Takahiro Mitsui Project 2049 Report Vol.2Vol.2

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■ 1. LIVING QUESTIONS

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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.

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This week’s subject is the future that lies in the vacuum a bursting bubble leaves behind.

I was born in January 1991, and in my thirty-five years I have lived through three great bursting bubbles: first the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the 1990s, then the dot-com crash around 2000, and finally the Lehman shock of 2008. Though I say I lived through them, all three came before I entered working life, somewhere between my early childhood and my student years, and so, regrettably, I remember none of them and never felt them in my daily life. When I ask my parents, who lived through Japan’s bubble era, I can understand how extraordinary it was, but there is nothing I can tell of it from my own experience.

There is one more thing in Japan. The ultra-low interest rates that began in 1995, and the zero-interest-rate policy that followed from 1999, lasted for some thirty years. Since 2024, however, the Bank of Japan has raised rates again and again, and in September this year the policy rate reached 1.25%. By global standards that is still low, but set back in the Japanese context, it is the highest level since 1995. The policy rate, in other words, has returned to where it stood when I was about four years old, while prices alone have climbed to a different order altogether, and in a Japan that has entered a super-aged society, the social security burden on the working generation has reached a level never seen before. In another country this would be enough to spark riots, but in a society where the young are a minority, riots are unlikely to happen. And so, for the first time, my generation in Japan has come to live in “a world with interest rates.”

Yet when I look at the people of my generation around me, myself included, I see that, having known only the age of zero interest rates, we still entrust the design of our lives to that premise, and cannot shift to a life designed for a world with interest rates. In fact, 64% of households in my generation carry debt such as a mortgage, and the recent rise in the policy rate has begun, unmistakably, to bite into their lives.

Watching my generation, I think, from the bottom of my heart, that human beings are truly fascinating. Look back through history and you find countless similar cases, yet we do not learn from them, and we soon forget. And we tend to confine ourselves to our own lives, that is, to the sixty to eighty years of a human lifespan, as if they were an absolute measure. That is exactly why the chain repeats itself: we inflate bubble after bubble, burst them, and then give birth to the next.

Whatever the case, from the standpoint of my generation in Japan today, it is a fact that we have entered an unknown world unlike anything before (though put another way, Japan has at last begun to return to the global standard). For those of us who have never known a world with interest rates, nor a bubble’s collapse, the world now beginning is something we have never experienced. That is why so many of my contemporaries, who do not learn from history, have fallen into anxiety, are being tossed about by a flood of information, and have handed the reins of their lives to someone else. Sadly, handing the reins of one’s life to a nation or a platform is also, historically, a sign that one is about to be weeded out.

What we must really ask here, more than how to survive, is how to see where opportunities that never existed before will arise. When structural distortions appear at the level of the social system, or of the world system, they are certainly a disaster for the great majority, but for a few they become the decisive opening through which to rise anew.

When Japan’s bubble burst, the older generation of creatives in the advertising industry, who had been devouring enormous budgets, were weeded out all at once, and a new generation, young, cheap and fluent in digital technology, rose in a single surge. The culture of Ura-Harajuku (known in Japan simply as Urahara), which now draws vast numbers of tourists, also has its source in the bubble’s collapse. Rents fell in the back streets of Harajuku, and in 1993 two young men, Jun Takahashi, then twenty-three, and NIGO, twenty-two, who would later found A BATHING APE, pooled 400,000 yen of savings to open a shop there called NOWHERE. And the foundation of this Tokyo-born street fashion was laid by one person: Hiroshi Fujiwara. Working as a DJ in London and New York in the 1980s, he became close to Shawn Stussy, a California surfboard maker, and joined the circle around the brand Stussy had founded, Stüssy. Fujiwara did not sell the new pieces that arrived from Stüssy; he gave them away to the young friends around him, and it was under his influence that Tokyo’s street culture began to bud.

Look a little further back, too, and city pop, which now has young people around the world in raptures, is a culture of sound born in the booming Tokyo of the late 1970s and the 1980s, the years heading toward the bubble. What young people around the world now consume as “Japanese culture,” in other words, is in substance the legacy of new cultural movements that took place in a few districts of Tokyo in a particular era. Put another way, it is the legacy of “the last era in which Japan had momentum.”

