Awakening is not the goal

LIVING QUESTIONS

Last week Russia's President Putin set foot in the Northern Territories on an official visit for the first time, and Japan's Takaichi government, the Western media and the Japanese press under their influence have made an enormous fuss about it. I see the visit as a thoroughly rational strategy, the continuation of an important current that almost everyone has missed. I believe the Russian side read that current and chose its moment on purpose.

What is that current? It is a series of events in which the fact that Japan has no sovereignty has at last become clear to the world. The decisive exposure was the joint Japan-US currency intervention at the end of July.

On 23 July the dollar briefly reached ¥163.99, the weakest the yen had been in some forty years, since November 1986. Japan had already intervened alone to buy yen on a scale of ¥11.7 trillion from late April into May, but the slide did not stop, and on 31 July (US Eastern Time) the currency authorities of Japan and the United States intervened together to buy yen. It was their first joint intervention in fifteen years, since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, and the first intervention to buy yen in twenty-eight years, since 1998.

At first glance, it might look as if the two authorities were cooperating. But that is not where the truth lies. Japan, of course, does need to deal with a situation in which the medicine of a weak yen has stopped working. And yet there is a strange fact here.

Japan is the largest foreign holder of US Treasury bonds, with more than $1.1 trillion. Yet it cannot sell them on its own judgment. On 1 August the Ministry of Finance itself pointed to a mechanism for raising dollar funds from the US authorities with Treasuries as collateral: intervention can continue without selling, it explained. Turned around, this means that selling is not an option in Japan's hands. I take it as the moment the world finally saw the structure in which Japan has no fiscal sovereignty.

This must not be read as a mere movement in the financial markets. I see it as a sign that the warped structure of postwar Japan-US relations has finally begun to move toward its end.

The proof is Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, who has come to Japan three times in the past year. At Davos in January, as a plunge in Japanese government bonds threatened to spill over into the US Treasury market, he reportedly shouted at Finance Minister Katayama. An American Treasury secretary treats Japan's finance minister like a slave, and does so without a second thought on the international stage of Davos. It shows how desperate both governments now are.

On his visit in May, he met Prime Minister Takaichi, Finance Minister Katayama and other senior ministers in turn and called for the weak yen to be corrected not by intervention but by Bank of Japan rate rises. Behind this lay the fear that Japanese sales of Treasuries would push up US interest rates and unsettle the markets. It was not a request. It was, in effect, an order.

That these events have exposed Japan's lack of fiscal sovereignty to the world is only one side of the matter. A country without sovereignty over its national finances can reasonably be assumed to have no other sovereignty either, and that this is so is gradually coming to light. I see these events, in other words, as the decisive starting point for the end of the postwar relationship between Japan and the United States.

Russia did not miss this exposure.

It is worth recalling the condition that the Soviet Union, and then Russia, has raised again and again for handing over the islands. In the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration of 1956, the Soviet Union agreed to hand over the Habomai islands and Shikotan after a peace treaty was concluded. But in 1960, angered by the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty under the cabinet of Nobusuke Kishi, grandfather of the former prime minister Shinzo Abe, the Soviet Union demanded a new condition for the handover: the complete withdrawal of foreign troops, including US forces, from Japan.

President Putin himself has repeatedly voiced concern that US bases might be placed on the islands if they were handed over, and lately he has been watching NATO's moves in East Asia closely. In November 2018 Prime Minister Abe reportedly told the Russian side that no US bases would be placed on Habomai or Shikotan. But Abe was the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, who was released from detention as a Class A war crimes suspect and made prime minister in return for being used by the CIA as America's dog. There is no way his word could be trusted.

The heart of the negotiations, then, was never the islands themselves but whether or not, once returned, they would be entered by "someone." Russia judges, in other words, that the Japanese government has no power of its own to refuse the deployment of US forces. Precisely because Russia has given up on Japan having any sovereignty, President Putin visited Etorofu himself and sent a message not to the Japanese government but to the Japanese people: "Take back your sovereignty." The message was aimed not at the governments of Japan, the United States or Europe, but at the Japanese. That is how I read it.

At her press conference last week, Prime Minister Takaichi declared that the Northern Territories are an inherent part of Japan's territory and protested that the visit was "absolutely unacceptable." The US State Department, too, has stated its position that sovereignty over the Northern Territories lies with Japan, and many Western media outlets have criticized the visit. But the crucial point is missing from the coverage.

