# Takahiro Mitsui Project 2049 Report Vol.4: Why Has Life Lost Its Meaning? Instant Meaning, the Journey to a Teacher, and Why Amaterasu Chose Ise - Author: Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央) - Published: Friday, October 30, 2026, 5:00 p.m. JST - URL: https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-4 - Publication: Project 2049, a weekly essay in English by Takahiro Mitsui (https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049). Not a Substack publication; not the Project 2049 Institute > Takahiro Mitsui on why so many people say they have lost the meaning of life: what was lost is instant meaning, not meaning itself, and those who came before us found their way by setting out in search of a teacher; and on Amaterasu's road from the Yamato palace to Ise, the Inner and Outer Shrines, Toyouke, and why pilgrims went to the sea first. 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 Japan entered soko (the descent of frost), the eighteenth of the twenty-four solar terms. Under the influence of Typhoon No. 30, which had grown into a large and violent storm, the weather turned wild across the country and temperatures began to fall sharply. Yet I feel the actual climate has never stood so far from the twenty-four solar terms as it does now. Before we noticed, Japan lost its four seasons, and its plains have entered a regime of two: summer and winter. In its strangeness the climate is the same the world over, but the frightening thing is that in Tokyo it rained every day in September; from the end of August until October 2, the rain went on for thirty-seven days in a row. I live in Osaka, and in Kansai, too, the rain kept falling from the first half of September into the middle of the month. September, which I had always known as the time when the sunlight softens and the days grow easy, now belongs to the past. Amid all this, together with the strange weather, came word from an occupational physician in Tokyo: the number of people on leave from work, chiefly for depression, had exploded to three times the previous year's, and the society of the capital had already collapsed. The worldwide decline in diet, the falling quality of food, a society run on stress, politics that are unstable and cannot be trusted, economic crisis: the causes must be countless, but it is important to see the climate as a trigger. At the same time, the world has already fallen into a confusion too violent to be put away as a problem of climate alone. Lately, for instance, many people are said to have lost the meaning of life. It seems to be a worldwide phenomenon, most common, we are told, among those from their teens to their mid-forties. Why is it that this generation has lost the meaning of life and now wanders? I belong to this generation myself, yet I have never once lost the meaning of life, nor ever thought about such a thing. Going by that feeling, perhaps I am, whatever my circumstances, among the fortunate of my generation where living itself is concerned. But this is not a problem peculiar to our age. Look back through history and you find that people have lost sight of meaning again and again, at intervals. The tendency I see, in my own reading, is this. In an age when a long current runs, in which the many who have lost meaning go astray and despair of their lives, what arrives first is the offer of "instant meaning," and its consumption. The power to show people who can no longer think for themselves a purpose in life, a purpose made complicated by existing theories and logic, is lost, and in its place rises a current that deludes them into believing they can understand instantly and fulfill the purpose of their lives instantly. The social media of the past decade or so has made this plain. We are, in other words, already standing past that point. People consume it believing it to be salvation, and history also teaches that groups of this kind swell rapidly. But what they gain there is not the meaning of life. What they gain, in the end, is a sickness: they lose the meaning of their lives still further, and they themselves are hollowed into empty forms. In the thirteenth century, too, an age once called the Latter Days of the Dharma, the instant teaching of Nichiren, that one need not understand the difficult Buddhist sutras, that it was enough to chant the single phrase "Namu Myoho Renge Kyo," spread explosively among the common people. Phenomena of this kind seem to me to recur throughout history. In fact, this year data has appeared that shows the signs. According to a survey by *Publishers Weekly* published in April, in sales of print books in America from January to March 2026, demand for self-help books, which had made their money by handing out instant meaning and giving readers the illusion of having understood, fell 26.3 percent from the year before, while religious books rose slightly. No doubt the slowing of social media plays its part, but then where will people, worn out by consuming instant meaning, run next? What matters, I think, is that what people have truly lost is "an instant meaning of life," not "the meaning of life" itself. We must not get this wrong. So what we must think about now is that today's condition, the loss of the meaning of life, is in truth the result of having sought instant answers too much. It has repeated itself many times in history, and in itself it is nothing very unusual. In that sense, the causes and effects of today's phenomenon are, too, comparatively clear. The question, then, is how those who came before us took their next step when they fell into such a state. It may be unexpected, but the answer is the history of one act: "setting out on a journey in search of a teacher." And I believe people will now split, to an extreme degree, into the