カテゴリー: Aesthetics & Impermanence

Everything Hidden in a Circle — What Japanese Family Crests Reveal About the Ethics of Simplicity

It was a Sunday morning in late autumn, and I had pulled out one of my older haori from the wardrobe — a dark indigo jacket I rarely wear now but can’t quite part with. Nicholas happened to be over, drinking coffee at the kitchen table while we talked about nothing in particular. He noticed me folding the haori over a chair.

“What’s that on the back?” he asked, squinting. “Some kind of symbol?”

“My family crest,” I said. “We call it kamon.”

He put down his coffee and came closer to look. The design is called Mitsu-mori Kikkou ni Hanabishi — three tortoiseshell hexagons enclosing a diamond flower. He stared at it for a moment.

“Huh. It’s really… clean,” he said, which I took as a compliment, though I wasn’t entirely sure he meant it as one.

A few days later, Catherine joined us at a café near Nakanoshima. I’d brought the haori along — it felt like the right prop for the conversation. She spread it carefully on the table and leaned in.

Catherine: It’s beautiful. It almost looks like a geometry problem. How old is this design?

Takeshi: Honestly, I’m not sure exactly. Kamon as a practice goes back to the Heian period — nobility used them to identify carriages and belongings. By the Edo period, commoners were using them too. The Kitagawa crest has been on our family’s formal clothing for generations. My father had it embroidered on his haori as well.

Nicholas: Okay, so — family crest. We have those in Europe. Coat of arms, heraldry, all that. Castles covered in them. The British are obsessed. But those look completely different from this. They’ve got lions, shields, crowns, gold everywhere. This is just… a circle with geometry inside.

Takeshi: That’s exactly the right observation.

Nicholas: I mean, I’m not criticizing. It’s actually more elegant. But it makes me think — why did Europe go one direction and Japan go another?

Takeshi: European heraldry grew partly from the need to be identified on a battlefield — armored knights, visors down, you couldn’t tell who was who. So the visual language became as loud and unmistakable as possible. More color, more symbols, more detail. The goal was recognition at a distance.

Nicholas: Right. Which makes total sense from a practical standpoint.

Takeshi: Kamon had similar practical origins — identifying family belongings, marking military banners. But at some point the aesthetic took a different turn. Instead of adding, Japanese design kept subtracting. The tortoiseshell hexagon doesn’t try to look like a tortoise. It just holds the essential structure — the six-sided geometry of the shell — and leaves the rest out.

Catherine: So the tortoise is there, but you have to… already know it’s a tortoise?

Takeshi: In a way, yes. Or you feel the connection once someone points it out. Before I knew what the hexagon represented, it just seemed like a beautiful mathematical form. Once I knew — turtle shell, ancient symbol of longevity and steadiness in Shinto tradition — I couldn’t unsee it. The meaning was always inside the shape.

Nicholas: It’s like… all the information is compressed. Like a file that needs to be unzipped.

Takeshi: That’s not a bad way to put it, actually.

Catherine: Can I ask something? Why nature motifs in the first place? Most kamon seem to be plants, animals, natural shapes. European heraldry has lions and eagles, sure — but also a lot of human symbols, crosses, crowns, castles. Japan’s seems almost entirely rooted in the natural world.

Takeshi: I think about this a lot. My honest interpretation — and I want to be clear it’s just how I read it — is that it reflects something deep in Shinto thinking. We don’t really separate the human world from the natural world. There are kami, spirits or divine presences, in rivers, mountains, old trees, animals. The tortoise isn’t just a tortoise. It carries something. When a family chose it as their crest, they weren’t just picking a cool shape. They were, in a sense, placing themselves under its protection. Aligning with what it represents.

Catherine: So the crest isn’t just an identity marker. It’s almost like a relationship.

Takeshi: That’s how it feels to me. Though I should be honest — most Japanese people wearing kamon today probably don’t think about it in these terms. It’s become more like a tradition you carry without fully unpacking. Which is its own kind of Zen, I suppose. The meaning is there whether or not you’re consciously reaching for it.

Nicholas: Okay, you mentioned Edo period earlier — commoners could use them too, right? So what was the deal with the samurai and their crests? Because I’ve read that losing your family name, like — having the family abolished — was some serious punishment. Like, worse than execution?

Takeshi: Oie-danzetsu — the abolition of a house. Yes. In the Edo period, there were cases where a lord’s entire family line was extinguished as punishment. The house would be dissolved. No heir permitted. The name, the crest, the lineage — ended. For the samurai class, this was considered worse than personal death because it meant everything your ancestors had built, and everything your descendants might have become, was simply erased.

Nicholas: I’m going to be honest — that’s hard to wrap my head around. As an American, the idea that my family’s reputation or name could be a reason to live or die… I don’t really have that. My last name is something I got from my grandfather. I like it. But if my company went bankrupt tomorrow, my kids would still be fine. The name would still exist.

Takeshi: That individualism — the self as the primary unit — is very Western. In the Japanese system, for much of its history, the ie, the house or family lineage, was the primary unit. You existed in relation to it. The crest was a visible statement of that relationship.

Nicholas: So the crest is not just a logo. It’s more like… a contract.

Takeshi: A contract with the past and the future at the same time. Yes.

Catherine: And the design itself — the simplicity — do you think that’s connected to that sense of obligation? Like, you can’t afford to be decorative when the symbol carries that much weight?

Takeshi: That’s a really interesting question. I’ve never thought of it in exactly those terms, but… maybe. There’s something about excessive ornamentation that draws attention to itself. And a symbol that draws attention to its own beauty might be pulling focus away from what it represents. Zen has a similar principle — the thing that tries hardest to appear enlightened is usually furthest from it.

Nicholas: The quiet ones in the room are often the ones you end up listening to.

Takeshi: Exactly. The kamon doesn’t announce itself. On formal clothing, it sits on the back, both shoulders, and chest — but always in white on the fabric color, always the same scale. It doesn’t compete with the garment. It completes it.

Nicholas: Here’s what I keep coming back to as a design question. European heraldry is beautiful too. You can’t say it isn’t — those illuminated manuscripts with full-color coats of arms, the craftsmanship is incredible. So it’s not like simple is better and complex is worse. Right?

Takeshi: Completely agree. This isn’t a competition. What we’re talking about are two different aesthetic ethics. European heraldry is an additive aesthetic — you build identity by accumulating symbols, each one adding a layer of meaning, history, achievement. Japanese kamon is a subtractive aesthetic — you build identity by removing everything that isn’t essential until only the core remains.

