Prayer is born of place, not of the will

LIVING QUESTIONS

The United States is nearing a structural turning point, and it grows ever more likely that the aftershocks will shake Japan hard. How will the warped complicity between Japan and America, built up since the war, change under that shaking? Thinking about this near future bears directly on my own life. I cannot look away from it.

I regret it personally, but a country like Japan, sunk in a super-aged society with ever fewer children and with its powers of self-correction broken, never gets the chance to update itself. Its moment of reckoning will come, without fail, inside the destruction and rebirth of its suzerain, America. Just as Ukraine and Taiwan today cannot decide their own future and have it settled for them by the calculations of great powers, Japan will without doubt become one of them.

Many intellectuals look at America today and announce the end of the empire. They are not wrong: America as an empire is finished. But one look at demographics shows what sets America apart among the advanced nations. Japan, South Korea, China, Europe and Britain all face, without exception, a future weighed down by falling birth rates and aging populations, and Japan is already at the front of that line. America alone among them has escaped the trap. It is the one advanced nation with an abundance of Millennials and Gen Z. Once you see that this is the real America, you will misread the future for certain if you fixate only on the many problems America is causing in the world. Across the presidential elections of 2028 and 2032, the majority of the American electorate will flip.

America, which has reigned as a vast empire since the war, has clearly begun to change. The aftershocks will of course be felt around the world, but I believe Japan, bound by the warped structure of its relationship with America, will take the hardest blow. The point to watch is that the majorities behind both Republicans and Democrats are turning into what could be called the "old Americans" of the anti-communist era. That type will shift dramatically once Millennials and Gen Z, who grew up without knowing the anti-communist era, become the majority.

This generation, moreover, does not speak with one voice, and it is the first that lacks the power to wire a communal illusion straight into politics. Having no ties to the evangelical Christians who sustained the old Americans, or to any strong ideology, its members are striking for how varied their values and claims are. At bottom, though, they oppose imperial meddling in other nations' affairs, and they believe America's problems at home must come first.

It is sound to think it foolish to topple foreign governments or go to war while your own life at home is falling apart. But I predict that when these "new Americans" emerge, the existing relationship between Japan and America is likely to collapse because of this "change in America."

Consider the Liberal Democratic Party, which built a de facto one-party state after the war. To defuse public discontent with its rule, it needs an imagined enemy at any cost. That, without question, is the intent behind the Japanese government's excessive provocations toward China today. If control slips, war remains an option. The LDP wants to manage what people say and do and to stay in power, and beneath that ambition lie the bureaucratic system inherited from Meiji and the US military's Yokota Air Base, the deepest malignancy of postwar Japan. The LDP has survived this long because it could use American security for free. It may be hard to see from abroad, but this is exactly why Yokota Air Base holds more power than anything else in Japan. And the benefit was not one-sided: the LDP was useful to America, too.

But that complicity held only because Japan had value to America as a "bulwark against communism," a thoroughly 20th-century reason. Today it is an old story from the world of the old Americans.

When America enters its era of generational change, the world the old Americans built, an eyesore to the new ones, will survive intact in super-aged Japan. The problem is that no one has yet thought about what that will mean. America can renew its values wholesale as one generation replaces another. Japan, now a super-aged society, and South Korea and Europe following behind it, will see no update on the American scale. A structural distortion is bound to open up. Because no generational change takes place in Japan, it will go on seeking its relationship with America by the old manners.

To a new generation of American leaders who never knew the old postwar arrangement and hold no stake in postwar Japan, that arrangement will look like something bad that must be dismantled. A decisive rift may also open between them and a future Japanese government that pushes militarization and stokes tension with its imagined enemies, China and North Korea. The least we can foresee about the near future we will live in comes down to this.

Over the next eight years or so, Japan will not change. What will certainly change is America, its suzerain.

One more thing must not be missed. The transition is likely to push America toward civil war, so its involvement in the world will necessarily weaken. Signs of this are already showing, and in reaction, anti-American feeling will rise inside Japan and be put to political use.

