カテゴリー: Aesthetics & Impermanence

My Grandfather’s Unspoken Dead

Inside an Osaka temple, ten thousand flames burn for the dead. It took me fifty years to understand which ones my grandfather was carrying

Obon ended a few days ago. The heat has not, and will not for weeks, but my summer is over. It ends every year on the same evening, at Shitennō-ji in Osaka, in a courtyard full of candles.

The service is called mantō kuyō（万灯供養, an offering of ten thousand lights. The temple gives you a candle and an ink brush, and you write on it the name of someone who has died. The candles are set out on tiered wooden stands that run the length of the compound, so the flames stand at about the height of a man’s waist. After dark the monks walk the central compound chanting the Heart Sutra, and they begin again every fifteen minutes until the gates close, and anyone standing there can walk with them. Printed sheets of the sutra wait at the entrance for people who never learned it. By full dark there are close to ten thousand flames burning at once.

As a boy I hated going.

My grandparents took me. I have no idea what year it was or how old I was, only that I was small enough to be led by the hand. August in Osaka is thick enough to lean against before anyone lights anything, and inside the compound ten thousand flames had been working on the air for an hour. There was wax in it, and smoke, or the steam that comes off that much burning at once. It sat in my throat. I remember breathing carefully, the way you do when the air seems to be running out.

Then I looked at the flames, and at that age they were level with my face.

They moved without any wind. A whole field of them in the dark, each one leaning and recovering on its own schedule, none of them agreeing with the others. I understood at once, the way a child understands things, that they were not candles. Every one of them was somebody who had come back, there were ten thousand of them, and they were standing all around me breathing the same used-up air. Nothing about this was consoling. I was frightened badly enough to still have it, fifty-odd years later.

Not once did I ask my grandparents why we were there. Children accept the shape of the year the way they accept the weather. We went because August came.

Then my grandfather died, and we stopped going.

I did not notice the absence. I was young. The summers filled with other things, and later with work, and the service became something my grandparents used to do, filed away with the rest of what disappears when the people who organized it are gone. Thirty years went past. I stayed away for no reason at all, which is to say that nothing was asking me to go.

Then a friend from my university years died.

We had been close as students, the kind of closeness that assumes an unlimited supply of future afternoons. After we started working we still made time, less often each year, and then several years went by in which neither of us managed it. We were busy. That is the entire explanation and it is not much of one. The last time we met I did not know it was the last time, and nothing about the evening marked itself. It had never crossed my mind that the next thing I would do for him would be to write his name on a candle.

Five or six years ago I went back to Shitennō-ji.

My friends have graves. Every one of them is somewhere, in a family plot, in a city I would have to take a train to, on a hillside I would have to find. A man with a working life does not have many free days in August, the graves are scattered, and the honest accounting is that I can reach one or two of them in a summer and not the rest. So they come to Osaka instead. There is room on the candle for a single name and I choose one, which is not a comfortable minute, and the others stand behind him while I hold the flame steady. Nobody at that temple writes down everyone they mean. You put down the one you can manage, and the rest are understood.

I was standing there with the brush in my hand when I understood what my grandfather had been doing.

The Kitagawa family has a temple. It is Konkai-Kōmyō-ji in Kyoto, it belongs to the Pure Land school, and our dead are there. That is where a family goes for its ancestors. Shitennō-ji has no claim on us at all. It belongs to Washū, a school founded to stand outside the sect system entirely, tracing itself back to Prince Shōtoku in the sixth century. My grandparents crossed the city in the worst heat of the year, with a small boy in tow, to a temple that was not ours, for someone who was not us.

My grandfather was a naval officer. He came home from a war that had taken most of the men he trained beside, he never spoke about them, and nobody in the family asked him to. A family stone has room for the family. It has no room for the men he served with, and there is no ceremony in the Japanese year for someone who wants to remember people he has no standing to remember. Shitennō-ji belongs to no sect and asks nothing of a visitor except that he come and write a name.

He also came home, and they did not. He lived another forty years after that, married, raised children, took a grandson to a temple in the heat. I doubt he ever put words to what he owed them or what he thought he had done wrong by surviving. He simply went every August and stood in the smoke, and whatever he was carrying in there with him, affection was only part of it.

I cannot prove any of this. He never said so, I never asked, and there is no one left to ask now. I know only that at fifty-something, with one name chosen out of several, I was doing something I had watched him do without understanding it, and it suited me for reasons he would have recognized.

Something else had changed by then, and it took me longer to admit.

Ten thousand is not a number you can feel by reading it. In that compound it stands at waist height and runs the length of the courtyard. Every one of those flames is a person who died of something. An illness that took a long time, or a road, or an age that finally arrived, or a war. I know nothing about any of them, and outside the gate a stranger’s death does not reach me at all. Inside, with the whole field of them burning at once, I cannot get rid of a single one. All of these people had reasons, and all of them ran out.

The man crouching beside me, shielding his candle with one hand until it catches, will not be at this service in some August either. Neither will the woman behind him holding a sutra sheet she does not need. I have known since I was young that everybody dies. The courtyard puts it in front of me as a quantity, and a quantity is harder to look away from. I spent most of my life not looking. The thing I was frightened of at five and the thing I avoided at thirty are the same thing, and it can be stood in for an evening without much happening to you.

The flames I was so frightened of as a boy were never the dead. They were an evening’s worth of people who had agreed to carry a name for a few hours in the heat. My grandfather stood in that compound with names he could not say out loud. I stand there now with my friends. In some August I will not be standing there, and I will be one of the small flames leaning and recovering in the dark.

This year I stayed until the chanting started again. The heat over the compound had warped the air so that the far wall came and went. I went back to find my friend and could not tell his flame from the ones on either side of it, doing what the rest of them were doing.

Then I walked out through the gate and left them to the evening.

Takeshi Kitagawa heads the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT, which aims to introduce Japanese culture. Rooted in his years of Kendo, Zen, and Shinto practice, the project explores whether these traditions have anything real to offer modern life―without pretending they have all the answers.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

An Earthquake Has Brought Down Kumamoto Castle’s Walls Again

What the repeated fall of Kumamoto Castle teaches us about mujō — and why impermanence is a quiet instruction to rebuild.

In October 2024 I stood at the foot of Kumamoto Castle and looked up at its stone walls. Some had been rebuilt. Others still lay where the 2016 earthquake had thrown them — great blocks of cut stone tumbled into heaps, roped off, waiting.

I had heard why the work was slow. The restorers were not simply pouring new walls. They were returning each stone to the exact place it had occupied for four centuries, numbering them, studying old photographs, fitting them back like the pieces of an enormous and patient puzzle. A wall built this way cannot be hurried; the full restoration has been projected to take decades.

Standing there, I found I did not mind the slowness. The rebuilt sections told me the rest would follow. Stone by stone, year by year, the castle would come back. Before I left I gave ten thousand yen to the city’s official restoration fund. A small sum against a project of that size — I knew that. But you give anyway, because you want to belong to what you are hoping for.

On the afternoon of 28 July 2026, an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 struck Kumamoto. The ground shook at its most violent level — the maximum on Japan’s seismic intensity scale — in the towns of Uki and Hikawa. And the walls of Kumamoto Castle came down again. The city counted twenty-seven collapses that night, and closed the castle’s gates.

I never imagined that in my own lifetime I would watch the stones of Kumamoto fall a second time.

I had been waiting for that castle. I feel, if I am honest, a plain and almost childish disappointment — the disappointment of a person who was promised nothing and hoped anyway.

No one to blame

An earthquake takes everything at once. A house, a lifetime’s savings, and with bad luck a life — gone between one breath and the next. As I write this, the full extent in Kumamoto is still unknown, and there are people who did not come home. I think of them, and of everyone in the prefecture struck twice inside a decade, and my chest tightens.

Here is the strange thing about that grief. When a person harms you, there is someone to blame, someone to be angry at, someone who might have chosen otherwise. A natural disaster gives you no one. The fault line did not decide. The earth holds no intention toward us at all — and that absence of intention is exactly what we mean when we call nature merciless. It is rifujin（理不尽）: unreasonable, unfair, and yet not unjust as cruelty is unjust, because injustice needs someone to commit it.

The older Japanese feeling for this is unsentimental. The mountain gives you clean water; the same mountain shrugs and buries a village. It is one mountain, one kami. Nothing up there is watching over you. This is not a comforting idea, but it is an honest one, and it clears away the question that can eat a grieving person alive — whose fault was this? No one’s. The ground simply moved.

What is left is us

I have lived long enough now to have watched this cycle more than once. In 1995 I was living in the heart of Kobe when the Hanshin earthquake killed thousands on a winter morning; my family came through it, but our home did not — it was destroyed. The Noto Peninsula was struck at this same maximum intensity on New Year’s Day 2024. And now Kumamoto, twice in ten years. Each time the same unbearable arithmetic: everything lost in seconds, then the slow years of setting it back.

You do not rebuild because you have been promised the ground will hold. You rebuild because rebuilding is the human answer to a catastrophe that has no answer.