Catherine: Plus versus minus.

Takeshi: Plus versus minus. And neither is superior. They’re expressions of different ways of understanding what beauty is for. In one tradition, beauty demonstrates abundance. In the other, beauty demonstrates clarity. The interesting question isn’t which is better — it’s what each reveals about the people who made it.

Nicholas: You know what it reminds me of? Baseball statistics. Old-school scouts would say a guy who hit .300 with thirty home runs was the best. Modern analytics says sometimes the guy who walks a lot, never makes headlines, gets on base quietly — he’s more valuable to the team over a season. Same result, different philosophy about how to get there.

Takeshi: I’ll allow that analogy. Though I suspect you’re thinking about someone on the Yankees.

Nicholas: (laughing) Aaron Judge doesn’t need the analogy. He’s already the whole package. But yeah, okay — I see what you’re doing.

Catherine: Takeshi-san, can I ask something more personal? When you put on your haori and you see the crest — what do you actually feel? Not philosophically. Just personally.

I paused at that. It’s the kind of question that’s easy to deflect with theory.

Takeshi: Honestly? Something like weight. Not a heavy weight — more the way a good tool has weight. You feel it in your hand and you know it’s real. When I see the crest, I’m aware that my father wore it. And his father. And that whoever in the Kitagawa family chose the tortoiseshell hexagon made a decision I’m still living inside of. There’s a kind of… company in that. Not loneliness.

Catherine: That’s a beautiful way to put it.

Nicholas: I’m not going to say I feel that about my family name. But I’ll admit — I understand it a little more than I did an hour ago.

What to Take Away

Kamon are often described as Japan’s answer to European heraldry. That comparison is a useful door — but it’s only a door.

Once you step through, what you find is a design tradition built on a fundamentally different question. European heraldry asks: What can we add to make this symbol powerful? Japanese kamon asks: What can we remove and still have the meaning survive?

The tortoiseshell hexagon doesn’t look like a turtle. It doesn’t try to. It holds the turtle’s most essential structure — the six-sided geometry, ancient and patient — and lets everything else go. Black on white. Line and curve. No color, no gradient, no ornamentation. And yet somehow: longevity, steadiness, the presence of kami, a family’s relationship with the natural world, centuries of ancestry pressing lightly on your shoulders.

This is what I mean by simplicity dense with meaning. It isn’t the simplicity of a pictogram, designed to be understood at a glance by anyone. It’s the simplicity of something that has been refined over time until it carries more than it appears to.

Whether that kind of beauty speaks to you, or whether you prefer the honest abundance of a full coat of arms — that’s not a question with a right answer. What might be worth sitting with is this: every aesthetic tradition encodes an ethic. A belief about what beauty is supposed to do in the world.

The Japanese chose reduction. Not because complexity is wrong, but because they trusted that meaning, once genuinely held, doesn’t need to be announced.

What you do with that is entirely up to you.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT — Osaka Exploring Japanese philosophy and aesthetics through cross-cultural dialogue

A haunting waka by Ono no Komachi

花の色は うつりにけりな いたづらに わが身世にふる ながめせし間に

The colors of the flowers have faded away, while I spent my days in this world — doing nothing — lost in the long rains, lost in my own thoughts.

We were sitting at a small café near Shinsaibashi, the three of us, on one of those early April afternoons when Osaka smells faintly of rain and something almost sweet. The cherry blossoms had peaked maybe four days earlier. By now, the petals were collecting in the gutters.

Nicholas had been complaining about the crowds. “I don’t get the whole hanami thing,” he said, stirring his coffee. “You sit under a tree. You drink. The tree doesn’t care. What’s the point?”

Catherine, who had been looking out the window at the last few petals drifting down, turned back to him. “Maybe that’s the point,” she said. “That it doesn’t care.”

Nicholas looked at her like she had said something mildly insane.

That seemed like a reasonable moment to bring up the poem.

Takeshi: I want to show you something. A poem. It’s about a thousand years old.

Nicholas: A poem. Great. Is this going to be on the test?

Takeshi: There’s no test. Just read it.

花の色は うつりにけりな いたづらに わが身世にふる ながめせし間に

— Ono no Komachi, from the Hyakunin Isshu (100 Poems by 100 Poets)

Nicholas: Okay. I don’t read Japanese. So.

Takeshi: Right. Here’s a rough translation —

The colors of the flowers have faded away, while I spent my days in this world — doing nothing — lost in the long rains, lost in my own thoughts.

Catherine: Oh. That’s… actually kind of sad.

Nicholas: It’s about flowers dying. That happens every year. I’m not sure I see the big revelation here.

Takeshi: What do you think it’s about, Catherine?

Catherine: She’s watching the cherry blossoms fall, and she’s thinking about how time has passed. Like, she missed it somehow. She was right there, but she wasn’t really there.

Nicholas: Who wrote it?

Takeshi: A poet named Ono no Komachi. She lived in the ninth century. She was considered one of the greatest waka poets of her time.

Nicholas: Ninth century. So she was writing about being distracted before the iPhone existed. Impressive.

Catherine: (laughing) That’s actually not wrong though.

Takeshi: Can I tell you how I personally read this poem? This is just my interpretation — I should say that clearly. With poems like this, you can ask a hundred people and get a hundred different answers. The only person who knew what she truly meant was Komachi herself.

Nicholas: Fine. What’s your read?

Takeshi: When I read this, I don’t think she’s just saying “I got older.” I think she’s looking back at all the years the flowers bloomed and fell — spring after spring after spring — and asking herself: What was I actually doing during all of that time?

Nicholas: And the answer is — nothing, apparently. That’s what “doing nothing” means.

Takeshi: Maybe. Or maybe the “nothing” isn’t laziness. Maybe it’s something more uncomfortable. She was busy. She was thinking. She was feeling things deeply, writing poetry, living her life. And yet somehow, looking back, it all dissolves into this sense of itazura ni — “to no purpose,” or “in vain.” The time passed regardless.

Catherine: That’s a little terrifying, actually.

Nicholas: See, to me this just sounds like regret. Which — I get it, regret is real. But the solution is to do more, achieve more. You track your goals, you stay accountable. That’s how you don’t end up sitting somewhere staring at dead flowers feeling like you wasted your life.

Takeshi: I understand that instinct. It’s a reasonable response.

Nicholas: But?

Takeshi: I didn’t say “but.”

Nicholas: (pause) You were about to.

Takeshi: (smiling) Look at the flowers outside.