few who take this road and the great majority who cannot move, and that the very definition of the meaning of life will come, for each of them, to belong to an entirely different world. Even on the meaning of life, humanity will no longer be able to speak with its neighbor. In the past, when people lost meaning, a person living in that land who could teach them something, or a book, took its place. But those who lose meaning today are being gathered up, rapidly, into a newly arrived refuge that gives "answers dressed up to look as if they were not instant." It is the most instant answer and the most plausible one, and it can be consumed lying in bed. What is more, it seems to go on giving answers twenty-four hours a day without rest, and it goes on deluding people. In this sense, it is clear where the great majority are heading, having lost meaning and fallen to the edge of the abyss of confusion, and in fact the number of people who ask AI chatbots for the meaning of life is already rising fast. These people do not know that an AI chatbot is, after all, nothing more than a summary of the average of information that already exists, and they do not know that the real information, which never makes it onto the internet, is not there. Real information, in every age, can only be gathered on foot. This rule will not change, however far the age advances into high technology, or into an unmanned society. And so these people are likely, from here on, to have their exhaustion driven to the extreme by instant answers (social media) and by answers made to look as if they were not instant (AI chatbots), and to lose everything. There, the question of why they have lost the meaning of life, why they suffer, why they cannot escape their predicament, will never be answered, and there is no one to answer it in their place. So such people will be left with nothing but to rampage in the streets and online, and the signs have already appeared in many places. Whenever those who came before us fell into such a predicament, when nothing more could be done by their own strength, they always found their way out by moving their bodies. This, I believe, is what they truly teach. What is happening now, in other words, is the extinction of the value of all information except the primary information taken on foot and touched by hand, and for those who go on learning on foot as they always have, it is no great problem. In this sense, those now seeking meaning will, in the current to come, divide broadly in two. On one side is the person who, as ever, does not move the body, carries on in the same place, with the same people, in the same work, makes nothing but excuses, and never turns toward the choice of moving in search of a teacher. On the other is the person who moves in search of a teacher and, along the way, begins to grow the power to grasp for themselves what the meaning of life is. Needless to say, the meaning of life is not something obtained by thinking with the head, nor something anyone can teach you. It is something you have grasped with your own body before you know it. In Confucianism this is called taigo (体悟). Meaning is realized through the body. I myself have never thought about the meaning of life, and I suppose that is because I have moved my body and, without anyone telling me to, followed my own curiosity, reading what I wanted to know and wanted to learn not with my head but with my own body. ## 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 week, following on from last week, we draw closer to the mystery of Amaterasu. Last week, drawing on the accounts of both the *Kojiki* and the *Nihon Shoki*, we looked at how Emperor Sujin, who had set his palace at the foot of Mount Miwa in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, took Amaterasu out of the palace where she properly belonged and tried, for the first time in the history of the emperors, to worship her outside it. Amaterasu, until then worshipped side by side with another god within the palace, was entrusted to Sujin's daughter Toyosukiirihime, and Yamato no Okunitama (who appears only in the *Nihon Shoki*) to another of his daughters, Nunakiirihime. But Nunakiirihime could not bear the divine power of Yamato no Okunitama. Her hair fell out, her body wasted away, and she was unable to worship the god and failed, so the *Nihon Shoki* records. There are two important things in this tale. First, the whole affair is made to begin with Sujin coming to fear the force of the gods and no longer finding peace in living alongside them. Second, Nunakiirihime failed to worship Yamato no Okunitama, a god whose very name holds "the god of the land of Yamato." Why did Nunakiirihime fail to worship Yamato no Okunitama? The shrine that worships Yamato no Okunitama stands to this day in the southern part of Tenri, Nara Prefecture, at a place called Yamato Okunitama Shrine, and, interestingly, it is not very far from Mount Miwa, the sacred ground. Here I see the strength of the land itself, the land around Mount Miwa where Sujin set his palace. What is worshipped on Mount Miwa is Omononushi, one of the oldest gods, deeply revered as the deity of Omiwa Shrine on the mountain. Put another way, in this land of Yamato, long before Sujin appeared, Omononushi was already there, and so was Yamato no Okunitama. What we should turn our eyes to, then, is that at the very place where the emperor's palace was newly set, Amaterasu, who had no ties to Yamato, could not stand alongside the gods of the land. This tale shows how strong the power of the gods of the land (that is, the kunitsukami) was, and it carries an old memory of how hard it was for the emperor, a descendant of the amatsukami come into new territory, to govern the kunitsukami. What can be told as actual events is that