Japan does not have that "sovereignty" in the first place.

Japan's so-called "sovereignty" is in America's hands. A strange world in which Japan's sovereignty is loudly proclaimed while the fact that Japan has none hangs in the air: this is the inconvenient truth recently exposed to the world.

I think President Putin's visit to Etorofu can fairly be read as a warning to the Japanese: do not become a second Ukraine. Postwar Japan-US relations are abnormal by any world standard. It is true that both sides have interests: Japan achieved its economic recovery while depending on American military power, and for the United States, if Japan sold its Treasuries, American interest rates would soar and the world envisioned by the Trump administration, its successors and Democratic administrations alike would fall apart. The two governments, in other words, are already chained together, in a structure where if one falls, both fall.

As if to prove this whole sequence, something extraordinary happened on the Japanese side on 7 August. In the Ministry of Finance's announcement of senior appointments, Jun Hitotsumatsu, deputy director-general of the Budget Bureau, was moved out to become director-general of Tokyo Customs. He is a leading figure in the ministry, the real leader on fiscal matters, and he was suddenly sidelined.

As the ripples spread, Prime Minister Takaichi remarked, "He doesn't do as he's told." In short, when the Japanese government, acting on American wishes, tried to draw up a fiscal plan, Hitotsumatsu blocked it, and that was the reason. Prime Minister Takaichi, acting on American wishes, removed an obstacle by transferring him. At its core, what is at work here is not Japan but the dynamics of factions and the like on the American government's side. Finance Minister Katayama in fact opposed the move to the end, but once "a word from someone" came down, it was settled in an instant. All of these events arise from the same relationship.

In that structure, the relation of victor and vanquished still holds. The world is not a pretty picture; it is far too cruel. However hard life becomes for the Japanese of a defeated nation, the Japanese government must keep paying vast tribute to support the victor's government and its finances, and the bill is passed to the Japanese people through tax rises and the like. And the mass media, because control of the airwaves rests with the US forces at Yokota Air Base, cannot report freely and are never permitted to criticize the United States. So the public sees only the news that suits the interests not so much of America as of the US forces in Japan, and rejoices or despairs accordingly.

The Northern Territories could have been settled in the 20th century. When we think about what will become of them, we must not look at them through the relationship between Japan and Russia. Nor should we look at the Taiwan question through the relationship between Taiwan and China. What we must look at is the relationship between Japan and the United States. Russia understands this, and that is exactly why it chose the period right after the joint Japan-US intervention for President Putin to land on Etorofu himself. Unlike a Japan and a West in utter confusion, it was a masterly move.

For now this event can be buried under the media scrum, but in time the Japanese will surely come to see it as a problem. Nobusuke Kishi and Shinzo Abe. The postwar history of Japan, with incompetent prime ministers at its top, will now collapse over some twenty years. When that happens, will Japan part ways with America and hold its own sovereignty? Will it keep following America and destroy itself? Or will it choose a third way?

Against everything I personally hope for, I am torn this week by the sense that Japan's future is heading toward collapse.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

In 1990, just before I was born, the Human Genome Project began. It was an attempt to read, from end to end, the blueprint written into the human organism, and after thirteen years its completion was declared in April 2003. Barely more than twenty years have passed since humanity first held its own blueprint.

This year I had the most advanced genetic test in the world, and last week I received the data, analyzed over six months. What is fascinating is how much in it seemed to turn inside out the being I had thought of all my life as "myself" when seen at the level of the genes.

Genes, of course, do not decide fate. People form their "selves" largely under the strong influence of acquired, environmental factors. But when the self built in that way is seen against the blueprint of the genes, surprising gaps become visible. Perhaps everyone still living in modernity has trouble with the quality of their life because of such gaps.

To my mind, the great benefit of genetic testing is that it lets you become fully aware of yourself as N=1. Because humanity has never had a way to grasp N=1, it has produced countless beautiful ideals through religions and ideologies that assume the many. Beautiful ideals have a magical power to enchant large numbers of people, and when many devote themselves to one ideal, they can share a kind of rapture.

Many of these ideals have indeed been built into modern society, and they still nurture the convictions of great numbers of people. But it is also true that they were somehow vague and hard to grasp. Or rather, the absolute fact that "every person is different" cannot be covered over by any ideal, however beautiful; it always comes to light. A world like ours, already past its structural turning point, can no longer sustain the old ideals.