There was a tree just visible through the café window. Most of its blossoms were gone, but a few clusters held on, pale pink against the grey afternoon. None of us said anything for a moment.

Takeshi: The flowers don’t set goals. They don’t track their progress. They don’t lie awake in March worrying about whether they’ll bloom well this year. They just — do what they do. And then it’s over. And then it happens again.

Nicholas: That’s because they’re flowers. They don’t have consciousness.

Takeshi: Exactly.

Nicholas: …Is that the point?

Takeshi: I’m not sure there is a point, in the way you mean it. That’s what I find interesting about this poem. Komachi isn’t offering a solution. She’s not saying “meditate more” or “be more present.” She’s just sitting with the feeling that being human — having all this consciousness, all this interiority — doesn’t necessarily mean you were here for the moments that passed.

Catherine: It’s almost like the thinking got in the way of the living.

Nicholas: Okay, I can actually relate to that. Last season. Yankees. (stops himself) Actually never mind, I’m not doing this to myself right now.

Catherine: (laughing) No, say it.

Nicholas: I spent the entire second half of last season analyzing why they weren’t performing, running through lineup scenarios in my head during games, reading takes online — and then they went to the World Series and I barely remember actually watching the games. Like, I was there but I wasn’t there.

Takeshi: Hmm.

Nicholas: Don’t “hmm” me like that. It means something.

Takeshi: It means whatever you want it to mean.

Catherine: Can I ask something? Is Komachi writing this about one specific spring, or is it more like — all of it? Her whole life?

Takeshi: That’s one of the things about waka that I find remarkable. In thirty-one syllables, you can’t really specify. The poem holds all of it at once — the afternoon she’s sitting in, and every other afternoon she can barely recall. That compression is the form.

Catherine: So the ambiguity is deliberate.

Takeshi: Sometimes. Some poets in this tradition were famous for writing poems that could be read as innocent on one level and as sharp political criticism on another. The ambiguity was armor, in a way. But with Komachi — I don’t know. Only she would know what she intended. That’s something I have to hold honestly: my reading of this poem is just that. My reading.

Nicholas: That would drive me insane, professionally. Imagine sending an email that could mean two completely opposite things and calling it elegant.

Catherine: (quietly) I think I do that kind of thing all the time, actually.

Nicholas: What?

Catherine: Not say exactly what I mean. Hoping the other person will understand anyway. Or… maybe hoping they won’t.

Nobody had a response to that for a moment.

Takeshi: That’s a very waka thing to say.

Catherine: (surprised) Oh. I wasn’t trying to —

Takeshi: No, I mean it genuinely. There’s something in this tradition that trusts the space between words. The reader brings something to the poem that the poet couldn’t have anticipated. Komachi couldn’t have imagined us sitting here talking about her poem in a café in Osaka in the twenty-first century. Whatever meaning emerges in this conversation — she didn’t write that. We made that together.

Nicholas: So the poem changes depending on who’s reading it.

Takeshi: And when. And what they’ve just been through.

Nicholas: That’s either very profound or a very convenient way to avoid being wrong.

Takeshi: (laughing) Possibly both.

Catherine had been looking at the translation again on her phone. She set it down.

Catherine: I keep coming back to the flowers. The way you described it, Takeshi-san — that the flowers just bloom and fall without thinking about it. Is that what she’s envying? Like, she wishes she could do that?

Takeshi: That’s an interesting way to read it. What makes you feel that?

Catherine: Because the poem doesn’t feel angry. It feels… wistful. Like she’s not blaming herself exactly. She’s just noticing the difference. Between how the flowers exist and how she exists. And maybe there’s something a little lonely in being the only one who noticed.

The table was quiet for a moment.

Takeshi: That’s a beautiful reading, Catherine.

Catherine: But it’s probably not what she meant.

Takeshi: (pause) Only she would know.

Catherine: Right. (softly) Only she would know.

Nicholas: Okay. I will admit. That’s a lot of weight for a short poem about flowers.

Takeshi: That’s waka.

Nicholas: Thirty-one syllables.

Takeshi: Thirty-one syllables.

Nicholas: And nobody knows what it means.

Takeshi: Everybody knows what it means. That’s the problem.

Nicholas looked at him. Then he looked out at the rain starting to fall, and the last petals coming down from the tree outside, and he didn’t say anything for a little while.

Neither did the rest of us.

What to Take Away

There’s a temptation, when encountering a poem like this, to want the answer. What did she really mean? What’s the lesson?

I’ve sat with this poem for years, and I’ve made peace with not having a clean answer. The reading I’ve shared here is mine — shaped by my own sense of what it is to watch a season pass and wonder where the time went. Someone else might arrive at something different. That’s not a flaw in the poem. It may be the poem’s greatest feature.

What I do think is worth sitting with is the image Komachi leaves us: flowers that bloom and fall without thinking about it. Humans who think, and plan, and remember, and regret — and who sometimes arrive at the end of a season surprised by how little they recall of actually being in it.

This isn’t an instruction to stop thinking. It isn’t a case for one way of being over another.

It’s just a question, asked quietly, across a thousand years:

While the flowers were falling — what were you doing?

Whatever your answer is, it’s yours. Komachi isn’t here to tell you if you’re right.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture through conversation. New pieces are published regularly on Medium.

The 1,000-Year-Old Secret Inside a Single Japanese Word

What a 9th-century poet hid in the rain — and why it still haunts our modern distractions

I want to return to a poem I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Not to explain it — I said in my last piece that only Ono no Komachi could do that, and I meant it. But there is something inside this poem that I didn’t mention before. Something hiding in plain sight, in a single word, that I think says more about Japanese aesthetics than most essays on the subject ever manage to.

Here is the poem again:

花の色は うつりにけりな いたづらに わが身世にふる ながめせし間に

And a rough English rendering:

The colors of the flowers have faded away, while I spent my days in this world — doing nothing — lost in the long rains, lost in my own thoughts.

I added those last four words myself. That addition is not in the original. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Thirty-One Syllables

Waka — the classical Japanese poetic form from which haiku later descended — follows a strict structure: five syllables, seven, five, seven, seven. Thirty-one in total. That’s roughly the length of a single sentence in English.

Inside those thirty-one syllables, a poet of this tradition was expected to evoke season, emotion, landscape, longing, and often a philosophical undercurrent — all at once, without stating any of them directly.

This is not compression in the way a headline is compressed. It’s more like what happens when you press your thumb into clay. The material doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere else, deeper, and the shape that remains carries the pressure of what was applied.