Now, to return to the individual life I spoke of a moment ago: a person lives in society as an active, working member for fifty years at the very most. From this it becomes clear that the vacuum of a bubble’s collapse, that once-in-a-lifetime chance, is something precious that may come once in a single life, or not at all.

That is why I am now rethinking the design of my life from the ground up. I have built several elements squarely into it, but among them there is one large one. That is the bursting of the AI bubble.

It is no exaggeration to say that AI has now taken over our daily lives in every sense. As everyone experiences day to day, a climate has formed in which people talk about AI in connection with anything and everything, driven not only by technical progress but by the discourse and information of people who are being tossed about. On the other hand, as I survey the recent debates about AI from a distance, I have come to see that they are following the same course as the dot-com bubble before its collapse.

To begin with, looked at calmly, the Lehman shock, which began with the collapse of the mortgage bubble, did not give rise to the one phenomenon that decisively builds the next future. That phenomenon is a renewal of the means of production. In this sense, no renewal of the means of production took place with the Lehman shock; the truth is that, as a broad current, the elites who had been in finance flowed into the internet advertising industry and moved, in large numbers, into the tech culture of the 2010s. But what we now face, and what is about to begin in earnest, is a renewal of the means of production, the first in some forty years.

Let us look back at the larger current. In 1995 Windows 95 appeared, and the age of the personal computer truly began. Thinking back, I remember how, right at the end of February 1996, my father came home with a Game Boy and the very first Pokémon game. Pokémon has since become a global phenomenon, but I in fact belong to its very first generation. I must have been about five, and back then everyone put a Pokémon cartridge into their Game Boy and would gather to play until we had worn it out.

By the time I started elementary school, there was a computer in our home. After that, things that profoundly changed our daily lives certainly appeared, the internet and the smartphone among them. But as means of production, neither the internet nor the smartphone came anywhere near the personal computer; they produced nothing. The internet is simply a device for amplifying information, and the smartphone is a device that produces nothing. The one thing a smartphone does produce is the photograph, which is why every manufacturer puts so much into its cameras.

It was in the middle of this current that the dot-com bubble burst.

Between June 1999 and May 2000, the Federal Reserve raised rates six times, and yet at the Super Bowl in January 2000, more than twelve of the sixty-one commercials were for internet companies. It was a bubble, pure and simple. Pets.com spent $11.8 million on advertising against $620,000 in revenue, Webvan ordered twenty-six warehouses for $1 billion, and Kozmo lost $3.20 every time it delivered a single chocolate bar. That absurdities like these happen as a matter of course is what a bubble is.

This method, “buying scale with investors’ money and borrowed money before the customers arrive,” is the typical path by which bubbles form, and on March 10, 2000, the Nasdaq reached its peak of 5,048 points. Two months later, in May, Boo.com collapsed, and on November 7 Pets.com announced that it would close, just nine months after going public. And so the dot-com bubble became a thing of the past.

But this is my point. The overinvestment that was the dot-com bubble did indeed collapse, yet anyone living today knows that the technology itself did not become a thing of the past. And still, for some reason, the present is repeating the same thing.

If a bubble’s collapse made the technology itself vanish from daily life, there might indeed be little point in looking back at the past. In reality, though, after the dot-com crash the technology was democratized in earnest and came down into people’s hands. Ask anyone today whether they could manage their private life or their work without its benefits, and no one could say for certain that they would be fine. It took nearly thirty years, then, for this technology to become part of people’s everyday lives. Look at the present in light of those thirty years of history, and you see that AI too is being pushed forward on enormous borrowing by a data-center bubble (a GPU bubble), which is inflating it exponentially. We are now right in the middle of it. To offer one view: this is exactly why people like NVIDIA and SoftBank, who are investing vast sums in these GPUs, say socially minded things, because it would hurt them if those investments melted away. But their true motive is that they stand to lose enormously unless AI keeps selling at a high price, and their words are shaped not by the ethics of AI but, to an extreme degree, by the private desire to recover their investment.

