Rootless: Nomadology from Deleuze to Yanagita and Orikuchi

In an age of such upheaval, the single greatest issue we need to look squarely in the face is the disappearance of the homeland as an ontological ground.

What modern people secretly and gravely dread, even as they avert their eyes from it, is the terror of having turned into rootless grass that belongs nowhere. We are not on the way to that transformation; it has already happened.

Born and raised at the nerve center of the state system, inside its densest and most thoroughly prepared space, these children carry the fate of the rootless: they have no native home in the land and know no place to which they might return. Most striking of all, they do not know the feel of soil in the hand, the sound of the wind, or the silence of trees.

What is crucial here, however, is not a Marxist picture of exploitation by a ruling class, but the fact that people subjected themselves of their own accord. Unless we register these subtle, two-way movements — the self-domestication into the system that has become everyday life in contemporary Japan — we will never see how history actually moved.

And what they themselves fail to see is that while they appear to have escaped or stepped outside a particular system, they are still standing in the exact same spot. … There is no future in people who merely open their laptops in cafés from one city to the next and call it a nomad life. That has nothing to do with nomadology.

For them, the nomad is a war machine that lives outside the state apparatus, punching holes in its rigid order and exerting a relentless force upon it. "War" here does not mean slaughter; it means flight from the fixed order of the state system, a resistance that brings that apparatus of control to nothing.

To my eyes, contemporary nomads are simply tourists moving from the cage of one nation-state to the cage of another. Among the reasons for this drift, one stands out: a lack of any real insight into the concept of the homeland itself — which is to say, a fatal lack of introspection.

Where Yanagita was an accomplice to a reality alienated and consolidated on behalf of the state, Orikuchi refused to go along with that current and chose instead an unflinching gaze upon the real.

What matters most here is that the marebito was never tamed by the logic of settled society; it always arrived wrapped in an outside wind, existing precisely to stir up the stale air of the interior. … A marebito does not settle. It comes on the premise that it will leave. That dynamic — arriving with departure built in from the start — is what I am convinced forms the true shape of nomadology.

What I want to ask is not about moving around for convenience or getting by in a worn-out modern society, but whether you have the single-minded resolve to stand in a place as a being fated from the outset to leave. That resolve is the lifeline of any genuine nomad, and the source of true externality.

What we truly need to ask about is not identity as self-definition. … What I believe we should truly look at is something far deeper and heavier than identity, namely the origin.

But however much the times shift, however far the place we live changes, however our social standing is transformed, there is a beginning of the soul that words can never rewrite. That is the origin.

Re-landing has nothing in common with a retreat into easy, exclusionary nationalism or a nostalgic flight into agrarian nativism. It is an intensely painful act of digging straight down into the origin beneath your own feet, all the way into your own interior.

There are many ways to search for ancestors, but for my generation, the natural starting point is the hometowns of our grandparents. … In my case, my paternal grandparents came from the old province of Iwami—the coastal region of western Shimane today—while my maternal grandfather came from Akita Prefecture in Tohoku, and my maternal grandmother from an island in the Seto Inland Sea.

I went to see the priest because of the Japanese tradition of cherishing the bodaiji (菩提寺)—the family temple—as the center of ancestral memorial rites.

As our genes make clear, every person is truly different, and no two are alike. I felt this deeply myself while digging into who I am through the most advanced genetic testing available.

True universality is reached not by spreading our arms wide across the surface, but by diving all the way down. … The outside is not far away. It opens out right beneath your feet, at the bottom of where you dig.

Anxiety is an interesting thing. It is not simple discomfort. When we pinpoint where it stirs, the heart grows much lighter and life regains its vitality, a reversal anxiety holds within it. Put the other way, people who feel anxiety every day of their lives may in fact be the ones with the potential to live with the most vitality.