A hint of it appeared in a large global survey released last week, on 15 July, by the Pew Research Center. Of the 36 countries surveyed, 25 viewed China more favorably than the United States. It was the first time since the survey began in 2002 that China had come out ahead in so many countries, and in many of them, China's President Xi Jinping was trusted more than America's President Trump to "do the right thing regarding world affairs." The report also noted that six countries still viewed the United States more favorably: Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland and Israel. What stands out is that Japan recorded one of the lowest favorability ratings toward China of any country. That figure should be read as the clearest reflection of America's present need to cast China as the enemy. Take away the will of the West, and I can see no reason at all for Japan to treat China as an enemy.

Japan, in other words, has completely failed to respond to a new current in which the world places more trust in China than in America. This Galapagos-like isolation recalls the 1990s, and Japan's absolute isolation will prove fatal to it. The absurd fantasy that the postwar relationship with America will last forever is leading a nation toward its own disappearance. Many factors are at work, and no one is looking at any of them.

It is also true that this new current will be useful to a third political force outside the LDP, because postwar history can be read as "the history of America stripping Japan of its sovereignty and forcing it into subordination for American gain." That is, of course, a one-sided Japanese reading. But we must not forget that for a third force seeking to rise by stoking anti-American sentiment and setting itself apart from the LDP, this will be the most realistic route. My own view is that this force has not yet appeared in Japanese politics, and that it will be led by someone now unknown who emerges around the 2030s.

Over the next ten years we will be living witnesses to a world without precedent. Japan, with no power of self-correction, will not change. Yet we must also keep in mind that when its suzerain changes, the effects will show most starkly in Japan.

Japan's ending should become a lesson for a world heading into the second half of the 21st century. Unable to escape a 20th-century system, run by the old and unable to decide anything, it postpones every problem and dodges every responsibility. It hands every vital part of its sovereignty to its suzerain and decides nothing for itself: a contemptible posture. Whether this ends in extinction or in a reset that leads to rebirth, I do not know.

But that future is coming, and that much is certain.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

For nearly seven years I have watched classic Japanese films relentlessly, and only recently have I felt Japan put down roots in me, deep in the ground. Seen from there, the work of one foreign director I returned to after a long break showed its difference more clearly than ever.

The director is Ingmar Bergman. He is one of the great names of film history, the master of Swedish cinema. Yet when I took Japan as my axis and looked hard at his work again, I sensed in it a "something" I could not name.

This time I want to write about that presence, which resists being put into words.

Prayer and faith are acts humanity has shared since the beginning, yet their forms are not one but many. My question is where that many-formed prayer comes from. I have come to think the answer is place. The idea goes back to an essay published exactly a hundred years ago.

Kitaro Nishida, the prewar philosopher at the heart of what came to be called the Kyoto School, reached a single conviction while studying Western philosophy alongside Japanese Buddhist philosophy. He set out that deep reflection in an essay published in 1926 in the journal Tetsugaku Kenkyu.

Its title was "Basho" (場所): "Place."

First I must say what Nishida struggled all his life to overcome. It was the epistemological scheme of subject against object, in which "the subject grasps the object."

Modern Western epistemology sets "the one who sees" (the subject) against "what is seen" (the object). Nishida argued that for this opposition to hold at all, there had to be a deeper ground beneath it that held both.

The ground he proposed was "place."

Place, he argued, is not physical, and it exists in three layers, each enfolding more deeply than the last. Put simply, there is an ultimate ground that gives rise to being and nothingness themselves, and in that ultimate place even opposition is enfolded and erased.

Nishida called this ultimate place "the place of absolute nothingness."

Being is written yu (有) and nothingness mu (無). Mu was already drawing attention then as the logic of Eastern thought, and today, mostly through the spread of Zen, it is widely known.

But has the logic of mu ever truly been understood? Anyone asked would struggle to answer.

Nishida too learned deeply from Buddhism, but at the source of his own philosophy stood a figure who was its counterpart.

That figure was Daisetsu Suzuki, who carried Zen to the world.

Nishida and Suzuki both came from Ishikawa, went to the same middle school and were friends through good times and bad. One became a philosopher of the Kyoto School; the other became the evangelist who spread Zen across the world. No account of Nishida's philosophy can avoid Suzuki's Zen.