There is no guarantee in it. The people of Kumamoto rebuilt after 2016, and the earth broke their work anyway. They will rebuild again, knowing the fault still runs beneath them, knowing this may not be the last time. To an outsider that can look like foolishness, or like denial. I have come to think it is closer to dignity — a refusal to let an indifferent universe have the last word about how a person lives.

I suspect this is one of the things that living on these islands has done to us over the centuries. When the ground itself cannot be trusted, you stop expecting permanence and begin to honor continuity instead — the carrying of something forward, again and again, rather than the thing standing untouched forever. The impermanence the Japanese call mujō（無常）is not only a wistful idea about falling cherry blossoms. It is also, quietly, a set of instructions: what falls can be raised; what is raised will fall; raise it again. A castle rebuilt one numbered stone at a time, on a fault everyone knows is still alive, is not naïveté. It is that instruction, made visible.

The treasures of this world

I love old buildings — not only Japan’s castles but the temples of Greece and the towers of Angkor Wat. They are among the treasures of this world. Near my apartment stands Osaka Castle, and I understand what such a place becomes for the people who grew up in its shadow: not a tourist site but a landmark of the heart, a fixed point they have looked toward their whole lives. When one falls, the loss is not only architectural. Something in a community’s memory loses its footing.

This is why people give — and why so many did. After 2016, donations poured toward Kumamoto, many of them through furusato nōzei（ふるさと納税）, the system that lets a taxpayer send part of their taxes to a region of their own choosing. Eiichiro Oda — the Kumamoto-born creator of One Piece, the best-selling manga read around the world — quietly gave eight hundred million yen under a pen name, wanting no credit; the gift surfaced only in 2018, and only because a controversy over how the money was spent forced his hand. My own ten thousand yen was nothing beside his, and beside the scale of the ruin it was nothing at all. But the amount was never the point. What mattered was the act, and that so many people chose to perform it. You give to a restoration as you set a single stone — not because your one stone finishes the wall, but because the wall is a thing many hands have agreed to keep.

Enough to be going on with

Nature will not learn mercy. The fault beneath Kumamoto will not move aside for our sake, and somewhere a future earthquake is already certain, only waiting for its date. None of that is in our hands.

What is in our hands is smaller and more stubborn: to prepare for the next one, to refuse to break, and to stand a little closer to the people the earth has just emptied out. I will wait for Kumamoto Castle again. I know now that its walls may fall a third time, and a fourth. And I know that when they do, someone will kneel in the rubble, lift a numbered stone, and begin to set it back where it belongs.

That is not a promise of anything. It is only what we do — and it is, I have come to believe, enough to be going on with.

If this piece speaks to you, you may want its companion — a reflection on readiness itself, on what Zen and the samurai understood about facing what cannot be prevented: Before the Ground Moves: What Zen and the Samurai Knew About Preparing for Disaster.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

Before the Ground Moves: What Zen and the Samurai Knew About Preparing for Disaster

A personal essay on impermanence, readiness, and the quiet discipline of being prepared

Eleven Injured, None Dead: What the Sanriku Coast Already Knew

On the morning of June 25, 2026, the ground moved in northern Japan. A magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck off the Sanriku coast, registering a seismic intensity of “6-plus” — strong enough to crack walls and bring things down from shelves across Aomori and Iwate prefectures. By any reasonable measure, it should have been a catastrophe.

It wasn’t. No one died. Eleven people were injured. That was the extent of it.

I have thought about that number every day since. Not because the quake was small — it was not — but because of why it stayed small. The Sanriku coast is one of the most earthquake-prone stretches of land on earth. The people who live there have felt the ground move again and again across their lifetimes, and across their parents’ lifetimes before them. They know what to do. They have known for generations. The water is stocked. The furniture is secured. The exits are clear. When the shaking came that morning, almost no one had to think — the thinking had already been done, quietly, years in advance.

The disaster was not averted by luck. It was absorbed by preparation.

As I was writing this essay, news arrived of a major earthquake in Venezuela, which appears to have caused catastrophic damage and the loss of several hundred lives. My heart goes out to everyone affected.

I should be honest about one thing before I go further. Part of why the Sanriku quake caused so little harm is that Japan’s building codes and inspection regimes are unusually strict — that is simply a fact, and it saved lives that morning. But I am not telling you this to say that Japan is superior, or that one country has solved what another has not. Disaster does not respect that kind of accounting. What I want to point to is something available to anyone, anywhere: the quiet, unglamorous work of preparing — of building, in calm, the conditions that hold when the ground moves.

There is a line in the Zhenguan Zhengyao, the classical Chinese record of Tang-dynasty statecraft: qián chē fù, hòu chē jiè — “when the cart ahead overturns, the cart behind takes warning.” When you see the wheels of the cart in front of you tip into the ditch, you do not shrug and drive on at the same speed. You watch the road more carefully.

The Mindanao earthquake. Venezuela. These are not someone else’s misfortune to be watched from a safe distance, like a fire on the opposite shore. The probability that you, too, will one day stand where those people are standing is not zero. That is not a thought meant to frighten you. It is the cart ahead, overturning, asking the cart behind to pay attention.

I want to begin there, because everything I am about to tell you grows out of a single conviction: that readiness built in calm is the only readiness you will have when the ground moves. And I did not learn that from a headline. I learned it the hard way, a long time ago.

The Morning the Ground Moved in Kobe

I was thirty years old when the ground moved.

January 17, 1995. 5:46 in the morning. The Great Hanshin Earthquake killed more than six thousand people in and around Kobe, the city where I was born and raised. My family survived. Our house did not — not entirely. Most of what we owned was gone. And some people I knew never came back.

I don’t write that to set a dramatic scene. I write it because I want to be precise about what I’m saying next: the earthquake didn’t teach me anything.

That sounds wrong. Maybe even cold. But stay with me for a moment.

What the Dojo Taught Before the Words Came

I started Kendo at six years old, Judo shortly after. By the time I was sixteen, I had my first Dan in both. I wasn’t exceptional. I was just a kid in Kobe who went to the police station dojo after school because that’s what some kids in my neighborhood did.

Nobody sat me down and explained Zen. Nobody handed me a philosophy. What happened was quieter than that — and slower. You practice a form ten thousand times and somewhere along the way, without noticing, you stop fighting the form. You stop thinking about whether you’re doing it right. The movement and you become the same thing for a moment. Then it’s gone. Then you practice again.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s just what happened in the dojo.

I didn’t have a word for it then. I didn’t need one.

By my twenties I was studying design, spending time in Kyoto, reading about Zen and Buddhist philosophy — putting language to things I had already, in some dim way, experienced through my body. The concept of ichigo ichie — this moment, unrepeatable, never to return — wasn’t a revelation when I first read it. It was more like recognition. Oh. So that’s what that was.

And then, years later, the earthquake.

The Earthquake Was a Mirror, Not a Teacher

Here is what I mean when I say the earthquake didn’t teach me.

When the shaking stopped and the dust settled and the weeks turned into months, I noticed something. I wasn’t experiencing the loss as a philosophical lesson about impermanence. I was just living in it. The impermanence wasn’t an idea I was applying — it was simply what was true, and I already had some way of being with what is true.

Zen hadn’t made me stoic or detached. I grieved. I was afraid. But underneath the grief and fear, there was something that didn’t collapse. A kind of steadiness that I can only describe by saying: I had been here before. Not in an earthquake. But in that place where you stop fighting what you cannot control.

The earthquake didn’t give me that. It showed me I already had it.

“Three Levels of Initiative” — A Swordsman’s Idea of Readiness

There is a line in Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings — the Gorin no Sho — about what he called mittsu no sen, the “three levels of initiative.” Western readers often assume this means strike first. It doesn’t.

What Musashi describes is something closer to reading. You watch how the opponent is about to move, and you arrange yourself so that whatever he does, you are already in position to meet it. The point is not aggression. The point is that you have removed the conditions under which you could be caught off guard.

This is — and I offer this as my own reading, not as scholarship — a remarkably useful way to think about a country that sits on a fault line.

You cannot strike an earthquake first. You cannot win against it. But you can study how it tends to arrive, and you can arrange your life so that when it comes, you are not caught flat-footed. That is sen applied not to a duel, but to the ground beneath your feet.

You cannot defeat the earthquake. You can only refuse to be surprised by it.

“First Cleaning, Second Practice, Third Study”

There is an old teaching in Zen monastic life: ichi sōji, ni gongyō, san gakumon — “first, cleaning; second, religious practice; third, study.”

Notice the order. Cleaning comes before chanting. Chanting comes before scholarship. The sweeping of the floor outranks the reading of the sutras.

To a Western reader this can sound like false humility, or an exercise in discipline for its own sake. I read it differently. In Japanese schools, when the lessons end, the children clean their own classrooms. Not a hired crew — the students themselves, every single day, before they go home. They wipe the floors, clear the desks, take out the trash. It is so ordinary here that no one thinks to remark on it.