I do not believe the prevailing view, voiced by so many, that “AI is a bubble, and that will be the end of it.” I take it to be the nonsense of people who have not studied the history of the technology after the dot-com crash. Such people seem, somehow, to have forgotten that the social media they use right now, X, Instagram, Substack, YouTube, were every one of them tools born from the period of the dot-com crash onward.

This is where the idea of the vacuum comes in. A bubble’s collapse is not the moment something ends; it is the soil something needs in order to begin. That is how I think about it.

The AI bubble, then, will probably burst sometime between around 2028 and 2030, but even if it bursts, it is from there that the age of AI will truly begin, and we should prepare that understanding now. The other thing that matters is to step half a pace back from the circle of extreme arguments over whether AI is good or bad; I think this is important as a frame of mind. In other words, do not take part in the AI debates on social media.

This, in fact, is why I have recently put distance between myself and every platform and made everything myself. To keep my distance from the discourse of people who do not learn from history, so as not to be swept up in it; to survey history calmly with my own eyes; to find a new vacuum by myself; and to wait, watchful as a tiger, for the chance to enter it and rise. That is one of the plans I will carry out over the next seven years, and I spend my days preparing for it and putting it into practice.

What we have to think about here is why YouTube and Google rose after the dot-com bubble burst. Those who remember that time may see it, but for my generation, Google, YouTube and Facebook already existed by the time we entered working life. So the history of their rise is not something we can see as lived experience. We come to think of them as simply there, like infrastructure. But that is where the misperception begins.

Look again, and one of the reasons YouTube and Google rose is clear. The optical fiber that telecom companies had laid in vast quantities as advance investment during the dot-com bubble was left behind when the bubble burst, 95% of it unused. And these companies made full use of that fiber, left in the burnt-out ruins of the bubble, at bargain prices.

What a bubble brings about, in other words, is not the end of the technology at its center; it can be described instead as enormous advance investment in the technological foundation for the next age. Most of the investors who put money into it lose, but for a few people it becomes the decisive chance.

What makes this AI bubble troublesome, though, is that there is nothing in it comparable to the optical fiber of the dot-com crash. The great numbers of GPUs installed in data centers go out of date in roughly three to five years and constantly demand replacement. They will not, therefore, become a technological foundation that can go on being used afterward. When we think about the world after the AI bubble bursts, no one, in truth, can answer the question of what will remain. Measured against the bubbles of the past, this is the most unknown of the variables.

But that is no reason to stop thinking. In daily life we should make active use of AI, because that trial and error becomes a capital all one’s own, and a pass that lets us move from the bubble’s collapse to the next budding. And there is one thing, now, that I can name as what will remain in the burnt-out ruins of the AI bubble. It is intelligence that has become cheap.

I want to keep writing about this, drawing on a number of examples, in the issues to come. Let us get through, together, the years from 2028 into the early 2030s, when a blizzard such as humanity has never known will rage, and keep moving on toward 2049.

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■ 2. JAPANESE THOUGHT

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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.

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Ethnicity is a subject that grows more fascinating the more you think about it, and new discoveries emerge depending on where you set your angle. At the same time, this very quality can be exploited: when a strong regime begins to grow unstable, moves arise to re-emphasize ethnicity in order to unify and control the people. It is exactly what we are experiencing all over the world right now, and Japan is no exception. Open assertions of ethnicity may be weaker here than in other countries, but there is no doubt that Japan is walking the same road, steadily following the rest of the world, only with a time lag.

Many people believe that Japan accepts almost no immigrants, but this is in fact a serious misperception. As of this year, immigrants already make up more than 3% of Japan’s total population, and Japan has in substance become a “hidden nation of immigrants.” That is exactly why I sense that, in this new world where immigrants have entered daily life, the question of ethnicity is gradually and steadily being redefined for the people of this country, little by little, and beginning to draw attention. And yet, when you think about it again, no one can answer if asked what the Japanese are.