in Sujin's realm plague and defection broke out, and that the emperor worshipped Omononushi, the god of the land, anew on Mount Miwa, and sent Amaterasu and Yamato no Okunitama outside the palace. In my own terms, Sujin's reign was the decisive age in the history of the emperors, when the arrangement of the amatsukami and the kunitsukami was rebuilt from the root, in Yamato. Once out of the palace, Amaterasu did not go straight to present-day Ise. In the *Nihon Shoki*, in the reign of Emperor Suinin (Sujin's successor), Amaterasu is passed on from Toyosukiirihime to Suinin's daughter, Yamatohime. What is interesting is that here, on the journey in search of a land fit for Amaterasu to settle in, a princess who bears the name "Yamato" appears. The plan to enshrine Amaterasu, which could not be achieved in Sujin's time, was handed on to a princess who held the spiritual power of Yamato, and carried out through her. And so Yamatohime, seeking a place for Amaterasu to settle, travelled through Uda in the mountains of Nara, through Omi in Shiga, and further east, round to Mino in Gifu, and at last reached Ise. Of course, this was not accomplished by a single princess in a single lifetime. The tale compresses into one story a course of events that took a great many years. In the end Amaterasu, having reached Ise, gave Yamatohime a revelation, and it was settled that she would remain in Ise. A shrine was raised in Ise as Amaterasu's words directed, and the Saigu was built on the banks of the Isuzu River, and with this the history of today's Ise Jingu began. At the same time, the tale tells the origin of the shrine maidens of today's shrines: a princess who serves and worships a god. What is important is that the *Nihon Shoki* records this place as "the land where Amaterasu first descended from heaven." It means that in the myth Amaterasu came down to earth from the plane on which she had existed in Takamagahara, and that a new faith arose to worship her divine spirit. In the shifting of the imperial order, we can see here the early current by which she was being placed as the ancestral deity of the imperial line. The *Kojiki*, on the other hand, does not tell this long wandering as the *Nihon Shoki* does. Under Sujin there is a single line, "Toyosukihime worshipped at the shrine of the Great God of Ise" (the Great God of Ise being Amaterasu), and in Suinin's genealogy a single line, "Yamatohime worshipped at the shrine of the Great God of Ise." Yet the *Kojiki* writes that long before, in the myth of the heavenly descent, the scene in which the descendants of the amatsukami come down to earth, the mirror that is Amaterasu herself is already worshipped at Isuzu no Miya (the Inner Shrine of Ise Jingu). Put simply, the *Nihon Shoki* tells the road to Ise in linear time, while the *Kojiki* places Ise in nonlinear time, as a place decided since the Age of the Gods. The two books tell the same event from entirely different angles. What I can say from the feel of my research so far is that Amaterasu was originally a god worshipped by the sea peoples of the Ise region. The *Nihon Shoki*, compiled with the intent of writing the history of the emperors by the rules of China's orthodox histories, needed Amaterasu, the ancestral deity to be, to travel from Yamato to Ise. The *Kojiki*, which had no such intent, shows that the worship of Amaterasu was in Ise from the beginning. What is interesting here is the mystery that follows: if so, why does Ise Jingu have two shrines, an Inner and an Outer? The Inner Shrine (Kotaijingu) is the shrine that worships Amaterasu, while the god worshipped at the Outer Shrine (Toyouke Daijingu) is Toyouke, a god of food. The *Kojiki*, in the scene of the heavenly descent, already records Toyouke by name as "the god who dwells in Watarai, at the Outer Shrine," but why Toyouke came to Ise is written in neither the *Kojiki* nor the *Nihon Shoki*. What I want to draw your attention to here, though, is the word "Watarai." For Watarai was the place governed by the Watarai, a clan that would later seize control of the Outer Shrine of Ise Jingu and try to rewrite the history of Shinto. As I said above, Amaterasu is also called by the name Isuzu no Miya, because her shrine was built on the banks of the Isuzu River. Toyouke, by contrast, is recorded as dwelling in Watarai, not on the Isuzu side. What speaks of the mystery of Toyouke is a book, the *Toyukegu Gishikicho*, which the priests of the Outer Shrine submitted to the court in 804, roughly a century after the *Kojiki* and the *Nihon Shoki* were completed. It is, incidentally, the oldest record connected with Ise Jingu. According to this book, it all began when Amaterasu appeared in a dream of a later emperor, Yuryaku, the twenty-first sovereign (thought to have lived around the fifth century), and said: "I am here all alone, in great distress, and cannot even take my meals in peace. Summon to Ise Toyouke, the god who governs meals, who is in the land of Tanba." The emperor took the dream as an oracle and, it is said, quickly welcomed Toyouke from Tanba to Watarai and worshipped the god there. This is, in effect, the beginning of the Outer Shrine. Ever since, at the Outer Shrine, a rite of offering meals to Amaterasu twice a day, morning and evening, has gone on down to the present without missing a single day. Tanba, incidentally, was reduced under later administrative divisions, but in ancient times it is said to have been a great province that took in the present-day Tango region as well (the whole Sea of Japan side of Kyoto Prefecture), and indeed, in a place called Miyazu in Tango, an old shrine that first worshipped Toyouke still remains. That is Kono Shrine. Kono Shrine stands on land that faces the sea, but the origin of its founding lies in Manai