The constraint was the point. Saying less forced the poet to mean more.

The Word I Left Out

In the poem’s final lines, there is a word I want you to look at closely.

ながめせし間に

Nagame-seshi ma ni.

“During the time I spent in nagame.”

In my earlier translation, I rendered nagame as “lost in my own thoughts” — the sense of drifting, of the mind wandering while the body stays still. That’s one valid reading. But it’s only half the word.

Nagame (眺め) means a distant gaze. A kind of unfocused looking. The mind going somewhere the eyes aren’t.

But nagame (長雨) also means long rain. The slow, grey, persistent rain of late spring in Japan — the rain that comes after the cherry blossoms have gone and settles in for weeks.

Same sound. Two written forms. Two meanings.

In waka, this technique is called kakekotoba — a pivot word, or a word that faces two directions at once. The poet writes one word, and the reader hears both meanings simultaneously. Neither cancels the other out. Both are present, layered, the way two panes of glass laid on top of each other let you see through both.

This is why I added “lost in the long rains” to my translation. I was trying, clumsily, to make visible what the Japanese holds in a single word. In English, I needed seven words to do what Komachi did with one.

Why This Matters

You might ask: is this just a clever trick? A kind of literary wordplay?

I don’t think so. Or rather — yes, it’s clever. Komachi was a sophisticated poet and she knew exactly what she was doing. But the effect of kakekotoba isn’t just cleverness.

When you read nagame and feel both meanings at once — the rain outside and the drift inside — something happens. The boundary between the external world and the internal world dissolves, briefly. The long rains aren’t just weather. Her thoughts aren’t just private. The poem puts them in the same place, occupying the same syllable.

This is, I think, a profoundly Japanese aesthetic instinct. The idea that inner and outer are not separate chambers. That the quality of a rainy afternoon and the quality of a mood can be the same thing, expressed by the same word.

Wabi-sabi reaches for this. The aesthetics of the tea ceremony reach for this. The design of a traditional Japanese room — where the garden outside is treated as part of the interior — reaches for this.

Komachi was doing it in the ninth century, in thirty-one syllables, in a single word.

What Cannot Be Translated

I want to be honest about something.

But first — a small confession about my own relationship to this poem.

In Japan, classical literature is not an elective. It is part of the standard middle school curriculum, taught alongside modern Japanese in a subject called kogo — classical language. By the time most Japanese students are thirteen or fourteen, they have already encountered waka, read passages from The Tale of Genji, and struggled through the opening lines of The Pillow Book. The strangeness of the old language is something we meet young, before we have fully decided what we find strange.

This matters more than it might seem. When I read Komachi’s poem, I am not translating it in my head. The sounds, the rhythm, the emotional weight of certain words — these are things I absorbed before I had the vocabulary to analyze them. The poem arrives in me the way a childhood song arrives: not as information, but as something already inside.

I tell you this not to claim any special authority over the poem’s meaning — I’ve already said I have none — but because I think it explains something about why waka can feel so opaque to readers encountering it from outside. It is not just that the language is old, or that the cultural references require footnotes. It is that Japanese readers typically come to these poems with a kind of embodied familiarity that no amount of explanation can fully replicate. The form doesn’t feel foreign to us. It feels like something we half-remember.

That gap is real. I think it’s worth naming honestly rather than papering over it with optimism about cross-cultural understanding.

The translation I gave you earlier — and any translation I could give you — loses this entirely. Once you render nagame into English, you have to choose. Long rain or distant gaze. You can add a footnote. You can write a paragraph explaining the kakekotoba. But the experience of the two meanings arriving simultaneously, inseparably, in a single sound — that cannot survive the crossing into another language.

This is not a failure of translation. It is a property of the poem.

And it tells us something about why Japanese poetry — why Japanese aesthetics more broadly — can be so difficult to explain to someone encountering it from outside. Not because the ideas are foreign. But because the vehicle that carries the ideas is itself part of the meaning. Strip the vehicle away and you have something that points at the original, but is no longer the original.

I am not saying this to discourage anyone. I am saying it because I think honest disappointment is more useful than false accessibility. When you encounter a limit, you at least know where you are.

The Interpretation Problem

There’s one more thing I want to address, and I’ll be direct about it.

My reading of this poem — the one I shared in conversation with Nicholas and Catherine, and the one implicit in everything I’ve written here — is mine. It is shaped by my own experience of watching springs pass in Japan, by the years I’ve spent with these texts, by the particular way my mind moves when I read old poetry.

Komachi scholars have debated this poem for centuries. Some read it as a lament about lost beauty and the cruelty of aging. Some read it as a love poem, the flowers a metaphor for a relationship that faded while she was distracted. Some have suggested that the poem was addressed to a specific person — a lover, a rival — and that the ambiguity was strategic, the way a sharp thing can be wrapped in silk.

I don’t know which reading is correct. I am not sure correct is the right word for what any of us is doing when we read this poem.

What I do believe is that waka — at its best — was designed to hold multiple truths at once, the way nagame holds two meanings in the same sound. The poem does not resolve. It opens. And each reader brings something to the opening that the poet could not have anticipated.

This is not a weakness of the form. This is the form’s highest ambition.

A Closing Thought

I began studying waka because I wanted to understand something about Japanese aesthetics that I couldn’t find in design theory or philosophy. What I found, eventually, was this:

The Japanese aesthetic tradition is not primarily interested in beauty as an object. It is interested in beauty as an experience that happens in the relationship between the thing and the person encountering it.

The kakekotoba is not beautiful because it’s clever. It’s beautiful because it creates a space where the reader has to bring both meanings forward simultaneously, and in doing so, participates in making the poem complete. Without the reader’s attention, the double meaning collapses. With it, the poem becomes briefly, quietly alive.

Komachi wrote this sometime in the ninth century. She has been dead for more than a thousand years. I cannot know what she intended.

But sitting with this poem on a rainy afternoon in Osaka, watching the last of the cherry blossoms disappear — I feel something I don’t have a precise word for in English.

In Japanese, we sometimes say mono no aware. The bittersweet sense of things passing. The emotion that arrives not when something is gone, but in the exact moment of its going.

Maybe that’s what nagame holds, in the end. The looking, and the rain, and the knowledge that both are already ending, and the strange grace of noticing before they do.

If you found peace in these words, feel free to follow for more reflections on Zen and philosophy. Let’s walk this path together.

This essay is a companion piece to a dialogue conversation on the same poem, which you can find here

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror.

