A new age begins where no one is watching

LIVING QUESTIONS

Slowness is now valued as a kind of luxury. Yet merely slowing down only leaves you behind the times. I have felt this in my own work. Until recently, I was building everything with no-code tools, and in the past few days even those have started to feel dated. That is how staggering the speed of AI has become now that it runs as an automaton. Almost every day, working alongside it, I sense that human beings have already been written out of its ecosystem entirely.

If we are going to raise the value of slowness in a world like this, I don't think the answer is to lock things down with the regulations now being debated around the world. The individual has to become fast as well. The key is to build automation into your own daily life. I have come to feel that this is the lifeline that makes a slow life full, lets you enjoy it, and lets you earn a living from it.

That is why I launched a new blog this week. It is a way of savoring the value of slowness to the full, and it is also preparation for the great upheaval I believe is approaching. I built the blog from scratch, and I have used it as the base to rebuild my company website, which I had previously put together with no-code tools, as well as the newsletter I publish in Japanese.

It has only been a few days, but I already feel lighter. When I ask myself why, I think it may be because I have stepped out of my dependence on platforms, whether total or partial, and put some distance between us. Strangely, stepping back from them has given rise to a new way of thinking, in which I tend my own world slowly and with care.

As this post shows, I still use Substack to publish my work in English, but I plan to move off it completely at some point. The first reason is that because this is "work I publish myself," I believe it matters to take full responsibility for all of it. In a sense, it is by deliberately keeping a convenient platform at a distance that I can move forward. The second reason is decentralization. When something goes wrong, a moment will come when everything depends on the preparation you made beforehand, and I am speeding up the work of spreading things out now so that I am ready for it.

As everyone knows, social media and other conventional platforms lighten your data and compress your images at will, to suit themselves. You have no freedom of design, of course. And the readers you want to reach are not really your readers at all. They are simply siphoned off as the platform's users.

We may not need to fix all of this. But addressing it is essential if we want to build new relationships while truly slowing down, and when you measure it against the time it takes to nurture a relationship, relying on platforms simply does not pay. Over the long run, there is no escaping the scramble every time they change their terms, change their algorithms, go public, go bankrupt, or get bought and sold.

We can already see AI rapidly sweeping away much of what creators once considered indispensable. In an age when AI has become an automaton, it looks to me like a basic rule of survival to take responsibility for your own content and to see it through yourself, from making it and publishing it to building a relationship with the people who read it. That is what I mean by using AI to the full.

Today's arguments over whether AI is good or bad are hopelessly out of date, because they treat slowing down and speeding up as separate things. In truth, the two cannot be pulled apart. To put it another way, to slow down, you have to speed up. Try to slow down by slowing down the individual, society, and the nation, and you will be left behind in no time. Even if society and the nation slow down, the individual has to keep accelerating. Only from there can you finally enjoy a slow daily life.

This much, at least, I can say. It matters to have a place of your own for what you make, a place where no platform can convert it without asking. I would be glad if the photographs on the blog let you feel something of that first step.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

Mention Shinto, and most people picture a faith that has existed in Japan since time immemorial, a religion that has come down through thousands of years to survive in the country today. There is truth in the picture. What we now call Shinto grew from many sources, each shifting with its era, and those sources were sifted, merged and discarded over spans of time longer than we can easily imagine. Yet Shinto also holds a surprising amount that is historically certain, and that firm ground is well worth exploring.

There is, in fact, one decisive place. In the turbulent years that ran from the end of the shogunate into the first years of Meiji, the foundations of Shinto as we know it began to be laid in earnest, and the decisive work happened in Tsuwano, a small domain in what is now Shimane Prefecture. Most readers will never have heard of it, and most Japanese today would hardly recognize the name either. Tsuwano rarely surfaces in histories of the period. Yet it was the home of Amane Nishi, the philosopher who brought philosophy to Japan, and of the celebrated writer Ogai Mori, and it quietly produced men who came to stand for the Meiji age itself.