Not only for the Japanese, the question of ethnicity is, in the end, one no one can answer; in a sense, it is a question without an answer. And I have begun to see that question as a variable, one that the people who hold a voice in each age are able to move. In today’s LIVING QUESTIONS I wrote about the variable of a bubble’s collapse, and ethnicity, without doubt, is another.

Nor, needless to say, are the unstable swings around ethnicity anything new; they have a very old history. In Japan’s case, what we can turn to in this context are the Kojiki, completed in 712, and the Nihon Shoki, completed in 720.

Why were two books made in the same period, by much the same people? When I think about this, I am left with a strangely uneasy feeling. For although the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki are certainly similar in content and structure, the thought on which their premises are built is entirely different. For many years I have gazed at the gaps and fissures between the two, and rather than reading the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki as texts to be understood with the head, I have gone on reading them as if engraving them into my body. What came into view along the way was the idea of a “plural world” (多元的世界).

The phrase “plural world” itself was put forward in the late 1980s by the folklorist Hirofumi Tsuboi, and it appears in the title of his book Folklore Reconsidered: A View Toward a Plural World (1986). Behind his proposal lay the fact that, in an age when the theory that the Japanese are a single ethnic people was firmly entrenched, he had seen through it to its fiction from lived experience, through the bodily experience of his own fieldwork over many years. And he went out of his way to use the words “plural world” within folklore studies because there was someone he clearly meant to confront with them: the founder of Japanese folklore studies, Kunio Yanagita.

Yanagita opened up the field of folklore studies in Japan and expanded it by walking the whole country on his own feet. But what we must look at alongside this is the blueprint of his mind. For the design of his mind had itself been invaded by Japan’s bureaucracy. This is deeply bound up with the fact that, after graduating from the College of Law at Tokyo Imperial University (today’s Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo), he worked as a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce (the forerunner of today’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries). He went on to build his career as an official and rose as high as Chief Secretary of the House of Peers, but in December 1919, at the age of forty-four, he made a great decision: to leave officialdom and step into the world of folklore studies.

Yet however far he walked from there, it is a fact that he dragged along with him, unshakably, the views of nation and of ethnicity formed in the Meiji era, and transplanted them as they were into folklore studies. He was, in other words, the man who drew the Meiji image of “the Japanese” as a single ethnic people straight into the world of folklore studies. That, I believe, is where Yanagita stands.

Walk the land on your own feet, and anyone can see that the people living there cannot possibly be spoken of as a single “Japan” or a single “Japanese.” This in itself is obvious, but the problem I always think about lies less in the quality of someone’s research than in what that person is like. However brilliant a researcher may be, without the power to doubt, from the very outset, the common sense and fixed ideas built into their own head, they end up taking the first step toward extreme thought.

It is no exaggeration to say that Yanagita devoted his life to reinforcing, from the standpoint of folklore studies, the illusion he himself carried: “the Japanese as a single ethnic people.” From then on, the world of folklore studies came to be mocked as, in effect, “Yanagita studies,” and new researchers devoted their careers solely to following the many theories Yanagita had put forward and shoring them up. At the same time, those whose findings or ideas ran against his theories were driven out as heretics, and, astonishingly, according to folklorists I know personally, this structure has not changed to this day.

The world of Japanese folklore studies, in other words, cannot be spoken of as a single academic discipline; it has taken a strange shape, existing, as it were, by having others move around the edges of a closed, cult-like leader named Kunio Yanagita.

Seen in this light, Tsuboi was an outstanding figure, someone who put forward the “plural world” while standing in the very midst of academia. As a result, his work is hardly ever cited in folklore studies and has, for the most part, been ignored ever since. The reason is clear: he did not follow Yanagita’s theories, and put forward his own. But as I have traveled the Japanese archipelago over these seven or eight years, again and again, relentlessly, I have been moved by the insight of Tsuboi, who put forward the idea of a plural world.

Where, then, does this idea of a plural world lead? When I think about it, one important ancient concept rises up: the kunitsukami (国つ神), the gods of the land, and the amatsukami (天つ神), the gods of heaven, of which Shinto speaks.