I don’t think ichi sōji is really about cleaning at all. I think it is about arranging — keeping the things around you in order, giving every object its proper place, returning each thing to where it belongs. Not as tidiness. As a posture toward the world.

When everything around you has a place, a sudden shock does not become chaos. You already know where the door is.

Here is the connection I have come to feel in my bones, living where I live. The person who keeps an ordered home, who knows where the flashlight is without thinking, who returns things to their place out of long habit — that person, when the ground moves, does not dissolve into panic. The order they built in calm becomes the calm they draw on in crisis.

This is sen and sōji meeting at the same point: you prepare in the quiet so that the storm finds you already standing.

The Next One Is Not Hypothetical

Sixteen years after Kobe, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed nearly twenty thousand people. I watched from a distance, through screens, with a helplessness that I suspect most of the world shared. But something else happened in Japan in the months that followed. People quietly went and bought extra water, batteries, dried food. They packed emergency bags. They put them by the door.

And now there is the Nankai Trough.

This is not folklore or fatalism. It is one of the few major earthquakes that scientists believe can be roughly timed. Researchers including the Kyoto University seismologist Hiroki Kamata place the likely window in the 2030s — centered on 2035, give or take five years — and treat it as something that could come at any time within that span. Government estimates of the worst case put the death toll near 320,000, with tsunami reaching parts of the western coastline in as little as a few minutes. National and local authorities have published projected wave-arrival times and stockpiled supplies accordingly.

These numbers are frightening. I don’t want to soften them. But I also want to be honest about what they do and do not mean for how a person lives.

The earthquake cannot be controlled. Your own panic can be.

That distinction is the whole of it. You cannot move the timeline of the Nankai Trough by a single day. But the readiness you build now — the water, the order, the knowing-where-things-are — is entirely within your hands. And readiness is where fear goes to become something useful.

Accept. Prepare. Then Return to Now.

There’s nothing Zen about a flashlight and a three-day supply of crackers. But the act of preparing for a disaster you cannot prevent — that is, I think, a form of acceptance that most people don’t recognize as such. You are not pretending the earthquake won’t come. You are not bargaining with it. You are saying: this may happen. I cannot stop it. I will be as ready as I can be. And then you close the bag and go on with your day.

That’s not resignation. It’s not surrender. It’s what Zen had been quietly teaching me to do with every uncontrollable thing in life, long before I had emergency supplies to pack. It is Musashi’s sen and the monastery’s broom, expressed in the most ordinary objects imaginable.

Accept. Prepare. Then release it and come back to now.

The Limits of What I’m Saying

I want to be honest about those limits.

I was lucky. My family was alive. And I had grown up in an environment where Zen, Shinto, and martial arts were simply part of the texture of daily life — not something I sought out, but something I absorbed. That’s not a credential. It’s just context. The same teachings are available to anyone willing to sit with them.

But I also know that no philosophy rescues everyone. There are people in circumstances so relentless, so without exit, that no teaching reaches them. I don’t want to paper over that. The world is genuinely unfair in ways that a morning meditation practice cannot touch.

What I can say is this: if you are reading these words, you already have something. Time. Curiosity. A door cracked open. That’s not nothing. That might, in fact, be everything you need to begin.

How a Culture Shapes the Hand That Packs the Bag

I’ve come to believe that these traditions did something measurable to the way people here think and act — not as decoration, but as conditioning.

The dojo taught the body to stop fighting the uncontrollable. The monastery’s broom taught that order built in calm is the only order you’ll have in crisis. Musashi taught that readiness, not aggression, is what keeps you standing. None of these are abstract once you’ve absorbed them. They become the reason a person, without drama or fanfare, fills a backpack with water and sets it by the door — and then goes on with an ordinary evening.

That gesture is the philosophy made physical. Most people here would never call it Zen, or Bushidō, or anything at all. They’d just call it being ready. But the shape of the gesture was carved, over centuries, by exactly these ideas.

I’m not suggesting you go looking for catastrophe to test yourself against. I’m suggesting that whatever practice builds steadiness in you — whether it’s Zen, or something else entirely — it works best before the ground moves. Not as insurance. Not as crisis management. Just as a way of learning, slowly, over years, to be with what you cannot control.

The emergency bag by the door is already a kind of wisdom. Most people just don’t call it that.

And so, every so often, I check the backpack. Water. Dried food. A light. I return each thing to its place, the way I was taught to return the floor to order before I’d earned the right to study anything at all.

As someone who lives in Japan — a country that shares the same restless ground, the same place on the same ring of fire — I pray for the souls of those who lost their lives this week, and I hope with all my heart for the swiftest possible recovery of everyone affected.

Then I close the bag, set it by the door, and check its contents once more — quietly hoping, with everything in me, that this emergency bag never has its day.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture ― not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own ― shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

A Conversation About Tanizaki, Shadows, and the Aesthetics We Forgot We Had

This conversation grew out of a solo essay, “The Light We Forgot to Leave Out” published in Readers Club. The two pieces are independent — but they look at the same thing from different directions.

It was a Friday evening, early December. The kind of night in Osaka when the air has finally committed to being cold. We were at a small standing bar near Kitahama — the kind of place with no name sign outside, just a frosted glass door and a warm light leaking underneath it. Nicholas had found it, which surprised me. It didn’t seem like his kind of place.

He was already inside when Catherine and I arrived, nursing a glass of Yamazaki and looking mildly philosophical. That was also unusual.

“I’ve been thinking about your essay,” he said, before we’d even taken off our coats.

Nicholas: So I read it. The Tanizaki piece.

Takeshi: The essay, or the article?

Nicholas: Your article. Though I downloaded the essay too, which I haven’t finished. It’s slow going.

Catherine: I read both. I actually read the essay first because I wanted to come in with context. (She set her bag down and unwound her scarf.) Can I ask something before we start? Who was Tanizaki, as a person? The essay reads like someone with very strong opinions about toilets and electric lighting, but I don’t have a sense of who he actually was.

Takeshi: That’s a fair place to start. He’s hard to summarize. He was born in Tokyo in 1886, came from a merchant family — not aristocracy, not samurai class. He started writing in his twenties and almost immediately became controversial. His early work was very dark. Obsession, manipulation, beauty as something almost dangerous. Western critics sometimes compared him to Poe or Wilde.

Nicholas: Huh. I didn’t get that from the shadows essay at all.

Takeshi: Because In’ei Raisan is late Tanizaki. By 1933 he’d moved to the Kansai area — Kyoto, Osaka, around here — and something shifted. He became more interested in what Japan was losing than in transgression. More elegiac.

Catherine: There’s something interesting about that timing, isn’t there? 1933 in Japan — that’s a pretty charged moment politically.

Takeshi: It is. Though I’m careful about reading In’ei Raisan as political protest. I think he was genuinely just… sad about bad lighting. (A pause.) That sounds small when I say it like that. But it wasn’t small to him.

Nicholas: It doesn’t sound small. It actually sounds completely reasonable. (He refilled his glass.) Here’s the thing that got me. I kept thinking he was going to be wrong, and then he wasn’t. That thing about the lacquer bowl — I immediately thought of my grandmother’s apartment.

Catherine: Tell us.

Nicholas: She was Italian-American, grew up in Brooklyn. Her apartment was — it was dark. She had these heavy drapes she never opened, lamps with low-wattage bulbs, candles on the table at dinner even when it wasn’t a special occasion. And her kitchen had this old ceramic bowl she kept fruit in, dark green, and I never thought of it as beautiful when I was a kid. It was just her fruit bowl. But I went back there after she died, when we were clearing out the apartment, and I picked it up in that same low light, and — I don’t know. It looked completely different from how I’d seen it in photographs.

Catherine: That’s exactly what Tanizaki is describing.

Nicholas: I know. That’s why it got to me. It’s not a Japanese thing, is what I’m saying. My grandmother wasn’t practicing any kind of philosophy. She just had that apartment.

Takeshi: No, it’s not only Japanese. That’s something I think gets lost when Westerners encounter Japanese aesthetics — the assumption that you have to learn this sensitivity from Eastern thought. Most people have experienced it. They just haven’t had language for it, or they’ve been told the language is someone else’s.

Catherine: Wabi-sabi tourism. (She smiled.) “Discover the ancient Japanese secret of finding beauty in imperfection.” As if Europeans never noticed that old things are beautiful.

Nicholas: To be fair, Europeans spent a lot of the 20th century building things that were not beautiful in any light.

Takeshi: (laughing) That’s also true.

Catherine: Can I push on something? Because I think there’s a difference between having the sensitivity and building a world around the sensitivity. My grandmother — or your grandmother, Nicholas — might have had a dark apartment without necessarily thinking that the darkness was itself the point. Tanizaki is arguing that it was the point. That the aesthetic tradition was constructed around low light, that the objects were designed for it, the architecture was designed for it. That’s different from just happening to have curtains.

Takeshi: That’s a genuinely important distinction.