Yet an age of upheaval is not only cause for sorrow. For those who understand it, it is the perfect occasion for introspection, and many great spiritual revolutions have come out of such times. What ran beneath all of them comes down to "knowing the self." The longing for self-transcendence through religious ecstasy or psychedelics cannot be ignored either. Until now, though, all of this stayed abstract, at the level of something that "feels right for me." Now, at the molecular level, that has changed dramatically.

Analysis by ultra-high-depth whole-genome sequencing is quite literally the finest tool for "dialogue with the self" ever given to people today, and it offers possibilities human history has never had. It can make visible, for instance, the kind of meditation, religious sensibility and spirituality that suits you, and even your own way of using time, of relaxing and of turning inward. Once you hold that map, you are never again pushed around by other people's information. For the mindfulness, yoga and diets people generally talk about are designed to suit the many, and they may well not suit you.

Take meditation alone: what kind of meditation actually suits you? Do fasting and abstinence, practiced like a monk in training, suit you, judging by your genes? If your blueprint is highly attuned to the spiritual, you must design your lifestyle with more care than most about environmental toxins, and make detoxification a habit. In Ayurveda, the prakriti that could once be grasped only vaguely is shown at the level of the genes through Ayurgenomics. On that basis you can identify which treatments suit you, and from the standpoint of Chinese medicine you can understand the regimens and kampo herbal remedies that suit you.

This means that people living in a climate of sharp seasonal change can build the design of their year according to their own genes. Based on Ayurgenomics, for instance, the genetic data can also show where your metabolism carries variants and what nature it has. From there you can find, at high resolution, the right nutritional interventions by diet for each season, and the shape of your lifestyle.

What matters, of course, is not to be "pushed around by the results" but to "converse with the results," because self-formation through environment is more powerful than we imagine. With all this in mind, you review your life thoroughly and design your lifestyle. The aim is to turn toward introspection instead of being swayed by information that may or may not suit you. To finish as early as possible with the stage of being misled by "outside information," to listen to your own inner voice and live by it. The greatest benefit of understanding cutting-edge genetics is in fact for introspection.

Kukai once shut himself in a cave at Cape Muroto in Shikoku, practiced fierce austerities and reached awakening there in a blaze of light. En no Ozunu shut himself away on Mount Yoshino to practice, exerted an immense influence on the people who would make the next age and became the source from which Shugendo later arose.

The age of shutting yourself in the mountains for fierce austerities, or of leaving the world to seek truth as a recluse, is now completely over. While living in this world just as it is, standing in its very midst, we have become able to walk our own path without being pushed around by others, as the mountain ascetics once stood under waterfalls and Zen monks withdrew from the world. More than that, I believe it is the mission of our generation. This will become a great current in the years ahead.

To put it another way, the true end point, the completion of religion, lies not in some vast particular religion that enfolds all humanity but in each individual becoming aware of N=1 and turning toward their own introspection. True universality does not exist where people now say it does. It lies in each person reaching deep introspection and coming, there, to know the one true thing.

On this premise, let me go further. Why do I keep mentioning Wang Yangming and speaking of the importance of Yangming learning? By ordinary reckoning, Confucianism is the least understood tradition in the Western world: unlike Buddhism it is barely familiar, and only mistaken images of it have spread.

There are indeed many seekers of Buddhism and many drawn to Daoism, but almost no one influenced by Confucianism. That is because they do not know real Confucianism. Like Buddhism, Confucianism has a great many schools, quite different in character. And since the Confucianism of the Song dynasty forms the skeleton of Confucianism as it is known today, people cannot help but resist it.

But remember: even Zen, now absorbed into global mindfulness, was regarded in the West only a century ago as something suspect and met with strong resistance. We have been living witnesses to how completely that changed in a single century. Who can say for certain that Confucianism, born in China and immensely influential in Japan, will not become a global current too? And so that people do not lose their way within it, the one I want to put before those who practice introspection daily and keep up a spiritual search is Wang Yangming.

Here I am crossing the story of genes with the story of Wang Yangming. Genes are N=1, a tool for becoming aware of the fact that you are absolutely different from everyone else. And not in the sense of self-help: the genes inscribed in you tell you the fact that you really are one person, alone. It matters to use that tool to explore and cultivate your inner world more and more. But stop here, please, for a moment.

Were human beings really born for that alone?