What matters most is that both kept insisting that mu is not simply lack or emptiness. They tried to forge Eastern thought into a logic by speaking not of being but of nothingness.

It was in the middle of that shared, fused state that the place of absolute nothingness was proposed.

The place of absolute nothingness is mu as the source that makes all being possible. Because every existence appears as a self-determination of absolute nothingness, the self too appears within the movement by which this place determines itself. It is the source from which being and nothingness arise, and at its core is the structure of self-awareness Nishida described as "the self seeing itself in itself."

The heart of the Zen Suzuki taught resonates with that same self-awareness. The two men were describing the same state in different languages, philosophy and Zen. But one gaze cut deep into the inside of Japan, and the other reached out to the world. The sad result is that Suzuki is still revered as a saint, while Nishida is denounced as a spiritual villain who propped up militarism, and the understanding of him is crude and in a dismal state. Yet Nishida's inner struggle went far deeper than Suzuki's. Above all, it matters that he reversed the relation of subject and predicate in language, grasped as absolute nothingness that which becomes predicate and never subject, and named "place" as what enfolds every existence predicatively. The place of being is the realm of the objectified world and of natural things. The place of nothingness, which he also called the place of consciousness, is the field of consciousness in which subject and object still appear in opposition. And the place of absolute nothingness is the ultimate ground that enfolds even that opposition and erases it.

As if inheriting this lineage, the great director Yasujiro Ozu had a single character carved on his gravestone: 無, mu.

And I believe prayer and faith are not acts of individual will by a subject, as people imagine, but arise from place itself. Prayer is not born of the human subject's will; it is born of the working of what enfolds every existence predicatively. In Japan, that predicative presence has been grasped as the divine. That, I believe, is the true face of the eight million gods. Seen this way, the opposition of subject and object, of the knower and the known, is enfolded within prayer and erased by the ultimate ground. The question is what remains once it has been erased.

When people who have lived through modernity stand in a world where the scheme of subject and object has been erased, unbearable pain and fierce anxiety overwhelm them, and they cannot stay standing for even a moment. So since the modern era, humanity has fled again and again, putting on a show of breaking free, and has begun to behave as if it had arrogantly taken the throne at the summit of existence. Nothing has been solved and nothing has been asked. All this produced was a vast number of egos that turn away from reality and refuse to stand in it. And this community of egos loudly declared that God does not exist and that nature is there for humanity to conquer, and then carried that out without mercy.

Amid all this, what did the few true moderns see, the ones who looked reality full in the face and kept confronting a raw anxiety with their lives at stake? It was that fierce anguish, that sense of impermanence, that I felt in Bergman's films. And, tellingly, this kind of anguish and inner struggle does not exist in Japan.

So what lay at the end of his gaze? Going back through Bergman's films, what I grasped is that he was an artist who staked his whole life on one thing: the silence of God. In Japan, the silence of God has never once existed.

Bergman's God, however, is not a God dwelling in the midst of the world. It is the externalized God whom Western Christianity pushed out of the world, beyond the heavens, and reinstalled as the one transcendent subject. Seen through Nishida's logic, something that can never be a subject was forced outside and made into one. That was a disguise, and the greatest fiction of all. Out of it, in time, came the scheme of subject against object. Put differently, once the sacred is pushed outside, God can fall silent. And the human being is left alone. Am I the only one who sees in this the face of the modern West, the victor of modernity? And it is not only the West. It has become the fate of everyone who has passed through modernity.

I saw its furthest point in the ending of The Virgin Spring (1960).

A father whose daughter has been taken from him looks up at the sky in the forest and screams at God: why did you watch in silence? In the faith of the Western world, that figure may be beautiful. But to my eyes, which have spent years cutting into the Eastern, and more precisely into Japan, it can only look like a wretched man asking for an answer "outside."

Yet Bergman's struggle was real. Beside the father crying out for an answer from outside, a stream keeps flowing quietly, asking nothing. The sacred is flowing at his feet, but having taken an external God, he can only turn his back on the stream and look up at the sky. Is this not the true cause that gave birth to modernity?