Nicholas: Is it, though? Does it matter if it was intentional? The result is the same.

Catherine: I think it does matter. Because if it was constructed intentionally, then it can be recovered intentionally. If it’s just something that happened to some grandmothers in Brooklyn, then when they die, it’s gone.

Takeshi: What she’s pointing at is something Tanizaki doesn’t quite say directly but implies throughout: that this aesthetic is fragile. It requires transmission. It has to be passed on through practice and environment, not just through reading about it.

Nicholas: How is it transmitted in Japan? Like, do kids just absorb it?

Takeshi: Mostly, yes. Though less than before, I think. You grow up in spaces that were designed for a certain quality of attention. Temple visits, traditional restaurants, rooms where someone has arranged a single branch of something in front of a scroll. You don’t think about it philosophically — it just trains your eye. And your expectations.

Catherine: That’s true everywhere, though. I grew up in a house with a lot of natural light, big windows, white walls. Very California. And for a long time I thought rooms with a lot of light were just — correct. Healthy. Rooms that were dim felt depressing to me. I had to actively unlearn that.

Nicholas: What changed it for you?

Catherine: (She thought for a moment.) Honestly? Living in Japan. My apartment in Toyonaka is quite dark, and for the first few months I kept thinking I needed to do something about it. Buy more lamps. Then I stopped noticing, and then I started preferring it. Now when I go back to California, my parents’ house feels almost — aggressive to me. All that light.

Takeshi: That’s the process Tanizaki is lamenting happened in reverse in Japan. Overnight, essentially.

Nicholas: Okay, here’s where I’ll push back a little. Because there’s a version of this argument that becomes — look, I work in finance. I spend most of my day in a glass-fronted building that is, objectively, very bright. And I like it. I can see everything. I can read everything. Nothing is hidden.

Takeshi: Nothing is hidden — is that only an advantage?

Nicholas: In a financial context, yes. Absolutely.

Takeshi: I’m not arguing with you about financial contexts. I don’t want shadow in a spreadsheet.

Nicholas: (a short laugh) Okay, fair.

Takeshi: But I think you already know that “I can see everything” doesn’t apply the same way in every part of life. You found this bar, which is not a place where you can see everything. You’re not even slightly bothered by that.

Nicholas: (He looked around the room.) …Point taken.

Catherine: That’s kind of the key, isn’t it?

We’ve built our public spaces and work environments on the principle that maximum visibility equals maximum function. But we keep retreating, privately, into spaces that are softer.

Dimly lit bars, candlelit dinners, bedside lamps. We’ve just stopped thinking of that as aesthetic choice. We call it “ambiance.”

Takeshi: Or “mood lighting,” which manages to make it sound slightly embarrassing.

Nicholas: (dry) “Sorry, I need to turn off this overhead light for ambiance reasons. Very spiritual.”

Catherine: (laughing) Right, exactly. There’s no vocabulary for it that doesn’t sound either pretentious or like you’re setting a romantic scene.

Takeshi: Tanizaki gives you vocabulary. That’s part of what the essay does — it names something that was operating without language. And once it’s named, you can’t quite un-notice it.

Catherine: There’s one part I want to ask you about. The section on the toilet.

Nicholas: I was going to say — that section is bizarre.

Takeshi: He knows it’s going to seem bizarre. That’s why he writes it with such composure. He’s essentially daring you to dismiss it.

Catherine: And you can’t, really. I kept waiting for the logic to fall apart and it didn’t. He’s describing something very specific — this idea that the most functional room in the house was also given the most careful aesthetic attention. Not the grand rooms. The room you go to alone, in the cold, briefly, every day.

Takeshi: There’s something in Japanese spatial design — I’m being careful not to over-generalize here — where the threshold, the edge, the pause-point, gets more attention than the destination. The genkan where you remove your shoes. The covered walkway between buildings. The small garden you cross to reach a tea room. These transitions matter. The toilet, for Tanizaki, is a kind of forced pause in the day. A moment of solitude and quiet. Why wouldn’t you design it well?

Nicholas: You know what that actually reminds me of? Fenway Park.

Catherine: …The baseball stadium?

Nicholas: Hear me out. Old stadiums — Fenway, Wrigley — have these narrow concourses, low ceilings, you can barely see where you’re going. And then you come up the ramp and the field opens up in front of you. Green, enormous, completely unexpected even though you knew it was there. New stadiums give you sight lines from the moment you walk in. They’re bigger, more comfortable, objectively better in most measurable ways. But they don’t do that. That moment of emergence.

Takeshi: That’s a remarkably good example.

Nicholas: I have my moments.

Catherine: So the darkness before the light makes the light mean something.

Nicholas: I guess so. I never thought about it that way, but yeah.

Takeshi: Can I say something that might complicate this conversation slightly?

Nicholas: Go ahead.

Takeshi: Tanizaki wrote this essay in a moment of genuine loss. He was watching something disappear in real time. But I don’t think he was entirely right that it was disappearing. I think it was relocating.

Catherine: What do you mean?

Takeshi: The aesthetic sensibility he describes — preference for suggestion over exposure, for the beauty that lives in partial concealment — I see it everywhere in contemporary Japanese life. In the way food is plated. In the design of certain interiors. In how people dress here. It didn’t die with gas lamps. It migrated.

Nicholas: So the form changed but the instinct stayed.

Takeshi: Something like that. Though I’m not certain about it. It might also be that I want that to be true.

Catherine: I think that’s actually the most honest thing you’ve said tonight.

Takeshi: (quietly) Yes. Probably.

The bar filled up around nine o’clock — salarymen, a few couples, a table of young women drinking highballs and laughing loudly at something on someone’s phone. The frosted glass door opened and closed, letting in brief rectangles of cold air.

At some point Nicholas finished his Yamazaki and switched to beer. Catherine ordered a second glass of wine and started taking notes on her phone, which she does when she’s thinking hard about something. I watched the light from the single lamp above the bar shift slightly as someone walked past it, and I thought about the bowl on my grandmother’s table.

Not my grandmother — Nicholas’s. I don’t have that story.

But I think I know exactly what he saw.

What We Didn’t Figure Out

Whether the aesthetic Tanizaki describes is uniquely Japanese, or simply named by Japan — we didn’t resolve that. Nicholas’s grandmother never read a word of Japanese philosophy. Catherine’s shift in perception happened through exposure, not study. And yet both arrived somewhere close to what Tanizaki is pointing at.

Maybe the more interesting question isn’t where this sensitivity comes from, but why certain cultures built visible frameworks around it and others let it operate without a name.

What you name, you can protect. What remains unnamed tends to get renovated away.

I don’t know if that’s Tanizaki’s argument exactly. But it’s where I ended up.

This dialogue is based on real conversations, reconstructed and edited for narrative clarity. Nicholas and Catherine are composite characters inspired by people I know.

This article was developed with AI assistance. The thinking, research, and perspective are mine. The English expression is a collaboration.

The Light We Forgot to Leave Out

There are certain afternoons in Kyoto — late autumn, sky the color of old silk — when the gold leaf on a folding screen stops being decoration and becomes something else entirely. Something harder to name.

I saw it once. A room in a temple, barely lit, the kind of light that arrives sideways and then gives up. The byōbu — the folding screen — was old, its gold leaf worn unevenly in places, darkened at the edges where generations of hands had folded and unfolded it. And for perhaps twenty minutes, as the clouds shifted outside, that screen seemed almost to breathe. The gold didn’t shine. It moved. Not with light, but with the absence of it.

I’ve been trying to put that into words ever since.

Tanizaki Jun’ichiro did it for me. Ninety years ago.

Who Was Tanizaki?

Before we go further, a brief introduction for readers unfamiliar with the name.

Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886–1965) was one of the defining literary voices of modern Japan — a novelist, essayist, and cultural provocateur whose work spanned nearly six decades. His novels, including The Makioka Sisters and Some Prefer Nettles, explored the tension between Japan’s rapid Westernization and the quieter, more ambiguous world of traditional Japanese aesthetics. He was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

But in 1933, between novels, he wrote something small and strange and quietly radical: a long essay called In’ei Raisan — In Praise of Shadows.

It is not a straightforward argument. It is more like a confession, or a lament. Tanizaki noticed that Japan was flooding itself with electric light, adopting Western standards of brightness and clarity, and in doing so, was destroying something — a particular quality of beauty that had taken centuries to cultivate. Beauty that depended not on illumination, but on its careful, deliberate withholding.

The essay is 60 pages. Every sentence is worth reading slowly.

You Know This Feeling, Even If You Don’t Know the Word

You’ve probably been to a restaurant that was lit too well. Every surface exposed. Menu items photographed perfectly under controlled light. The food, when it arrived, looked exactly like the picture.

And somehow, the meal felt strangely flat.

It wasn’t the food. It was the light. Or more precisely, what the light had erased.

Tanizaki understood this in 1933. He didn’t have the vocabulary of modern restaurant design or Instagram optimization, but he understood the mechanism exactly: when everything is made visible, the imagination has nothing left to do. And when the imagination goes quiet, something essential about the experience of beauty goes with it.