This is what I truly want to ask again. And here lies the decisive break between Wang Yangming and Buddhism and Daoism. In his youth Wang Yangming was in fact drawn to Zen and Daoism and was no great believer in Confucianism. But while banished to a remote post and living at the very limit, he suddenly reached awakening. That awakening was simple and clear.

"There is no answer outside." That was Wang Yangming's awakening. From then on he wrestled in earnest with the school of Zhu Xi, by then the official philosophy, while seeking the state Confucius had reached, and there he found the truth. What was that truth?

Furi (不離), inseparability. In no world is there any separation of inner and outer. To nurture the inner is to nurture the outer, and to nurture the outer is to nurture the inner. It is a very Chinese way of thinking, from a people who hold the ancient wisdom of yin and yang, but Wang Yangming saw that separation was the root cause of human suffering and of the world's disorder, and he never stopped teaching the truth that everything is inseparable.

What he criticized most thoroughly was Buddhism, Zen above all, and Daoism. Both put great weight on introspection, but both tend to stay steeped in the pleasure of their own awakening, with its energy never turning outward. Since Confucius, Confucianism had long criticized that attitude as self-absorbed and selfish.

The point is not which is good and which is bad. What we must really ask is where a daily life of endless inner exploration through introspection finally lands. Creating peace in your own heart is certainly important and precious. Most people cannot even do that much, so in itself it is wonderful. But what Wang Yangming taught was "what comes after." When you have understood yourself through introspection, how do you stand toward the world? This historic question seems to me to be growing important now in every respect.

In that state, I believe, there is no Confucianism, no Buddhism, no Shinto, no Christianity, no Islam.

Think again, please. Why did Honen and Shinran, who as young men had withdrawn to Mount Hiei in the Tendai school, suddenly decide to leave the mountain, go down into Heian-kyo, the city they had wanted to cut themselves off from, and begin to live for its people? Thinking about this is deeply essential, and today it is indispensable. We are N=1, and at the same time we exist with others. However far you withdraw and however much you devote yourself to austerities, you will never know why you were given life. Unless you use your awakening, your realization, in earnest for other people, what is it worth? True awakening may in fact lie here.

To put it plainly, awakening is not the goal. The moment you reach it, your real life finally begins.

After his awakening, Kukai crossed to Tang China, mastered the inner secrets of esoteric Buddhism at a stroke, cut short a planned twenty years of study to just two, came home and exerted an immense influence on the people of Heian-kyo. Baisao lived nearly sixty years as a Zen monk, then simply threw away his priestly status and rank, put sencha leaves and tea utensils in a pack, taught his own philosophy of life to the people of Kyoto, and later had an immense influence on Ito Jakuchu and others.

I believe that Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism each, at their origin, held one question: "What will you do after you awaken?" How you act then is the energy, the source, that truly changes the world. Seen this way, it becomes clear that currents like today's mindfulness have strayed far from the essence; they serve a world of consumption, they are selfish, and they will go no further. We can no longer afford to stall there.

Inner and outer are not separate. The realizations of introspection must always be put to use for others and for the community, and care for others and for the community should return to one's own introspection. Selfish people are multiplying in the world today because the leaders of the world are selfish. Confucianism has always taught that the character of those who lead is reflected in the world. And changing that, too, begins with setting one's own heart right.

Drawing on what I have as a Japanese, I will combine a Shinto faith that cannot be put into words or forms, the Yangming learning that has moved me more than anything in my life, and the map of cutting-edge genetic testing, and put into practice an attempt to explore the next state. Standing where spirituality and technology cross is what the Japanese were always best at, and it is also what has now been lost. That is exactly why I believe there are still many things in the world that only the Japanese can do.

Humanity has now externalized knowledge as AI and has begun, in earnest, to build it into society. We did not create it to make life easy for ourselves, nor to destroy ourselves. Humanity has always tried, by creating technology, to secure time for introspection. That is my view. Seen from there, when intelligence is externalized, humanity will enter the first great "age of introspection" in its history. Sadly, the overwhelming majority will fall away at that point.

When everyone stands there, I hope you will remember this piece. Introspection is not only for yourself. Japan has a phrase, yo no tame, hito no tame (世のため、人のため): for the world, for others. Those who have gained awakening or realization through introspection are the very ones who can truly live for the world and for others.

Is where we now stand the entrance to ruin? Or is it the entrance to the fiercest and most remarkable growth since humanity decided to leave Africa and cross the Red Sea? That too lies in the hands of each one of us.