In this forest, the opposition of subject and object is not erased. It is stretched to its limit: a lonely subject facing a heaven that is an object and gives no answer. In a sense it is the end point of a subject that has lost its object, and in truth the moment when a subject that does not exist pretended to exist. Nothing, in fact, is happening. That is why modern intellectuals must pile up words to the point of foolishness. Having no words of their own, they can say nothing without a vast stock of quotations.

This world has no place in Nishida's sense. More precisely, place is always there, always enfolding us, but by externalizing God and lifting him into the heavens, people "made it as if it had never been." Put the other way round, God could not have been externalized unless the place of absolute nothingness, the source of everything, had first been made as if it had never been. Human prayer unmistakably carries this rift.

Perhaps no human act is more painful than prayer. But modernity looked away from that pain, too, and put on a performance of having established the human being, or rather the subject.

Is that really a human being? Is it a subject?

Here lies the source of the nameless anxiety now bearing down on us, who have seen every corner of modernity's wreckage.

Bergman did not run from this abyss. However torn his heart, he kept facing it all the way, and in that lies his life as a human being. He neither performed a breakout, as nearly every modern has, nor reigned over an arrogant ego. He simply kept looking straight into the silence.

Meanwhile the victors of the Second World War were playing at having conquered the world and humanity, and reveling in a golden age. At that extreme, Bergman groped his way, without knowing its name, toward the ground the East had held from the beginning. The old man in his masterpiece Wild Strawberries (1957) stops looking up at the sky. Having given up the vertical question that joins earth to heaven, he turns horizontally, toward the water beside him. In that moment he sees his dead father and mother across the water. The professor is on his way to receive an honorary degree, a modern emblem, and when his eyes turn from the unanswering external God to the everyday ground at his feet, the sacred returns into what dwells in this world. At the moment his self and his past are enfolded together in the "place" of a single shore, his heart is filled with peace for the first time. The world around him changes, because the place has changed, and so everything it enfolds has changed. What matters is that Bergman saw Nishida's place of absolute nothingness at the water's edge. He sensed that this was God, this was truth, this was time, and this had been our existence from the start. The forgiveness he had always sought was no longer handed down from heaven. It became something that could finally be lived, by the water, among human faces. No other work portrays the problem of the modern West so brilliantly.

In Persona (1966) he goes deeper still. The faces of two women are stitched into one, and the boundary between self and other melts away. "I am not you," one cries, but there is no longer any ground between them. It is the very moment the scheme of subject and object comes crashing down. Bergman reached the structure Nishida described, "the self seeing itself in itself," from the Western side, in fear and trembling.

Bergman was that rare human being who reached the very brink of the source Nishida called the place of absolute nothingness, arriving from the opposite direction and bleeding as he came. But where the Eastern mu was a ground that quietly receives the self dissolved there, his Western self could only taste the same abyss as the silence of God, as impermanence felt as a wound. Even so, the place he reached is more real, and more believable, than anything said by any philosopher or religious figure.

That anguish does not exist in Japan, because Japan had from the beginning the "place" that had long ago forged what Bergman bore as a wound into ground one can stand on. Yet since the modern era, and through the decades after defeat in the second half of the 20th century, Japan installed the same pathogen in itself and let it spread year by year. However much the world idealizes Japan today, that "Japan" is sadly not there. That is how I see it, and this "Japan" will never return to the earth.

Bergman's struggle, I think, is the record of a trembling: a civilization that put the sacred outside itself, with no mu to receive it, standing alone at the edge of the abyss. That is why his work still holds so many people. What I have written here alone makes clear that this is no mere nostalgia.

The place of absolute nothingness that Kitaro Nishida set out a hundred years ago is the most advanced philosophy in the world, never yet understood and left untouched, and it will likely stay buried. How can we recover the self-awareness of "the self seeing itself in itself," reflect on modernity to its very bottom, and look toward the future? Before we can even think about that, there is something we truly have to see. It is the river that keeps flowing, quietly, beside the man who looks up at the sky and cries out for an answer.