This is the first idea at the heart of In Praise of Shadows — and it’s worth sitting with before we go deeper.

Three Places Where Shadows Do the Work

The Lacquer Bowl

Tanizaki begins, almost playfully, with lacquerware.

Japanese lacquer bowls — urushi — are among the most quietly spectacular objects in traditional craft. The black ones especially. But Tanizaki insists you are seeing them wrong if you look at them under electric light. The surface becomes glassy, a little garish. The depth disappears.

Put the same bowl in a room lit by a single candle or a paper lantern, and something shifts.

The lacquer stops reflecting and begins absorbing.

The warmth of the light sinks into it. Shadows pool in the curves. The bowl seems to hold darkness like liquid.

He’s not being romantic about this. He’s making an almost technical argument: the material was designed for low light. The craftsmen who developed these finishes over centuries were working in dim interiors, by lamplight or firelight. The aesthetics grew from the conditions. Electric light didn’t reveal the object — it changed it into something it was never meant to be.

I’ve thought about this in my own design work. There’s a version of every textile, every pattern, every surface that only exists in certain light. Not better or worse — different. The question is whether we ever stop long enough to let that version appear.

The Gold Leaf Screen

This brings me back to Kyoto.

Tanizaki anticipates the obvious objection: surely gold leaf is meant to be bright? Surely it’s decorative excess, designed for impact and visibility?

His answer is essentially: no. And once he explains, you can’t unsee it.

The gold leaf on old Japanese screens and architectural interiors was not meant to catch light — it was meant to catch what little light existed in a dark room and redistribute it slowly, gently, across a space that had no other source of warmth. In deep shadow, a gilded screen becomes a secondary light source, not a decoration. It holds the room together. It makes the darkness inhabitable.

Move that screen into a brightly lit gallery, and it becomes something else — impressive, certainly, but its function has been amputated.

You’re looking at the skin of the object without the body it was made to inhabit.

This is, I think, one of the most counterintuitive ideas in the essay. That restraint — darkness — was the condition that made opulence work. Not despite the shadows, but through them.

The Lavatory

Tanizaki saves his strangest observation for last — or rather, he places it so calmly among the others that it almost doesn’t register as strange.

He argues that the most aesthetically considered room in the traditional Japanese house is the toilet.

Not the receiving room. Not the tokonoma alcove with its hanging scroll and single flower. The lavatory.

In old Japanese architecture, the toilet was placed at the end of a covered walkway, apart from the main house, surrounded by garden. You had to walk to reach it, sometimes through rain or cold. The room itself was dark and cool, with a small wooden lattice window that let in — not light exactly, but the idea of light. A filtered suggestion of the garden outside. Moss. The sound of water somewhere.

Tanizaki writes that poets and literary men of old were particularly fond of this room for its contemplative atmosphere. He credits it with inspiring an uncommon quality of quiet thought.

I used to find this mildly eccentric. Then I spent a winter in Kyoto.

The house where I was staying had no central heating. The toilet — separate from the bath, as is traditional — was at the far end of a narrow corridor. On cold nights it was genuinely uncomfortable. But in the mornings, there was sometimes a quality of light through the small frosted window, with steam from the bathhouse nearby and the sound of a neighbor’s garden — a birdsong — and I understood, in a small and specific way, what Tanizaki meant.

A space designed to make you pause, cool down, become briefly aware of weather and season and the pace of your own breath — that is not inefficiency. It’s a different theory of what a room is for.

What He Was Really Saying

Underneath the aesthetics — the lacquer, the gold, the lavatory — Tanizaki is making a larger argument.

Western modernity, as it arrived in Japan, brought with it a particular value system: visibility is clarity, clarity is progress, and shadow is simply a problem to be solved with better lighting. The ideal was to make everything available to the eye, all at once, without ambiguity.

Japanese aesthetic tradition had built itself on something close to the opposite premise. Not everything should be seen. Not everything should be immediately available. The parts left in shadow are not gaps in the design — they are invitations to the imagination, and to the other senses. A surface half-lit is more complex, more alive, more interesting than one fully exposed.

This is not mysticism. It’s a theory of perception that Western design has been slowly and partially rediscovering — in the language of “negative space,” in the architectural interest in “threshold” and “liminal zones,” in the deliberate under-lighting of restaurants that want their rooms to feel like something worth being in.

Tanizaki was there first. And he was specific.

What I’m Still Thinking About

I don’t read In Praise of Shadows as a protest against modernity. Tanizaki was too honest for that — and too in love with electric blankets and Western toilets, which he admits cheerfully.

What he’s mourning is something subtler: a set of perceptual habits that took centuries to develop, calibrated to specific conditions of light and material and space, and that were being abandoned in a generation without anyone quite noticing what was lost.

Every culture has its version of this. There are things you learn to see slowly, through repeated exposure to a particular kind of beauty, and once you’ve been trained out of that seeing — by brightness, by speed, by the requirement that everything be immediately legible — it’s hard to get back.

I still visit the temple in Kyoto occasionally. The screen is still there. On overcast afternoons, it still does what it does.

But I notice I have to wait longer now before I stop looking for the light and start letting the shadows speak.

Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, In’ei Raisan, 1933) is widely available in English translation. The Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker translation, published by Leete’s Island Books, remains the standard edition.

If you’d like to explore Tanizaki’s life and ideas further, I’ve had a longer conversation about both in a companion dialogue: “Did We Ever Actually Like Bright Lights? (Diarogue)”

— Takeshi Kitagawa

This article was developed with AI assistance. The thinking, research, and perspective are mine. The English expression is a collaboration.

A Bell Made of Silence.

The Bell That Was Never There: A Meditation on The Tale of the Heike’s Opening Lines

祇園精舎の鐘の声、諸行無常の響きあり。 沙羅双樹の花の色、盛者必衰の理をあらはす。 奢れる人も久しからず、ただ春の夜の夢の如し。 猛き者も遂には亡びぬ、ひとへに風の前の塵に同じ。

The bell of Gion Shōja echoes with the impermanence of all things. The color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must fall. The proud do not endure — they are like a dream on a spring night. The mighty ones, too, must perish — like dust before the wind.

— Opening lines of The Tale of the Heike, 13th century. Author unknown.

I want to start with something simple.

That bell — the one ringing in the opening line of Japan’s most celebrated war chronicle — never existed.

Not in the way we imagine it. The great bronze temple bell, whose low resonance moves through the chest and lingers long after the sound has gone — that is a Japanese thing, a Chinese thing. Indian Buddhist monasteries had no such bells. Gion Shōja, the ancient monastery in northern India where the Buddha himself once taught, used wooden clappers to mark the hours. The bell that opens The Tale of the Heike was placed there by a Japanese imagination that could not conceive of a temple without one.

A real bell — cast in bronze, hung in a proper belfry — was finally donated to the site in 1981. By Japanese donors. Eight hundred years after the poem was written about its sound.

I think about this often. Not because it feels like a mistake, or an embarrassing historical inaccuracy. But because the bell’s absence seems, to me, to be exactly the point.

Gion Shōja itself — the monastery where the Buddha delivered most of his teachings, built on land that the merchant Anathapindika famously purchased by covering a forest floor in gold coins — was already in ruins by the seventh century. When the Chinese monk Xuanzang made his pilgrimage there, he found only foundations. He had traveled thousands of miles to visit one of the holiest sites in Buddhism, and what he encountered were the remains of walls.

By the time The Tale of the Heike was written, five or six centuries after Xuanzang’s visit, the monastery had been rubble for longer than most nations have existed. Whoever wrote those opening lines was writing about a place that had not stood for generations. A sound from a building that had already returned to earth.

Then there are the sala trees. The four trees said to have surrounded the Buddha at the moment of his death, whose white blossoms fell as he passed — those trees don’t grow in Japan. Shorea robusta is native to the Indian subcontinent. What Japanese temple gardens call sala trees are a different species entirely: the summer camellia, chosen for its resemblance. Beautiful in its own right. But not the tree. Not those flowers.

So we have, in four lines:

A bell that was never there. A monastery that was already rubble. Flowers from a tree that doesn’t grow here. And at the center of it all — a death, the Buddha’s, which happened centuries before any of this was written.

A bell that was never there. A monastery that was already rubble. Flowers from a tree that doesn’t grow here. Everything in those four lines is already a ghost.

The author’s name is unknown.

This is perhaps the strangest part. The Tale of the Heike is one of the most widely read works in Japanese literary history, recited by blind traveling monks for centuries, memorized by schoolchildren today. Its opening is as embedded in Japanese cultural memory as anything can be. And we do not know who wrote it. Various attributions exist — a nobleman, a monk, a court scholar — but none has held. The voice behind these words has itself become impermanent.

I sometimes wonder whether the preface was written last.