Why Catherine Got More Beautiful in Japan

A conversation about green tea, matcha, and the philosophy hidden in your cup

It started with a simple observation.

We were sitting at a café near Nakanoshima, the kind of early autumn afternoon where the light turns gold and nobody’s in a real hurry to go anywhere. Nicholas was on his second coffee. I had hojicha. Catherine walked in, dropped her bag on the chair across from me, and pulled out — as always — a bottle of green tea from her tote.

Nicholas looked at her, then at me, then back at her.

“Has anyone told you,” he said, squinting a little, “that you look… different? Like, good different. Like you’re actually sleeping and eating vegetables or something.”

Catherine laughed, a little caught off guard. “I mean, I’ve been getting that a lot lately actually.”

That’s how this conversation began.

Nicholas: Okay, I have to ask. My wife started doing some skincare thing she found on Instagram, costs her like four hundred bucks a month. Catherine shows up looking like this and her secret is what — green tea from a vending machine?

Takeshi: laughs I’m not a dermatologist, so I can’t promise you anything. But I’ll say this — walk into any convenience store in Japan, look at what’s in people’s bags on the train, see what everyone’s drinking. It’s almost always tea. Hot or cold, winter or summer.

Catherine: That’s honestly what happened to me. When I first got here, I was still buying coffee or the canned lattes, you know. But then I started noticing that literally everyone around me had this little bottle of green tea. And I don’t know, I just started doing it too. It felt… natural? After a while I couldn’t imagine going a day without it.

Nicholas: And that’s it? That’s the whole secret?

Catherine: I mean, I don’t know if it’s the secret. But my skin has been better since I moved here. My hair feels different — I don’t know if that’s the tea or the water or the food or just the lifestyle. Probably all of it. But the tea thing, I notice it when I forget to bring it. I feel off.

Takeshi: There’s actually something worth knowing about why that might be. Green tea — and matcha especially — is packed with catechins. They’re a type of polyphenol, very strong antioxidants. Japan has one of the highest concentrations of catechin-rich tea varieties in the world, partly because of the climate, partly because of how the tea is processed. When you heat green tea leaves, you preserve those compounds in a way that oxidized teas like black tea don’t.

Nicholas: Antioxidants. Okay, I’ve heard this word about fifteen thousand times. What does it actually do?

Takeshi: Simply put — it fights oxidative stress in your cells. That process is linked to inflammation, aging, skin degradation. Catechins also have some antibacterial properties, which is part of why Japanese people traditionally drank green tea with and after meals. It’s practical.

Nicholas: So it’s basically free skincare.

Takeshi: laughs I wouldn’t put it that way. But it’s not nothing.

Catherine: I’ve read some blogs by foreigners living in Japan — a lot of people write about this. Like, they came here and their skin improved and they half-joke that it’s the tea. I used to think that was just the excitement of being somewhere new. But now I’m not so sure.

Nicholas: What’s the actual difference between regular green tea and matcha? I always assumed matcha was just green tea that someone pulverized and started charging twelve dollars a cup for.

Takeshi: laughs That’s fair. The difference is significant though. With regular green tea, you steep the leaves and drink the water. The leaves get thrown away. With matcha, you’re grinding the entire leaf — the whole thing — into a fine powder and consuming all of it. So you’re getting the full concentration of nutrients, chlorophyll, L-theanine, catechins. It’s a different experience nutritionally and in terms of flavor.

Catherine: The L-theanine thing is interesting to me. I’ve been reading about it. It’s supposed to create a kind of calm focus? Like the opposite of caffeine jitters?

Takeshi: That’s roughly right. Matcha has caffeine, but L-theanine modulates how your body responds to it. The effect is less of a spike and more of a steady, present kind of alertness. Some people describe it as meditative clarity. Which is actually not a coincidence — matcha was historically used by Zen monks during long meditation sessions, specifically because it kept them alert without agitating the mind.

Nicholas: Huh. So Buddhist monks were essentially the first biohackers.

Takeshi: laughs I don’t think I’d phrase it that way in front of a monk. But there’s some truth to that.

Catherine: Takeshi-san, can I ask you something about the tea ceremony? I’ve been wanting to go to one properly but I feel like… I don’t know. Like I’d be a tourist there. Like I’d miss the point of it.

Takeshi: That’s a good concern to have. Most people who go to a tourist tea ceremony experience are receiving something — a performance. The real thing is different. It’s not a performance. It’s closer to a shared silence.

Nicholas: A shared silence. Okay, speak English for a second. What does that actually mean?

Takeshi: Let me try. There’s a phrase that’s central to tea ceremony — ichi-go ichi-e. It means “one time, one meeting.” The idea is that this specific gathering — this exact combination of people, this light, this season, this moment — will never happen again. That’s not poetry. That’s just true. And the ceremony is built around that truth. Every movement, every gesture, every choice of bowl and scroll and flower in the alcove — it’s all designed to make you present to that unrepeatable moment.

Nicholas: That’s… actually kind of heavy when you say it like that.

Takeshi: It’s the opposite of heavy. It’s lightening. When you really feel that this moment won’t come back, you stop being somewhere else in your head. You’re just here.

Catherine: But is there more to it? I’ve heard that gratitude is a big part of it too?

Takeshi: Yes. And this is the part that’s hard to put into words without it sounding like a poster on someone’s office wall. When you sit with a bowl of matcha in your hands, the tea has a history. Someone planted the tea plants — probably on a slope in Uji, or Nishio, or Kyushu. Someone else pruned them, tended them for years, waited for the right moment to shade the plants before harvest to concentrate the chlorophyll. Someone picked the leaves by hand. Someone processed them. Someone transported them. Someone prepared this bowl with care. And now it’s in your hands, warm.

Catherine: That’s a lot of people.

Takeshi: It’s always a lot of people. For everything. We just don’t usually stop to notice.

Nicholas: Okay, I’m going to be honest with you — that’s the kind of thing that in New York I would have rolled my eyes at. But sitting here, it doesn’t feel like a cliché. I’m not sure why.

Takeshi: Maybe because no one’s trying to sell it to you.

Nicholas: laughs Fair point.

Catherine: Do you do the full ceremony yourself, Takeshi-san?

Takeshi: Not formally. I’m not trained in the way someone who has studied with a master for many years is. But I make tea at home with intention. I don’t do it while looking at my phone or thinking about what’s next. I boil the water, I wait for the temperature to drop a little — you don’t pour boiling water over good green tea, it burns the leaves and turns it bitter — and I just make the tea. That’s all. It takes maybe four minutes.