Tsuwano still sits hidden in the mountains, ringed by steep ridges, and its streets keep the air of an old castle town. It is one of the rare places where Japanese history can be taken in slowly. For anyone drawn to the modern history of Japan, and not only to Shinto, coming to Tsuwano and spending time thinking there is essential. The old domain was home to a man whose work became the source of a great structural turn, one that leads directly to the Shinto of today. His name was Takamasa Okuni. He was born in 1793, late in the Edo period, and he died in 1871, just after the Meiji Restoration.

History has not made much of him. Most Japanese do not know his name, and few know what the domain of Tsuwano gave to Shinto. Still, the mind of that domain is quietly etched into the skeleton of Shinto as it stands today. To put it in my own terms, I believe there would be no Shinto without Tsuwano.

To see how, we have to begin with Takamasa's training. He was one of the leading disciples of Atsutane Hirata, the kokugaku (国学) scholar whose charisma dominated the age. As a young man he had ranged widely through Confucianism, painting, and Dutch learning. Such breadth was common in the late Edo period, when many people studied across disciplines and built their own thought from what they gathered. What Takamasa pursued most thoroughly, however, was none of these. It was phonology, the study of the sounds of the language.

That study had been established by Norinaga Motoori, the greatest kokugaku scholar before Atsutane, and Takamasa learned it directly from Harukado Murata, one of Norinaga's disciples. Norinaga also stands at the origin of the idea of "the Japanese language" that later fed into modern linguistics, and his son, Haruniwa Motoori, carried the work much further. Takamasa, in other words, grew up under the influence of Atsutane, the foremost religious thinker of his day, and gave himself to the study of words that began with the Motoori father and son. What deserves attention is that this source became a force that cannot be overlooked in the building of "Shinto."

He absorbed the defining disciplines of his era, but in the end he resolved to pursue a learning of his own. He blended several schools into an original body of thought and wrote prolifically, until his relations with the domain soured. He left Tsuwano, giving up his place as a retainer, and traveled from province to province on his own. In those years he redefined the spirit of kokugaku as honkyo hongaku (本教本学), the root teaching and root learning from which all others spring, and prepared to transplant it into a modern system.

He was also the first to give kokugaku a systematic shape. Until then the school had no clear boundaries. Takamasa named four great masters and declared that a true kokugaku scholar was one who stood in their line. They were Kada no Azumamaro, Kamo no Mabuchi, Norinaga, and Atsutane. In his thought, earnest study of these four rose into something larger, the mind from which everything springs, and it began to exert a powerful pull on people unsettled by the final years of the shogunate.

Takamasa did not change the future of Shinto by himself. What makes him matter is that the circle around him produced the men who would build the skeleton of modern Shinto into the state. The other great contributor was Kumaomi Oka, born a decade before Takamasa, who died in 1851 as the end of the shogunate drew near. Between them, the two men left traces of thought in Tsuwano that became, in effect, the force behind the founding of modern Shinto.

Kumaomi, too, trained in kokugaku as a disciple of Harukado, and in 1849, shortly before his death, he became the first teacher of kokugaku at the Yorokan, the domain's school. The appointment reveals something particular to Tsuwano. Until then the domain had taught what every other domain taught, the Zhu Xi learning the shogunate endorsed. As the shogunate's hold on the country weakened, Tsuwano decided to cut its own path to the future and switched its school to kokugaku in a single stroke.

The man behind that switch was the head of the domain himself, Koremi Kamei, who would be the last lord of Tsuwano. His achievements as lord are hard to overstate. In my view, he was a man of rare foresight and character, unusual among the domain leaders of those final years.

Kamei spared nothing in his investment in learning, and from this mountain domain he raised one gifted young man after another and sent them out into the world. The later emergence of Nishi and Ogai cannot be told without him. His greatest design was the promotion of kokugaku, and the scholar he chose to carry it was Kumaomi.