To put it another way, questions of the kind “Are the Japanese a single ethnic people, or a plural one?” are not, to whatever degree, confined to the domain of modern academia; they have an old history. And the first works to engrave the kunitsukami and the amatsukami in writing, at least among those that survive, were the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, in roughly the early eighth century. But that these books were completed in the early eighth century means that the concepts themselves had already been nurtured, and shared to a high degree, long before then.

The swings, in other words, were violent, and unification could not be reached. That is why the court’s officials began the work of applying writing, the most advanced technology of the time, brought from China, to record things and fix them in place. The one who led this was Emperor Tenmu, the fortieth sovereign, but the books were actually completed somewhat later, in the reign of Empress Genmei, the forty-third. Japan around the eighth century, then, had reached a great structural turning point and a period of renewal, and reading this context is a great step toward approaching the true shape of ethnicity.

What, then, is ethnicity? The answer cannot be simplified, but there is one more thing we must turn our eyes to here: the myths bring on not only the gods who appear as kunitsukami and amatsukami, but countless other, different gods.

Even in the midst of a new creative work, gathering old traditions from every region and weaving them anew, systematically, into books, the compilers of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki transplanted into them, in many forms, the memories of unspoken tribes that had survived as old memory. It is important to take the weight of this seriously.

For the dynamics of the court of that time are deeply involved in the gods who appear chiefly as kunitsukami and amatsukami. Broadly, the gods appear as the clans surrounding the imperial family and the people around them, or as their relations with the ancient tribes of various regions who opposed them, but what is surprisingly often overlooked are the gods who appear as animals.

Roughly speaking, some nine kinds of animal gods appear in the Kojiki alone. The most famous among them is the white hare in the myth known as “The White Hare of Inaba.” By origin, this animal god stands for a tribe, that is to say gods, who came across the sea from the land of Oki (today’s Oki Islands) to the land of Inaba beyond it (the area of present-day Tottori City).

The tribe told of as a white hare from Oki was in close contact with Yagamihime of Inaba. Yagamihime was the queen of Inaba, who held great influence at the time around today’s Tottori City, the gateway to Honshu’s Sea of Japan coast, and drew many tribes to her; the white hare, as I see it, carried what might be called the diplomatic side of her rule. In the myth, Yagamihime is described as a woman of peerless beauty, and countless gods set out for her land seeking her hand in marriage.

It is here that the myth brings on a god called Onamuchi, the source of Okuninushi, who would later rule the land of Izumo (and who is today the deity enshrined at Izumo Taisha). The tale records what happened as Onamuchi made his way to Inaba together with the Yasogami (meaning his countless brother gods).

The tale itself is simple. It opens with Onamuchi, made to carry all his brothers’ baggage on their way to court Yagamihime, walking behind the rest. The Yasogami, going on ahead, come upon a white hare on the shore, wounded after an attack by sharks; they tell it a false remedy, laugh at its suffering and pass by. Then Onamuchi, last and late, arrives and tells it the proper cure, and the hare recovers. In return, the white hare prophesies, “Yagamihime will choose you,” and so it comes to pass. Enraged, the Yasogami kill Onamuchi, and Onamuchi is reborn. That is the myth.

It is easy to misread, but the marriages of the gods speak, in one aspect, of alliances between lands. Look at it from the standpoint of which land allies with which, and what this tale conveys is a world of tribes from many lands seeking to conclude an alliance with Inaba, a land that was then highly attractive, and of a tribe from the island of Oki, floating far across the sea, that mediated those alliances. And at the time, the land of Izumo was very small and held no influence whatsoever.

There are many tales like this, in which animals appear in the myths and play an active part, but from the standpoint of the difference between the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, what I want you to notice is the section on the twenty-first emperor, Yuryaku, which comes after the age of the gods has ended and the books have moved on to recounting the reigns of emperors. Turn your eyes to just one tale in this section, and you can see that the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki were in fact written from entirely different thought, and that this, at the same time, hints at the true picture of antiquity.