Nicholas: Four minutes of not looking at your phone. That sounds genuinely difficult for me.

Takeshi: laughs Start with two.

Catherine: Can I ask — is there something you’re thinking about during those four minutes? Or is it really just… nothing?

Takeshi: Somewhere in between, I think. I’m aware of the sounds. The water. The steam. Sometimes I think about where the tea came from, just briefly. It’s not forced. It’s more like the act of making tea creates a small, quiet room inside the day. You can step into it or not. I just try to step into it.

Nicholas: So what’s your actual take on this? Like, should I be swapping my morning Americano for a bowl of grass-flavored powder?

Takeshi: laughs Please don’t do anything because I suggested it. But I’ll say — the cultural habit of drinking tea in Japan isn’t just about nutrients. It’s about pacing. It creates pauses. Most people here drink tea several times a day, which means they stop and make tea several times a day. Those are small breaks built into the rhythm of life. Whether the catechins are doing something for your cells or not, the act of pausing is doing something.

Nicholas: I will say, since I moved here I drink way less alcohol than I used to in New York. I think partly because there’s always this tea option that’s… satisfying somehow. Doesn’t feel like deprivation.

Catherine: I’ve noticed that too. I barely think about wine anymore, which is weird because in the States I drank it like water.

Takeshi: Japan has its own drinking culture, that’s for sure. But tea holds a different kind of place here. It’s not a substitute for anything. It’s its own thing.

Catherine: Takeshi-san — you mentioned that gratitude is at the core of tea ceremony. Is that connected to the way you think about shrines? You’ve mentioned before that you don’t go to pray for things, but to report and give thanks.

Takeshi: Yes, they’re connected for me. Whether it’s tea or a shrine visit, the movement underneath it is the same — becoming aware of what was given to you. Tea involves people you’ll never meet. The fact that I’m here, healthy enough to sit in this café, involves people and circumstances going back further than I can trace. Acknowledging that isn’t religion, exactly. It’s just honesty.

Nicholas: You know what, my grandmother used to say grace before meals. And when I was a kid I thought it was just this old-fashioned ritual. But the way you describe it… it’s kind of the same impulse, isn’t it? Stopping to notice before you consume.

Takeshi: Yes. Exactly that.

Catherine: That’s actually really beautiful, Nicholas-san.

Nicholas: Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to maintain.

We ordered another round. Nicholas finally switched to green tea. He made a face at the first sip — a bit bitter, he said. By the end of the cup, he asked for another.

Some things don’t need much explanation. They just need one honest encounter.

What to Take Away

This conversation started with a compliment and ended somewhere neither of us expected. That’s usually how the good ones go.

Catherine isn’t more beautiful because of a product, a regimen, or a trend. Something shifted when she made one small, quiet change: she started carrying tea. And in doing so, she accidentally stepped into a practice that has shaped Japanese daily life for centuries — the practice of pausing.

Green tea and matcha are genuinely rich in catechins, powerful antioxidants that may contribute to skin health, reduced inflammation, and metabolic balance. L-theanine offers a calm, focused alertness. The research on these compounds is real, though no one cup is a cure-all. The habit of drinking tea — the stopping, the warmth, the ritual of it — likely matters as much as the biochemistry.

Tea ceremony, chadō, takes that habit and deepens it into philosophy. Ichi-go ichi-e — one time, one meeting — asks you to be present not as a self-improvement strategy, but as an act of honesty. This moment won’t return. The people who grew, picked, and carried this tea to your hands will never know you. The least you can do is notice.

You don’t need to learn a formal ceremony. You don’t need a tatami room or a bamboo whisk. You just need four minutes, a little hot water, and the willingness to step out of what’s next.

That’s it. The rest takes care of itself.

SHIBUMIWORKS is a dialogue-based media project dedicated to sharing Japanese philosophy and culture through honest, unvarnished conversation. New articles are published regularly on Medium.

If something in this conversation stayed with you, consider sharing it with someone who might need a quiet moment today.

She Came to Japan Looking for Beauty. What She Found Was Something Harder — and Better.

A conversation about how real practice changes a person, and what it looks like from the outside.

It started as a casual observation.

Nicholas and I were having coffee near Shinsaibashi on a Saturday morning — one of those slow conversations that drifts from business to philosophy to nothing in particular. Somewhere between the second cup and the third, he said something that stopped me mid-sentence.

“You know, Catherine’s different. Like, actually different. Not in a ‘she’s been reading a lot’ kind of way. Something else.”

I nodded. I’d been thinking the same thing for a while.

So when we all met up the following week, we decided to tell her. And then she told us what had been happening on her end — what she’d been doing, quietly, on her own, without making a big deal of it.

This is that conversation.

Nicholas: Alright, I’m just going to say it — Catherine, you’re different. And I don’t mean that in a weird way. I mean it like… something’s shifted in you since you first showed up at that Minoo hiking trail last year and complained the whole way up.

Catherine: (laughing) I did not complain the whole way up.

Nicholas: You asked me three times if there was a cable car.

Catherine: Okay, fair. I definitely asked that.

Takeshi: When I first met you, you were very enthusiastic — in that way young people are when they’ve just arrived somewhere new. Very bright, very eager. But also a little… scattered, maybe? Like you were trying to absorb everything at once and nothing was landing.

Catherine: That’s kind of painful to hear, but yeah, you’re right. I remember feeling like I was constantly behind. Like everyone around me understood something I was missing, and if I just read more, or visited more temples, or took more notes, I’d eventually catch up. It was exhausting.

Nicholas: And now you seem… I don’t know. Quieter? Less frantic?

Catherine: I think the shift started with the zazen thing. After our conversation about it — the one where Takeshi-san talked about susokukan, counting breaths — I just started doing it. Badly, at first. Really badly. I’d sit down for what I thought was twenty minutes and it would be four.

Takeshi: That’s exactly right. That’s how it begins.

Catherine: But I kept at it. And what I noticed — gradually, not all at once — was that I stopped feeling like I needed to get something from every experience. Before, I’d go to a temple and think, “okay, what’s the lesson here?” Like I was collecting insights the way you collect stamps. But after a few months of sitting, I started just… being in places. Noticing things without immediately trying to categorize them.

Nicholas: See, that’s what I mean. That’s the thing I noticed. You used to ask a lot of “but what does it mean?” questions. Now you ask different kinds of questions. Or sometimes no questions at all, which honestly is a little unsettling from someone who used to never stop talking.

Catherine: (laughing) I still never stop talking.