So, just as the 1850s opened on the eve of the shogunate's fall, a lord and a scholar joined forces in a small domain in the mountains. Their partnership formed the source of what would later be called Tsuwano kokugaku, and it was Takamasa who later raised that foundation to a higher level.

This was a crucial moment for the new school, and it was cut short when Kumaomi died on September 1, 1851. Two weeks later, Kamei moved to bring Takamasa back into the domain. Takamasa had real gifts as a scholar, but he had not been understood at home, and he had left. By restoring him, the lord made sure the young men of Tsuwano would not lose their place of learning.

Kamei's hopes bore fruit. Among those who benefited from the renewed tie between Takamasa and the domain was a young man named Bisei Fukuba. In 1853, Kamei ordered Fukuba, then deep in his studies at home, to go to Kyoto and study under Takamasa, who was teaching there. The Kyoto that Fukuba entered bore no resemblance to the city of today. An uneasy atmosphere hung over the old capital.

In today's terms, the city was crawling with radicals of unknown origin, men we would now call terrorists, and people with dangerous ideas. Around them swirled the imperial court, which wanted to keep its distance from the shogunate, and the tangled interests of the domains. Fukuba lived in the middle of all this. Through Takamasa's kokugaku, he took in the rising current of the movement to revere the emperor and expel the barbarians, and with his purpose settled, he returned to Tsuwano in 1857 and began teaching at the Yorokan.

Then came the upheavals of the shogunate's last years. What matters here, even more than ideas, is where Tsuwano lay. I believe it was the domain's location that decided how Japan passed from the Edo period into Meiji. Tsuwano belongs to Shimane Prefecture today, but it sits almost on the border of Yamaguchi, right next to what was then the domain of Choshu.

Choshu was the protagonist of the era, and when the shogunate turned on it with punitive expeditions, neighboring Tsuwano was thrown violently about. Through Kamei's skill, the small domain kept its ties with Choshu intact, and that made it important. I suspect gratitude for those years played its part, because when Choshu and Satsuma overthrew the shogunate and secured their hold on power in 1868, Kamei was appointed a councilor to the new government.

His record as the leader of Tsuwano kokugaku, the man who had raised its fine scholars, also won him posts such as judge in the Office of Divinity Affairs, newly created by the Meiji government. This office was the de facto parent of the government's policies of uniting rites and rule and of making Shinto the religion of the state. It was, at bottom, an organ of religious administration, and no one did more to lay its early foundations than Kamei and the men of Tsuwano around him. The beginnings of modern Shinto, in other words, carry the thought of Tsuwano within them. Once that is understood, the enigmatic thing we call Shinto comes into far sharper focus.

Tsuwano's castle was a mountain castle, built on a summit, and today only its ruins remain. One morning, as autumn was just making itself felt, I stood among those ruins looking down on the town below, and a question came to me.

Why did a small mountain place, far from the capital, give rise to a way of thought that cried out the name of Japan?

In a sense, the question reaches into the essence of Japan itself, as a country and as a people. As the Meiji state took shape and grew, the influence of Tsuwano kokugaku faded away. Yet it is a fact that the school formed the source of the system that became State Shinto. The power this small domain once held within its ring of mountains is hard to imagine now. What energy seethed through this castle town? What kind of people sat here thinking about the future before they left Tsuwano behind?

Curiously, Japanese history in every era begins not in the capital but in some small place. A new age starts with a small step, which turns out to be a great one, taken somewhere everyone has overlooked. Japan has gone through that cycle of destruction and renewal again and again.

Standing in the autumn wind here, I cannot shake the feeling that the first voice of the next great turn will come not from Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto but from somewhere small and unnoticed today. And it will most likely begin in a village in the mountains.

The shape of the "next Japan" has not yet shown itself. Its seed, surely, may already be sprouting somewhere in the Japanese archipelago, quietly, out of sight.