Sohan Kyozon, Not Diversity: The Coexistence of Opposites

That is why I propose not diversity but sohan kyozon (相反共存), the coexistence of things that oppose each other: a condition in which those who stand opposed to one another live side by side. It is a different place entirely from the diversity that accepts others.

To get there, you have to cut into yourself without mercy and come to know what is there. Diversity, one might say, is a gathering of people who cannot perform that painful act on themselves, and I am convinced that the values it produces, however socially meaningful, do not give birth to a future.

I will say flatly that it does not, provided each person looks at their own origins, brings the thought of dissolution to bear on them, and digs all the way down. I say this from my own experience, with one condition. You must not stop growing. Stagnation, here as anywhere, always ends in some simple and extreme ideology.

What sets me apart is that I do not run from the wavering but keep facing it. It is intensely painful, and I believe the future lies inside that inner struggle.

Have any of us ever truly looked at where we come from?

Everyone carries an origin, and no two are the same. You can pretend it does not exist and wrap everything in a clean package of ideals, but the effect lasts only a while and changes nothing in any real sense.

Most people never doubt the nation or the ethnicity they were born into, but I know well that both are products of modernity. So while I feel a deep love for my country, I have tried all along to refuse blind faith in it.

Few countries are better placed to see this than Japan, which went through Meiji Westernization and postwar Americanization more fully than anyone.

Diving deep and the Western idea of transcendence look like movements in opposite directions, one downward and one upward, yet the difference goes beyond direction. Their structures are entirely different, because diving deep requires that the opposition of subject and object, which is to say separation itself, be dissolved.

Transcendence sets a goal, the single absolute summit, but the practice of dissolution has no end, because there is no goal to reach, no ideal, no guiding principle.

Today's diversity and multiculturalism are beautiful as ideals. No one can find a reason to oppose them, and they are hard to criticize. But a beautiful ideal is, after all, only an ideal.

Equality, I believe, lies in the host and the guest, in other words the one who visits and the one who receives, each conscious of their own roots, looking at the other's face, and facing each other with their lives at stake.

An increase in such shared spaces offers an opportunity to transform this machinery of distinction into a relationship of sohan kyozon (相反共存)—the coexistence of opposing entities, living together while fully preserving their differences.