Takeshi: You talk differently, though. There’s less urgency in it.

Catherine: I think that’s real. The zazen has something to do with it. Just sitting there and watching your own mind try to escape itself — it’s humbling. You realize how much noise is happening in there, all the time. And once you see it, you can’t really unsee it. You start to catch yourself in the middle of the noise during regular life, too.

Nicholas: Okay, I have to bring up the trash thing, because I saw it happen and I still think about it.

Catherine: (slightly embarrassed) Oh god.

Nicholas: We were walking back from Tennoji, and there was a piece of plastic near the edge of the path, just sitting there. And without saying anything, Catherine just bent down and picked it up and carried it until she found a bin. No announcement. Didn’t even break stride in the conversation.

Takeshi: I remember you telling me about this.

Nicholas: What got me was — nobody saw it. There were people around but no one was looking at her. She didn’t do it to be seen doing it. And when I mentioned it, she almost looked embarrassed, like I’d caught her doing something private.

Catherine: Because it felt private. That’s the honest answer. I’ve thought about why I started doing that, and I think it goes back to something Takeshi-san said early on — about how Japanese people often behave the same whether they’re being watched or not. That the standard isn’t external. It’s internal.

Takeshi:

Hito ga mite inakutemo — even when no one is looking. This is actually deeply connected to Shinto thinking. The idea that everything has a presence, a kami. The path, the river, the tree. So you’re never truly unobserved,

in a certain sense — not because someone is watching and judging you, but because the world itself is alive. You are always in relationship with something.

Catherine: That framing changed things for me. I’m not a Shinto believer exactly — I don’t know what I believe — but something about that way of seeing the world made me take the idea more seriously than if it had just been “be a good person when no one’s watching.” It made it feel less like a rule and more like… a natural response to being in the world.

Nicholas: I’ll be honest, that part I still struggle with. The kami thing. My brain just doesn’t go there naturally. I was raised Catholic in name but skeptic in practice. When I hear “the path is alive,” some part of me just says, “okay, that’s poetry.”

Takeshi: And maybe it is poetry. But what does the poetry do to how you move through the world? That’s the interesting question, no? You don’t have to believe in a literal kami in the stone to treat the stone with care. The belief is a container for a behavior. The behavior is what matters in the end.

Nicholas: That’s… actually the most convincing thing you’ve ever said to me about any of this.

Takeshi: (laughing) I’ve been working up to it for two years.

Catherine: Can I bring up the wa thing? Because that one’s been the hardest for me.

Takeshi: Please.

Catherine: So — wa (和). Harmony. The idea of not disrupting the atmosphere around you, being mindful of how your presence affects others in a shared space. I understood it intellectually pretty quickly. What took much longer was actually living it. Because I come from a culture where self-expression is very prized. Being direct. Taking up space. Having opinions and stating them loudly.

Nicholas: American traits. Can confirm.

Catherine: And I don’t think those are bad things, necessarily. But I started noticing how much friction I was creating without realizing it. In conversations, I’d push my point past the point where the other person was comfortable. I’d walk into rooms and immediately try to be interesting. It’s not malicious — it’s just how I was taught to be present. But here it reads differently.

Takeshi:

In Japan, the one who controls the atmosphere of a room is often the one who speaks least. Presence isn’t about projection. It’s about… I don’t know the exact English word. Attunement, maybe.

Reading the frequency of the space and adjusting to it, rather than broadcasting over it.

Catherine: It took me a long time to feel that, not just understand it. And I’m still not great at it. But I’ve gotten better. I notice now when I’m about to push too hard, and sometimes — not always — I hold back. And what I’ve found is that those moments of holding back actually create more connection, not less. People relax around me in a different way.

Nicholas: I’ve noticed that too. You’re easier to be around. And I say that as someone who always thought you were fine to be around.

Catherine: (laughing) That’s the most Nicholas compliment I’ve ever received.

Takeshi: What I find most interesting — watching both of you over these two years — is that the concepts we talk about in the abstract eventually find their own way into your lives if you stay open to them. I never told Catherine, “you should pick up trash.” I never gave her a lecture on wa. She encountered ideas, sat with them, and then found her own expression of them. That is how it’s supposed to work.

Catherine: That’s the difference between reading about something and practicing it, isn’t it? I’ve read so many books about Zen and mindfulness and Japanese aesthetics. But what’s actually changed me isn’t the reading. It’s the sitting every morning, even when I don’t feel like it. It’s the picking up the trash, even when no one sees. It’s catching myself in the middle of a conversation and asking, “is this my moment, or should I give it back?”

Nicholas: I’ll admit something. I’ve started doing the reports to shrines. You know — what Takeshi does. When I travel somewhere for work, I’ve been stopping at a local shrine and just… standing there for a minute. Not praying, exactly.

I’m still not going to pretend I buy into the theology. But there’s something about the act of acknowledging the place you’re in that feels right. Like you’re a guest who remembered to say hello to the host.

Takeshi: That is honestly all it is. You don’t have to believe in the deity to practice the courtesy.

Nicholas: So I’m a Shinto-adjacent atheist now. Great. My mother would be thrilled.

Catherine: The thing I want to say — and I’m a little emotional about this, so bear with me — is that these conversations have genuinely changed the direction of my life. Not in a dramatic way. I didn’t have a single breakthrough moment.

It’s been more like… the water table rising. Slowly, invisibly, until one day you look around and realize the whole landscape is different.

Takeshi: That’s a very Japanese way to describe it.

Catherine: (laughing through a little teary) Good. Maybe that’s the point.

What to Take Away

Catherine didn’t change because she read the right books or visited the right temples. She changed because she practiced — quietly, consistently, without waiting to feel ready or inspired.

The zazen taught her to stop chasing understanding and start being present. The trash-picking taught her that integrity isn’t about audience. The practice of wa taught her that restraint can be a form of generosity.

None of these lessons came wrapped neatly in wisdom. They came through friction, confusion, and the willingness to stay in the conversation — both with us, and with herself.

And here’s what Takeshi and Nicholas want you to take from this:

You don’t need to come to Japan. You don’t need to convert to Shinto or sit for hours in perfect stillness. You don’t need to agree with everything we’ve said in these conversations — in fact, Nicholas still doesn’t agree with half of it, and that’s exactly why this project exists.

What you can do — starting today, starting small — is pick one thing from what you’ve read here and try it.

Sit in silence for five minutes in the morning. Not to relax. Not to manifest anything. Just to watch what your own mind does when you stop giving it somewhere to run.