It’s not something I can prove. But when I think about the shape of it — its compression, its strange calm, the way it seems to look down from a great height at everything that follows — I find myself imagining a writer who had already finished. Who had lived inside the rise and fall of the Heike clan for years, tracking every battle, every betrayal, every moment of grace and cruelty. Who finally set the brush down, looked at what they had made, and felt something they hadn’t expected.

Not grief, exactly. Something quieter than grief. The sense that even this — even the act of recording it all — was already beginning to fade.

And so they went back to the beginning. Added four lines. Reached for images that were, in fact, not there: a bell in a ruined monastery, flowers from a foreign tree. Phantoms, deliberately chosen, to hold something true.

I don’t know what to make of this, fully. I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

What I keep returning to is the strangeness of the construction — that the most powerful evocation of impermanence in Japanese literature is built entirely from things that cannot be touched, seen, or heard. The bell rings in a place that is rubble. The flowers fall from a tree that isn’t here. The author is no one. And the clan whose story follows — the Heike, with their wealth and their sea battles and their doomed beauty — is gone so completely that what remains is a story, and even that story’s origins are a mystery.

Everything in those four lines is already a ghost.

I think this is what the preface is actually doing. Not explaining impermanence. Not reminding us that things end. But building something out of absence, so that the absence itself becomes the experience.

You can’t touch the bell. That’s the point.

Instead of a Conclusion

There’s a version of this essay that ends with a lesson — something I’m supposed to draw from all of this and hand to you neatly. I’ve decided not to write that version.

Not because there’s nothing to take away. But because I think you’ve already felt something, somewhere in the reading. The bell that was never there has a way of doing that without my help.

What I’ll say instead is this: somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, in a field that was once one of the most sacred places in the Buddhist world, there is now a bell hanging in a small belfry. It was placed there in 1981. When you strike it, it rings.

It is the first real bell Gion Shōja has ever had.

Eight hundred years from now, I wonder if anyone will remember who struck it.

This piece works alongside a dialogue on the same subject. The messier, more honest version of this conversation lives there.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

Reading The Tale of the Heike’s Opening Lines Through Western Eyes

This is a companion piece to the solo essay A Bell Made of Silence.
Nicholas and Catherine had read it before we met.

Nicholas dropped his phone face-down on the café table with more force than was strictly necessary.

Nicholas: Okay. So let me get this straight. The most famous opening line in Japanese literature is about a bell that didn’t exist, in a monastery that was ruins, with flowers from a tree that doesn’t grow here. And nobody knows who wrote it.

Takeshi: That’s roughly it.

Nicholas: That’s not roughly it. That’s completely it. The whole thing is made up.

Catherine: I don’t think “made up” is quite the right word for it, Nicholas-san.

Nicholas: Then what’s the right word?

Catherine: Imagined, maybe? There’s a difference.

Nicholas: In my line of work, imagined and made up are basically the same thing. You put a number on a spreadsheet that doesn’t correspond to reality, we have a problem.

Takeshi: This isn’t a spreadsheet.

Nicholas: I know it’s not a spreadsheet, Takeshi. That’s not what I meant. I mean — someone sat down and deliberately wrote about things that weren’t true. And now it’s considered a masterpiece. I’m just trying to understand the logic.

Takeshi: What would make it feel more logical to you?

Nicholas: If they’d gotten the details right, I guess.

Catherine: Can I ask something? In the essay, you wrote about maybe the preface being added last — after everything else was finished. Do you actually believe that?

Takeshi: I don’t know. It’s a feeling, not a fact.

Catherine: But it changes the whole texture of it. If you imagine the author sitting there, having just finished writing about all these battles and deaths and people trying desperately to hold onto power — and then looking at what they’d written and feeling like it was already disappearing…

Nicholas: Is it sad? Or is it just — realistic?

Catherine: Both, I think.

Nicholas: What gets me is the author thing. Not the bell, not the trees. The author. You’re telling me that whoever wrote this — went to all the trouble of crafting something that Japanese schoolchildren are still memorizing eight hundred years later — and there’s just no record. Nothing.

Takeshi: Nothing confirmed.

Nicholas: In my company, we document everything. Every deal, every decision, every meeting. You could go back and find out who said what on any given day, years ago. The idea that you could produce something that matters that much, and just — not be in the record. That bothers me more than the bell.

Nicholas: You know what it reminds me of? You know how baseball has this incredibly detailed statistical record going back over a hundred years? We know exactly how many home runs Babe Ruth hit in 1927. His batting average, his slugging percentage, the weather conditions on certain games.

Catherine: I have a feeling this is going somewhere.

Nicholas: But here’s the thing — the fans who watched those games. The guy sitting in the bleachers when Ruth hit his sixtieth homer. We don’t know his name. We don’t know what he felt, whether he went home and told his kids, whether it was the best day of his life. The stat survives. The witness doesn’t.

Nicholas: I guess what I’m saying is — sometimes the record and the person who made it are two completely separate things. And we forget that.

Takeshi: That’s almost exactly what the preface is about.

Nicholas: Don’t tell me I just explained Buddhist philosophy with baseball.

Takeshi: You explained it better than I would have.

Nicholas: (making a face)

Catherine: Can I say something that might sound strange?

Takeshi: Please.

Catherine: I’m writing my thesis right now. It’s going to take another two years, probably. And sometimes I think about — what if I finish it, and it’s good, and it matters to people, and then fifty years from now no one remembers I wrote it? Like, the ideas survive, but I don’t. Is that a morbid thought or a normal thought?

Nicholas: Both. Completely normal, slightly morbid. Welcome to your mid-twenties.

Catherine: (laughing) That’s not reassuring.

Nicholas: It’s not meant to be.

Takeshi: I think that might be exactly the fear the preface was written to hold. Not to resolve it — just to hold it.

Nicholas: What does that mean, hold it?

Takeshi: The author couldn’t undo the impermanence. Couldn’t make the bell real, or bring the monastery back, or guarantee that their name would survive. But they could write four lines that make anyone who reads them feel the weight of it. They held the fear in the form of a poem. Whether that’s comforting or not — I genuinely don’t know.

Catherine: I think it’s both.

Nicholas: You keep saying that.

Catherine: Because it keeps being true.

The afternoon light had shifted — coming in lower now, cutting across the table at an angle. For a moment nobody said anything, which was unusual for Nicholas.

Nicholas: The bell they put there in 1981. Japanese donors, you said.

Takeshi: Yes.

Nicholas: So people went to this ruined monastery in India, where the author of a famous Japanese poem had imagined a bell, and they put an actual bell there. Why?

Takeshi: I think because they wanted the sound to finally exist.

Nicholas: Did it work?

Takeshi: I don’t know. I’ve never been.

Nicholas: Me neither. I’d kind of like to go, actually.

Catherine: (looking at him) Really?

Nicholas: What? I travel.

We left the café as it was getting dark. Nicholas had a train to catch — he lived on the other side of the river, in Kitahama. Catherine had come from Toyonaka. I had come from Nishinomiya. We’d all traveled to meet in the middle, which felt, as I walked home, like it might mean something, though I wasn’t sure what.

On the train, I thought about the bell again. The one that rings now in Uttar Pradesh, installed by people who felt the absence acutely enough to fill it. I thought about the author whose name we don’t have. I thought about Catherine’s thesis, and Ruth’s sixtieth homer, and the man in the bleachers whose name no one kept.

A Question I’m Still Carrying

When Nicholas asked why the donors put a bell there, I said it was because they wanted the sound to finally exist.

But I’ve been turning his follow-up question over ever since: Did it work?

Does a real bell, hung eight hundred years after a phantom bell was imagined, make the place more real — or does it make it stranger? Does it honor the poem, or does it accidentally close something that was always meant to stay open?

I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure the poem does either.

Maybe that’s why it still works, after all this time. It was written in absence, about absence, by someone whose name is itself an absence. Add a bell, and you get a bell. But the absence that made the poem — that’s still there, underneath.

And the bell that was never there keeps ringing.

Nicholas and Catherine are fictional characters inspired by real people and real conversations.

This dialogue has a companion essay on the same subject. The quieter, more personal version of this conversation lives there.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

On impermanence, the petals on the ground, and why we keep showing up

This piece follows an earlier essay written during hanami along the Okawa River in Osaka. If you haven’t read that one, it isn’t required — but it may add some context to where this one begins.

The blossoms are gone now.

I walked past the Okawa last week, and the ground along the path was covered in petals — pale, softened by a few days of rain, pressed flat against the pavement. The branches above were filling in with that particular yellow-green of early spring leaves, urgent and a little startling against the grey sky.

I stopped and looked for a moment.

Ah. They’ve scattered.

There’s no English phrase that carries quite the same weight as that. In Japanese we might say chitte shimatta — not just “they fell” but something closer to “they’ve gone and fallen on us.” A mild reproach. Fond. The kind of thing you’d say about a friend who left the party before you were ready.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew this was coming. I watched the blossoms at their peak, felt the afternoon, drank the beer. And now here was the other side of it — the expected ending, arriving exactly as expected.

What I didn’t expect was how it would feel anyway.