Shrine, a sacred ground a little way into the mountains, and deep within it are two iwakura (磐座). A tradition survives that Toyouke descended upon these iwakura, and it was from here that Toyouke was moved to the site of the Outer Shrine of Ise Jingu. Amaterasu left the palace as though driven out by the power of the kunitsukami, wandered from land to land with Yamatohime, and at last settled in Ise, and even then she could not stand alone. Only when she gained at her side a god who offers food could she put down roots in the place called Ise. The two shrines, Inner and Outer, show in a form still visible today that the god later set in the absolute position of the imperial ancestral deity was in truth a being who could not be at rest without the support of a god who offers food. That is why there is an ancient rule that a pilgrimage to Ise Jingu must always go first to the Outer Shrine, and only then to the Inner. Why, then, was it Ise that Amaterasu finally chose? If we follow the *Kojiki* and the *Nihon Shoki*, Amaterasu reached the present site of Ise Jingu over a long span of years, a sanctuary was built there, and she has been worshipped there down to this day. But this is, after all, the history of Amaterasu written from the side of the history of the emperors, and it remains the case that the court led the compilation of both the *Kojiki* and the *Nihon Shoki*. Tell what is written there as a single history, and the true identity of Amaterasu does not come into view. So from here on, this is the real Amaterasu, as I read her from my many years of research. First, I believe that before the myth in which she left the palace in Sujin's reign and came to be worshipped in the land of Ise, Amaterasu had her source in a god originally worshipped by the sea peoples of the Ise region. One cannot generalize, but what matters for reading the worship of Amaterasu is a current in which she drew deep faith from two different domains. One is the faith of the sea; the other is sun worship bound up with the faith of agriculture. The two motifs of "sea" and "sun," that is, converged at once upon a god of "agriculture," in a current of worship held within the land in an extremely complex form, and it is because of this faith, I think, that she needed Toyouke, a god of agriculture. In that sense, as the god called Amaterasu was transformed, the place called Ise may have held an extremely important meaning. Here, take a moment to look at a map of the present-day Ise region, on Google Maps or anything else. You will see that both the Inner and the Outer Shrine of Ise Jingu stand near the foot of the mountains, inland from the sea. In front of them is a station, and lodgings and souvenir shops crowd in to receive the pilgrims, so that we today, visiting Ise Jingu, cannot imagine its ancient form. But once, the sea reached in here. As a basic premise, the coasts of the Japanese archipelago have always been at the mercy of the historical rise and fall of the sea. This has nothing to do with the global warming that is spoken of today as an effect of industry; it has happened again and again since ancient times, as a cosmic phenomenon. For people like me, born on an island nation, raised on an island nation, living on an island nation, the rising and falling of the sea is a matter of course. People on the continent, though, cannot feel the sea rising and falling, and so they tend to put it away as a human-made problem, an event confined to our own time. For people who live on islands it is an ordinary phenomenon, and unless we keep this view in mind, the reality of ancient Japan will not come into view. Put simply, I believe the sea once came right up to where the Inner and Outer Shrines of Ise Jingu now stand. As if to pass on that memory, Ise Jingu has had a fixed custom of pilgrimage since ancient times. To introduce it briefly: a traveler entering Ise begins by crossing the Miya River near the Outer Shrine. In the old days there was no bridge over the Miya, and travelers crossed by ferry into the land of the shrine. But before worshipping at the Outer Shrine, they did not go to the shrine at all. They went first to Futaminoura on the coast, and on the beach they bathed in the sea to purify body and mind. This purification is called hama-sangu (浜参宮), "worship at the shore," and only once it was done did they worship, first at the Outer Shrine, and then at the Inner. There is also a taboo for those going to Ise Jingu that forbids meat, fish and the like from at least a week beforehand, a custom of entering with one's bodily senses and spirituality honed. At Izumo Taisha, too, a taboo has been handed down that forbids four-legged animals (cattle, pigs, sheep and so on) from three days before, and I always worship at Izumo Taisha in keeping with these old traditions. It is hard to read the ancient form, but if this old way of pilgrimage passes on some remnant of it, then the question we should be asking is: "Why the sea first?" So next week I will tell you about the Amaterasu I have lately come to be certain of. --- Takahiro Mitsui Project 2049 Report Vol.4 — Friday, October 30, 2026. Written and published by: Takahiro Mitsui. All content in Project 2049 is copyrighted by Takahiro Mitsui. Please do not reproduce, forward, or redistribute any part of this report without permission. You may use it in a personal blog or newsletter if you clearly credit the source. When citing, name the author "Takahiro Mitsui" and link to https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-4 Project 2049 is Takahiro Mitsui's weekly essay from Japan, every Friday, and the sample issue is free to read in full at https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0 (subscribe at https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049).