Its stage is Mount Katsuragi, a mountain rising on what is now the border between Osaka and Nara prefectures, a mysterious mountain long revered as sacred. The Katsuragi area today, incidentally, is nothing more than a depopulated farming district, with no trace of past prosperity to be felt, but from beneath the ground another world rises up. Astonishingly, in the Kofun period there was a time when this area was at the height of its prosperity, ruled by an ancient clan of considerable influence called the Katsuragi. The area, in other words, carries the name of the ancient Katsuragi clan down to the present. What is more, the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki and old traditions tell that the Katsuragi were the main power throughout this area, who brought together the people who had come from across the sea and rose in the struggles for supremacy. In fact, I have seen many artifacts of the Kofun period unearthed in this area, and they make clear that a magnificent work of nation-building was carried out there.

Now to the main subject. What did Emperor Yuryaku encounter when he entered Mount Katsuragi, and what did he do? Let us look first at the Nihon Shoki.

In the entry for the second month of the fifth year of Yuryaku’s reign, the emperor is hunting on Mount Katsuragi when a raging boar bursts out of the undergrowth. The emperor orders his attendant to shoot it, to stab it, but the cowardly attendant climbs a tree, his face drained of color, and can do nothing. The boar then charges straight at the emperor, and in that moment the emperor, without fear, stops the oncoming boar himself, stabbing it with his bow, and tramples it to death. The point to notice is that the one said to have fled up the tree is the attendant, not the emperor. The one who ran, in other words, was the retainer, not the emperor. The Nihon Shoki conveys that the emperor was a dignified, authoritative presence.

The Kojiki, however, is entirely different. In the Kojiki, when the emperor tries to shoot the boar, the enraged boar comes at him, roaring, and the emperor, frightened by its roar, flees up into a tree. Both books include a song at this moment, and put simply, the subject of “the tree I fled up” is the emperor in the Kojiki, but has shifted to the attendant in the Nihon Shoki. The same song has its singer swapped between the two books.

In the Kojiki the emperor is anything but dignified, while in the Nihon Shoki Yuryaku appears as an emperor praised by the people as “a virtuous emperor.” The emperor’s conduct toward an animal god, in other words, is fundamentally different in two books made in the same period. To me, this is the most fascinating shift in thought.

For this tale already belongs to the reigns of emperors, after the age of the gods had ended. For those involved in compiling the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki at the time, it should have been proper, within the court, to bring the tale in line with the Nihon Shoki, in the sense of honoring the emperor. Yet even in that age, the Kojiki kept the old traces. What on earth does this mean?

In my own understanding, it suggests that the worldview of a single ethnic people centered on the emperor, the worldview some Japanese long believed in, and which from modern times onward was planted in the people as a concept on a national scale, did not exist in antiquity. And beings like this, who are not spoken of as kunitsukami or amatsukami, are called the matsurowanu (まつろわぬ) gods. The word matsurowanu is no longer in use, but in the old language it means “not subjugated.” Seen from this angle, it becomes clear that what we truly have to look at, if we are to understand Japan, is the rich world of these matsurowanu gods, alongside the kunitsukami and the amatsukami. This, I believe, is the plural world that Tsuboi set forth.

Thinking from all this, what I do is surprisingly simple. I go to places all over the country, bathe in the wind of each land, and offer prayers to the gods worshipped there, while at the same time engraving a plural world into my own body. To deny or eliminate with the head the fixed idea of a single ethnic people, so firmly transplanted by the state, is difficult, and only leads into deeper delusion. But a method of dismantling the image of ethnicity while engraving the myths at the level of one’s own body, and of opening a plural world from the body, may perhaps be called one answer from Japan to the dead ends and the weariness of today’s violently swinging ideologies, ethnic nationalism and statism among them.

Seen this way, it can be said that the present, in which people said to be intellectually brilliant within the bounds of modern academia carry on fierce debates over every ideology, is precisely the furthest from any answer, and the trigger most likely to lead people into wrong choices about their future.

I noticed this as I was writing: what can be said from all of this is that the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki are not mere reading. For me, they are the body itself. For me, the worldview of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, which carry Japan’s myths, comes, quite literally, from the words that come out of my own body, and it sways, little by little, day by day.

I do not know how to put this feeling into words just now. But I feel that here, a thought that can be passed on to the people living in the twenty-first century is beginning to show itself.