The Grief You Prepared For

There’s an interesting thing about anticipated sadness. You’d think that knowing something is going to end would soften the blow. You brace yourself. You make your peace in advance. And yet when it actually arrives — the empty branch, the scattered petals, the party over — there’s still something in it that lands.

I think this is because the mind is very good at knowing and very bad at feeling ahead. I knew the blossoms would fall. That knowledge didn’t protect me from the small, quiet pang of finding them on the ground.

But here’s what I’ve been sitting with: that pang is not separate from the joy of hanami. It’s the same thing, arriving in its second form.

When I was sitting under the trees on April 6th — petals drifting, friends laughing, the canopy still full above us — part of what made that afternoon feel so complete was the awareness, sitting somewhere underneath the enjoyment, that it was already ending. We were inside it and losing it at the same time. The blossoms were beautiful partly because they were already becoming memory.

And then the petals fell. And I felt the loss.

And that loss confirmed, retroactively, that the afternoon had been real.

Why We Come Back

Every year, the same thing happens.

The forecast is released. People get restless. The blossoms peak. Hanami. And then, within a week, the petals are on the ground.

And every year, the following spring, people do it again.

I used to think of this as simply tradition — something you do because you’ve always done it, because everyone does it, because it’s spring. But I think there’s something more precise happening. The loss teaches you something that the beauty alone couldn’t. And the next year, when the blossoms open again, you bring that knowledge with you. You sit under the flowers differently when you remember what it felt like to find them on the ground.

This is, I think, what mono no aware actually does in practice. It’s not just a bittersweet feeling you have in the moment. It’s a kind of education — slow, repeated, accumulated over years of watching the same trees bloom and fall.

The sorrow isn’t a side effect of the beauty. It’s the mechanism by which the beauty becomes yours.

By which this particular afternoon, these particular people, this particular branch heavy with pink above your head, become irreplaceable.

Impermanence, fully received, doesn’t make you mourn the present before it’s gone. It makes you present inside it.

The Thing We Keep Forgetting

I want to be honest about something, though.

I know all of this. I’ve known it for most of my adult life, in the way that things you’ve grown up around become part of how you understand the world without you ever deciding to learn them. Martial arts practice teaches it through the body — the technique that was there yesterday and gone today, the conditioning that requires daily maintenance or it quietly disappears. Zen points at it repeatedly, from different angles, until you stop thinking the lesson is about something other than your own life.

I know, in other words, that nothing holds.

And I still forget.

Not always dramatically. I don’t usually need a crisis to remind me. It’s more like a gradual drift — weeks where I’m moving through days efficiently, getting things done, planning ahead, and somewhere in the middle of all that forward motion, I stop noticing what’s actually around me. The light in the afternoon. The particular quality of a conversation with a friend. The fact that this version of my life, right now, is its own unrepeatable thing.

I forget, and then something calls me back. Sometimes it’s a piece of music. Sometimes it’s a conversation that goes somewhere unexpected. This year, it was the petals on the ground along the Okawa.

Chitte shimatta. They’ve scattered.

And just like that, I was paying attention again.

What Impermanence Is Actually Asking

I’ve been thinking about what it means to “affirm” impermanence — which is a phrase I used in my previous essay and have been turning over since.

It would be easy to read it as passive acceptance. A shrug. Everything ends, so why fight it. But that’s not what I mean, and I don’t think that’s what hanami embodies either. The people drinking under the blossoms aren’t resigned. They’re choosing. There’s a difference.

To affirm impermanence, as I understand it, is to let the fact of ending sharpen your attention to what is presently here.

It is not a philosophy of letting go — or not primarily. It is a practice of showing up, more fully, to the thing that is in front of you right now, because you know it won’t always be.

The petals fall. And because they fall, the afternoon they fell from becomes something you carry.

Your daily life is full of things like this — people, seasons, versions of yourself, periods of difficulty that are harder than you think they’ll be and then, quietly, over. The difficulty of applying this isn’t intellectual. Most people, if you ask them, already understand that things don’t last. The difficulty is in keeping that understanding alive — not as an abstract idea filed away somewhere useful, but as something present enough to actually change how you move through an ordinary Tuesday.

The cherry blossoms are almost obscenely good at this. They don’t let you forget. They give you one week, full bloom, and then they give you the ground covered in petals. The lesson is inescapable.

Most of life is less obvious. Which is why, I think, we need the blossoms.

A Question I’m Still Carrying

What would it mean to live with this kind of attention all year — not just for the week the cherry blossoms are out?

I don’t have a clean answer to that. I’m not sure it’s possible to sustain the quality of presence that hanami, at its best, produces. Some things require the contrast. The blossoms work partly because they’re surrounded by months of ordinary weather.

But I do think there’s something in the practice of noticing what is passing — of pausing, occasionally, to register that this particular thing, this particular moment, will not come around again in exactly this form.

Not as a discipline. Not as mindfulness homework. Just as a habit of attention. A small fidelity to the present.

The petals are on the ground now. The new leaves are in. Somewhere, the tree is already preparing for next spring.

And I am already looking forward to it — with all the anticipatory sadness that implies.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

The Japanese Art of Impermanence: Why We Feast Under Falling Flowers

On impermanence, joy, and the Japanese obsession with cherry blossoms

Yesterday, I was at Okawa.

If you’ve never seen the cherry blossoms along the Okawa River in Osaka, I’m not sure I can do justice to it in writing. The trees line both banks for over a kilometer, and when they’re at full bloom, the canopy closes over the water like a tunnel of white and pale pink. It’s the kind of scene that makes you stop mid-sentence.

I was there with friends yesterday — April 6th — and despite the crowds, or maybe because of them, something felt important about the day. Blue tarps spread across every patch of grass — a stark, utilitarian contrast to the delicate canopy above, yet the essential stage for our annual celebration.

Families with young children. Old couples on folding stools. Salarymen in loosened ties. Everyone eating, drinking, laughing too loudly. The blossoms were still holding.

I’ve done this every spring for most of my life. And yet, standing there with a beer in hand and petals drifting into it, I found myself thinking: why do we do this with such intensity?

Japan essentially stops to watch flowers for one week. One week. And not flowers that last — flowers that are specifically, almost defiantly, on their way out.

The Forecast That Changes Everything

It starts well before the blossoms appear.

Each year, around March, the Japan Meteorological Corporation releases its sakura zensen — the cherry blossom front forecast. It’s tracked like a weather system moving up from the south. People follow it. News programs report on it. There is genuine national anticipation.

This is, when you think about it, a strange thing to get excited about. The forecast tells you, more or less precisely, when something beautiful will disappear. You’re not preparing for arrival so much as bracing for departure.

And yet the excitement is real. I feel it every year. That particular restlessness in late March, checking the trees on my commute, noticing the first hints of pink along branches that were bare the week before.

I’ve thought about why this is. The honest answer, I think, is that the Japanese relationship with cherry blossoms isn’t really about beauty in the conventional sense. It’s about time. And about what it means to be alive inside time.

Impermanence Is Not a Problem to Solve

There’s a concept in Buddhism that sits at the core of Japanese thinking: mujo (無常) — impermanence. Nothing persists. Everything passes. The physical world is in constant flux, and attachment to any fixed state causes suffering.

This could sound like a cold philosophy. And in the wrong framing, it does — detached, resigned, almost nihilistic.

But hanami (花見）is not resignation.

When I look at the people drinking under the blossoms, I don’t see people trying to forget that the flowers are falling. I see people who know — and who are choosing, deliberately, to sit inside that knowledge and pour another cup anyway. The transience isn’t something to escape. It’s the reason to be here.

There’s a difference, I think, between tolerating impermanence and actually receiving it. Hanami, at its best, is the latter.

You’re not looking away from the fact that this will end. You’re looking directly at it — and laughing, and eating too much, and staying a little longer than you planned.

That strikes me as one of the most genuinely positive things a human being can do.

Sorrow and Joy Are Not Opposites

Mono no aware (もののあはれ) is a term that gets translated as “the pathos of things,” and that translation isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. It suggests melancholy. Wistfulness. A kind of beautiful sadness.

What it misses is that aware — the emotional core of the phrase — contains both sorrow and tenderness. It’s the feeling you get when something is beautiful and passing at the same time. The two are inseparable.

The beauty and the ending arrive together.

Cherry blossoms, in full bloom, are stunning. But cherry blossoms you know will fall by next week — that’s something else entirely. The awareness of the ending is what sharpens the beauty to that particular edge.

I don’t think this is uniquely Japanese. I think anyone who has stood at the end of a very good evening, knowing it’s almost over, has felt something like mono no aware. The difference, perhaps, is that Japanese culture doesn’t treat this feeling as a problem. It treats it as information. As something worth paying attention to.

What I’ve come to understand — not through study but just through years of living — is that sorrow and joy aren’t opposites in this framework. They’re two faces of the same experience. The cherry blossom makes you happy and sad for the same reason, at the same moment. To feel one is to feel the other.

