, is not a question about the individual we usually assume, the subject split off and isolated. In my own terms, it means letting “a self that is not established” become manifest in the act of gazing at heaven and earth and at society. I do not think of “discovery” as divided, in the relation of subject and object, into “the one who discovers” and “the one who is discovered”; I use the word “manifestation” instead. And to let anything become manifest, the self that behaves as a subject must be brought to nothing. For as long as we remain unaware of the self acting as subject, nothing becomes manifest, and we know from history how things then tip over into the violent world of discovery. My basic view is that truth is not something to be discovered, but something to be allowed to manifest.
When we think about iiku sansan, the modern way of thinking about the self as subject becomes an absolute obstacle; put another way, the structure of that obstacle also holds a clue to breaking through it. And the words of Yasuoka introduced here lead back, if you trace their origin on the Japanese side, to one person: the Confucian scholar Toju Nakae.
Born in 1608, five years after the Edo shogunate was established, in what is now Shiga Prefecture, Toju Nakae came to be venerated as the founder of the Wang Yangming school in Japan, and he is still deeply loved in many parts of the country. Strictly speaking, though, he was not himself a follower of Wang Yangming: he encountered Wang’s thought only at thirty-seven, about four years before his death. Among the ideas he left behind are many teachings that dive down into a world without a subject.
Here, two ideas become important: shingo (真吾) and kago (仮吾). Watching the people of his time, Toju taught that what people take to be their true self is entirely kago, the provisional self they have taken on from childhood until now, and that the world falls into confusion and chaos, and people lose their way, because they mistake this kago for shingo. Toju sees what people believe to be the attributes of the self, genzai kanno shiryo funbetsu (見在感応思慮分別), as the figure of kago.
Genzai is existing here and now, or the events that appear before one’s eyes. Kanno is the heart sensing and answering stimuli from the outside world, or the workings of the gods and the buddhas; in my own words, being deeply moved. In modern terms this too is read as something an individual subject feels, but it is not so: being moved is precisely what is granted through manifestation. Shiryo is the power to think deeply and judge, or consideration for those around one. Funbetsu is weighing good and evil, gain and loss, but in Buddhist terms it is understood as the knowing in which the working of the mind reflects on and measures its object.
These four are what people generally believe to be “something like a definition of the self,” and so at first glance they carry a certain persuasiveness. But Toju saw through them: they are the elements that form kago, and they are not shingo. Think about it, and these four are traits everyone has to some degree; they are important elements that we still believe to be our very existence, and they are also understood as the traits of the social human being. Yet they are the machinery that generates kago, and, in modern terms, the driving force of alienation. Here, in other words, we must not look for what is universal in human beings.
It would not matter if one person fell into this error. The problem is that the great majority fall into it and, even while fallen, go on mistaking it for shingo. As Toju says, once people fall into this state, the world’s confusion begins. And in fact this has not changed, then or now; if anything, in terms of sheer numbers, the present is the worst in human history. Through social media and the like, we have built a state in which people cannot step out of kago at any hour of the day, and are made to go on believing blindly that the kago constantly produced there is themselves. Frighteningly, this has the power to make almost every member of a humanity approaching ten billion mistake kago for shingo. Not even the religions of the past had such power. And so people keep falling into the depths of confusion, believing without doubt that kago is shingo. It is in this state that they speak of “the world,” so it is only natural that the world is in chaos, and that countless endless conflicts and clashes break out.
My conviction is that international cooperation is not what solves the world’s problems; real solutions only ever come from the individual. Climate change, capitalism, pandemics, advanced technology: whichever you take, for humanity to cooperate internationally in a true sense, what must be questioned is not agreements, laws or contracts but, above all, the person. This way of thinking is Confucian and East Asian, and it is true that it is not easily understood, but what it means is that someone who has not cultivated themselves as a human being amounts to nothing, however impressive their record in society. For the problem lies not in the self covered in the ornaments of kago, but in the self as shingo. Conversely, anyone who sees through their own kago, devotes themselves to daily introspection and tries to go even a little further will inevitably develop the ability to see through the kago of others. Unless we take this as our footing, the world will not move forward at all. History gave rise to religion and culture as the means to this, not the other way around.
When I take this way of thinking in, a doubt rises in my mind: whether the process by which the grammatical subject, the subject and the ego came into being is, in fact, an account of how the delusion of taking kago for shingo arose. In other words, whether it was precisely by mistaking kago for shingo, and believing in it, that modernity became possible. This is a personal hypothesis, but at the root of the phenomenon we call modernity there lies, without doubt, an illusion of the grammatical subject and of the subject, and it still works powerfully on people today.
Perhaps modernity is, at bottom, a social design for giving up the way of life that polishes shingo: a history that, through “social progress” built up over the years, weakened people’s shingo and generated kago. For in the phrase “social progress,” the human face has vanished. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the understanding of the “self” may have changed profoundly between before modernity and after. It is a work of splitting shingo and kago into a dualism and setting them against each other; of lowering, gradually but surely, the strength of shingo while fashioning, as a fiction, an “empty vessel”; and of filling that vessel from every side with social ornament. Through this work, kago is generated, and kago begins to exist as the very substance of self-loss and alienation, in every sense of those words.
For people after modernity, this was an extremely convenient invention, since it allowed introspection, the work of looking at shingo, to be removed from daily life. Even if humanity reaches ten billion, those able to introspect in earnest have been extremely few in every age, so for most of humanity it may have been imagined as “a society that is easier to live in.” But what came of it is clear from the world today, and from the suffering of its people.
If this view holds, a troublesome problem rises up in me. For even if we can grasp that what we have treated as alienation in fact stems from people continuing to mistake kago for shingo, in that state shingo has actually become invisible to them. Here, I think, may lie the true cause of alienation. And I keep turning over the thought that, in the identity crises and the mass outbreak of mental illness that spread among the young in developed countries from the late 2010s into the 2020s, what we truly need to look at is this “cause no one has considered.”
Rather than not considered, it may be more accurate to say not seen. Why should that be? Because the very people who question these problems and try to solve them are themselves people who mistake kago for shingo. That is my reading. And beneath it there lies some pain, some anxiety, that human beings wanted to look away from. That current became modernity, and it is simply reflected today as a crisis on a global scale. Seen this way, it becomes clear that the problem of identity, of the self, has to be looked at from a different place.
So where is that place? I find it in Takaaki Yoshimoto’s thought on communal illusion. Put simply, my present view is this: through the splitting that kago brings about, people are drawn into communal illusion, while mistaking it, as a question of identity, for shingo. Through this, people can no longer see their own shingo, and they enter an endless loop of adorning kago in ever more extreme ways and filling it to the brim. Those caught in this loop cannot, unfortunately, escape it by their own will.
Seeking salvation in religion or philosophy from within this state can, sadly, be expected to do no good; it will only make things worse. But put the other way, this is exactly why the age of religion and philosophy is coming. That age has already shown itself, and so the individual would do well to begin by thinking through, to the very end, the problem of having split into shingo and kago: translating it within oneself, editing it into a form that truly sinks in, and going on questioning oneself. For the fight is never between oneself and others, or society, or the nation, or the world. It is always between oneself and one’s own kago.
Inborn traits and acquired traits. It is surely true that human beings form a self while swaying between them, losing their way. But that swaying does not tell us where to go, nor does it give us answers. That is why people must learn, have faith, and go on living. What the Japanese who came before me taught me was, surprisingly, nothing other than a simple way of thinking about the self.
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