The Blossoms as Mirror

There’s something else I noticed yesterday that I’m still trying to articulate.

Watching people under the trees — really watching them — I got the sense that they weren’t just enjoying scenery. Something more personal was happening. The way someone stands under a branch heavy with blossoms and just looks up, without taking a photo, without saying anything. There’s a quality to that stillness that feels like recognition rather than observation.

I think people see themselves in the sakura. Not consciously. Not as a thought they’d be able to articulate after their third beer. But somewhere in the experience, the boundary between the viewer and the blossoms gets soft.

You are also at your peak right now. You are also on your way.

The flowers aren’t a metaphor you’re applying to your life — they are your life, reflected back from the branch.

This is something that runs deep in Japanese aesthetics: the idea that nature doesn’t stand apart from the human, waiting to be observed. Nature is the same process, running at a different scale. To really look at a cherry blossom isn’t to study something external. It’s to recognize something you already know.

What the Petals Leave Behind

The blossoms at Okawa are still holding as I write this.

But by mid-April, the ground along the riverbank will be covered in petals. Pink fading to white, soft underfoot. That, too, is part of it. The fallen petals have their own name in Japanese: hanafubuki (花吹雪) — flower blizzard. Even the ending has been given something beautiful to be called.

And after the petals, the leaves.

This is the part that stays with me most. The tree doesn’t rest after the blossoms fall. The pale yellow-green of new leaves comes in almost immediately, urgent and fresh against the branches. Life reorganizing itself. The sakura shifting modes — from the spectacular to the quiet, from the outward to the sustaining.

I find something genuinely moving in this. Not because it’s a comforting metaphor about seasons and renewal, but because it’s just true. The petals fall, and the leaves come. The difficult periods pass, and something grows in their place. Not the same thing — something new, something that only became possible because the blossoms let go.

Shogyomujō (諸行無常). All things are impermanent. It’s one of the most fundamental ideas in Buddhism, and it can sound like a warning or a lament. But sitting under the trees yesterday, watching the petals drift, I didn’t feel warned or saddened.

I felt, for a few hours, exactly where I was.

What This Means to Me

I’ve been going to hanami since I was a child, and I’ve never once gone because I thought it would teach me something.

But I think that’s how these things work, at least in my experience. You don’t go to cherry blossoms to understand impermanence. You go for the beer and the company and the excuse to sit outside. And then, somewhere in the afternoon, the understanding finds you anyway.

I’m not sure that can be replicated through reading about it. But I offer this account honestly, as one person’s experience of a very ordinary spring afternoon — and whatever, if anything, it might reflect about how a certain way of seeing the world takes root in a person without their ever deciding to plant it.

The blossoms are still there today. Go look, if you can.

They won’t be there long.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

I Keep Visiting a Dead Man’s Grave. He Taught Me More Than Most Living People Have.

Jiro Shirasu, cherry blossoms, and what Japanese aesthetics calls “the full feeling” — a visit to Shingetsuin Temple, Sanda City, Hyogo Prefecture

April 4, 2026 — Sanda City, Hyogo Prefecture

I drove ninety minutes from Osaka this morning to visit the grave of a man I never met.

Jiro Shirasu died in 1985, forty years before today. He was not my ancestor. He was not my teacher. He left no instructions asking anyone like me to come. But every spring, when the cherry blossoms are close to full bloom, I make this drive to Shingetsuin Temple in Sanda City — and stand at his grave for a few minutes, and say something like: The cherry blossoms are beautiful this year. I thought you should know.

Most Japanese people would understand this without needing it explained. For Western readers, I imagine it sounds slightly eccentric. That’s fair. I’ll try to explain — though I should say upfront that the explanation will probably fall short of the thing itself.

Who Was Jiro Shirasu? A Life That Refused to Perform

Jiro Shirasu lived what I can only describe as an unrepeatable life.

He studied at Cambridge in the 1920s, drove a Bentley, wore Savile Row suits, and moved through the world with a kind of ease that should have made him a man of surfaces. Instead, he became something harder to name.

After Japan’s defeat in 1945, while much of the country was learning to bow in new directions, Shirasu was appointed to negotiate with the General Headquarters of the Allied Occupation. The GHQ officers he faced were accustomed to a Japan that had surrendered. Shirasu appeared to have missed that memo.

When an officer treated him dismissively — the way occupiers sometimes treat the occupied — Shirasu replied with something close to: Japan lost the war. We did not become your slaves.

He said it. He meant it. And somehow it landed — perhaps because it came from someone who had been educated in the West and couldn’t easily be dismissed as simply not understanding the room.

He called this way of living his principle. Not a tactic. Not a negotiating strategy. A principle: the thing you do not compromise, regardless of who is in the room or what they can do to you.

Shingetsuin Temple in April: The Blossoms Were Doing Everything They Could

When I arrived at the temple this morning, the first thing I saw was the blossoms.

I knew they were near peak — the forecasts had said so — but knowing and seeing are different things. The trees along the path were absolutely full, the kind of full that looks almost excessive, like they couldn’t help themselves. The sky was that particular Kansai blue you get in early April when the air is still cool but the sun is genuinely warm. I stood there for a moment before even walking toward the grave.

I felt happy. Simply, completely happy. The kind of happiness that doesn’t ask you to analyze it.

Then, almost at the same moment, I was aware that this will be gone in a week.

Not faded. Gone. The petals will fall, the branches will go quiet, and what remains will be the tender yellow-green leaves that come after — which carry their own quiet beauty, but it’s a different thing entirely. The moment I was standing in right then — this specific light, this temperature, these particular blossoms at this particular fullness — this was the only time it had ever existed, and the only time it would.

That awareness didn’t cancel the happiness. It intensified it.

Mono no Aware: Not Melancholy, But the Full Feeling

This is what Japanese aesthetics has always tried to hold: that joy and sorrow are not opposites. They’re the same sensation seen from two angles at once. The blossoms are beautiful because they fall. The visit matters because I won’t always be able to make it. The happiness I felt walking that path was inseparable from knowing it was already ending.

Japanese has a phrase for this — mono no aware — which is often translated as “the pathos of things,” or simply as melancholy. But I think that translation misses something. It’s not melancholy. It’s the full feeling: joy and sorrow occupying the same moment without either canceling the other out. Two sides of the same sensation, the way yin and yang are not opposites but a single thing seen whole.

Standing under those blossoms this morning, I felt it clearly. I was grateful. And I already missed it.

Shirasu’s Grave: Austerity as a Final Statement

Shirasu’s grave is simple to the point of austerity.

He left instructions before he died: no funeral ceremony, no posthumous Buddhist name. In Japan, it’s traditional to receive a kaimyo — a name given by a Buddhist priest after death, inscribed on the gravestone as a final identity. Shirasu refused one. The stone marking his burial place alongside his wife Masako carries almost nothing. A single Sanskrit character. That’s all.

Standing in front of it, under those extravagant, almost theatrical cherry blossoms, I felt the contrast as something almost physical.

The blossoms were doing everything they could. The grave was doing as little as possible. And somehow the two together made more sense than either one alone.

Mushin: The Zen Shape of a Life

I don’t visit because Shirasu was a great man, though I believe he was. I visit because his life is a kind of argument — not the verbal kind, but the kind made by how someone actually lived.

He had every reason to perform. He was educated, sophisticated, connected to power. He chose not to. He stripped things back to what he called principle, and then at the end, he stripped the final ceremony back too.

There is a concept in Zen — mushin, often translated as “no mind” — describing the state of acting without attachment to outcome or self-image. I’m not claiming Shirasu was a Zen practitioner. I don’t know what he believed privately. But the shape of his choices has the quality of mushin in it. Not as philosophy. As practice.

That’s what I find myself returning to. Not the biography. The shape.

What I Said, and What Was Enough

I said what I came to say. Something like: The blossoms are perfect this year. Thank you for what you left behind.

Then I drove back to Osaka.

By the time I got home, I was already thinking about next week, when the petals will be gone. And I noticed I wasn’t sad, exactly. I was just aware. Aware that today was the day. That I went. That the blossoms were full.

That’s enough.

Why I Write About Japanese Philosophy for Western Readers

I’m sometimes asked why I write about Japanese philosophy for Western readers. The honest answer is that I’m not always sure I’m writing about philosophy at all.

Today I drove to a grave. The cherry blossoms were full. A man who died forty years ago — who I never met — spent his life doing something I find difficult to name but easy to recognize. He refused to pretend. He refused to perform a respect he didn’t feel, or accept a treatment that wasn’t honest. And at the end, he refused to be memorialized beyond what was necessary.

I find that clarifying. Not instructive — I’m not suggesting anyone should live as Shirasu did. But clarifying, the way a clear day clarifies the shape of things.

If something here stayed with you — the grave, the blossoms, the contrast — I don’t think it needs to resolve into anything specific. Sometimes the clearest things are the ones that simply sit with us for a while.This piece works alongside a dialogue on the same subject. The messier, more honest version of this conversation lives there.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.