Pick up a piece of trash when no one is watching, and notice how it feels — not virtuous, just quiet, just right.

In your next conversation, try holding back one thing you were about to say. See what happens in the space you leave open.

These are not hacks. They are not productivity tools. They are, in their modest way, practices of being human in a more considered, more attentive fashion.

If something from these conversations has sparked something in you — a question, a discomfort, a small recognition — we’d ask only this: don’t let it stay in your head. Take it into your hands. Into your mornings. Into the ordinary moments when no one is watching.

That’s where all of it actually lives.

If you found peace in these words, feel free to follow for more reflections on Zen and philosophy. Let’s walk this path together.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT is an ongoing dialogue exploring Japanese philosophy through genuine cultural exchange. Takeshi Kitagawa is a graphic and textile designer based in Osaka. Nicholas and Catherine are composite characters grounded in real conversations.

En (縁): The Invisible Thread That Brought Us Here

A conversation about fate, karma, and the strange beauty of being alive at the same time

It started, as many of our conversations do, with an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in Osaka. Nicholas had just come from a client meeting in Namba. Catherine had taken the subway from her university in Toyonaka. I’d been at my studio in Honmachi all morning, staring at a half-finished textile pattern. None of us planned this gathering with any particular agenda.

Which, now that I think about it, is exactly the point.

Which, now that I think about it, is exactly the point.

Nicholas: Alright, so what are we talking about today? I’ve got a 6 o’clock call with New York.

Takeshi: En. The concept of en — connection, or fate, depending on how you translate it.

Nicholas: En. Like… destiny?

Takeshi: Not exactly. Destiny feels too predetermined.

En is more like… the accumulated conditions that made something possible. Every cause, every chain of events, that had to align for this moment to happen.

Nicholas: So you’re talking karma.

Takeshi: Related, yes. In Buddhism, inga ōhō — cause and effect — is the foundation. Nothing arises without a reason. Every result has a cause, and every action becomes a cause for something else.

Catherine: So en is like the result of all those causes? Like, the web that everything leaves behind?

Takeshi: That’s a beautiful way to put it, actually.

Nicholas: Okay, but I’m going to push back here. I feel like “everything happens for a reason” is the kind of thing people say on Instagram under a sunset photo. How is this actually different?

Takeshi: (laughs) Fair point. The difference is that

en doesn’t necessarily mean things happen for a reason — like there’s some grand plan or purpose. It means things happen because of reasons.

Because of accumulated causes. There’s no script being followed. There’s just an endless chain of conditions producing outcomes.

Nicholas: Isn’t that just… physics?

Takeshi: In a way, yes. Buddhism and modern physics are surprisingly close on this one. But where physics describes mechanics, en is about the relational dimension of those causes. The fact that you and I are sitting here — that is en. Not because God arranged it. Not because the universe is fulfilling some purpose. But because a specific set of unrepeatable conditions converged.

Catherine: Can you give us an example? Like, trace it back?

Takeshi: Okay. Think about this: you, Catherine, grew up in California. Something — a professor, a film, a book, a random trip — made you interested in Japan specifically. Not Korea, not China. Japan. That interest built up over years. At some point you applied to a program in Osaka. You got accepted. You moved. You ended up at a specific café where we first met. Any one of those links breaks, and we don’t know each other.

Catherine: (pausing) That’s actually kind of overwhelming when you lay it out like that.

Nicholas: And I came here for work. My firm had an opening in Osaka, not Tokyo, not Fukuoka. And you, Takeshi, you’ve been here your whole life. Three separate chains, completely different lengths, and they all end at the same table.

Takeshi: Exactly. And there’s one more dimension that I find the most profound.

Takeshi: We are alive at the same time.

Nicholas: …what?

Takeshi: I can’t have this conversation with Miyamoto Musashi. Catherine can’t ask questions of Lady Murasaki. The people who will be born a hundred years from now — they can’t sit here with us tonight.

The fact that we share the same narrow window of time on this planet is itself an extraordinary condition.

Most possible combinations of human beings will never meet, because they were never alive simultaneously.

Catherine: Oh wow. I’ve never thought about it that way. Like, we take it for granted that we exist at the same time, but that’s not… guaranteed at all.

Nicholas: Okay I’ll admit, that one actually hit differently. (pauses) I was thinking about Aaron Judge the other day — greatest pure hitter I’ve ever watched. And I get to see him play. My grandfather never did. And I’ll never get to see Babe Ruth. That window, that’s not nothing.

Takeshi: (smiling) Exactly. And the Japanese have a phrase for this that captures the full weight of it.

Catherine: Ichi-go ichi-e?

Takeshi: You know it?

Catherine: I’ve heard it, but I’m not sure I really understand it.

Takeshi: Ichi-go ichi-e. Literally, “one time, one meeting.” The idea comes from the tea ceremony tradition — the understanding that every gathering, every encounter, is singular. It will never occur again in exactly this form. These specific people, this specific moment, this specific combination of moods and weather and conversation — it exists once and then it’s gone.

Nicholas: That sounds exhausting. Like, how do you enjoy anything if you’re constantly thinking “this is the last time”?

Takeshi: It’s the opposite, actually. Or at least, that’s the intention.

Ichi-go ichi-e isn’t meant to create anxiety about endings. It’s meant to create genuine attention to what’s in front of you.

If you really understood, on a gut level, that this afternoon can’t be retrieved — would you be checking your phone?

Nicholas: (looks down at his phone) …touché.

Catherine: (laughing softly) He literally just picked it up.

Nicholas: I was checking the Yankee score! (puts it away) But fine. Fine. I hear you.

Catherine: Takeshi-san, can I ask something more personal? Do you actually feel this — en — when you meet people? Or is it more of an intellectual concept for you?

Takeshi: Honestly? Most of the time, it’s intellectual. I’m not going to pretend I walk around in a constant state of wonder. (laughs) I’m as distracted and irritable as anyone. But there are moments where it surfaces, and when it does, it’s disorienting in a good way.

Catherine: Like when?

Takeshi: When I visit a shrine in a place I’m traveling. I have a habit — I always stop at the local shrine and just… report in. “I’m here. I arrived safely. Thank you for the conditions that made this trip possible.” Not a prayer, exactly. More like an acknowledgment.

Nicholas: An acknowledgment to who, though? You’re talking to… rocks and trees?

Takeshi: (thinks for a moment) To whatever it is that accumulates. The en that made it happen. In Shinto thinking, everything has a spirit — kami. The land, the river, the old tree. When I stand at a shrine, I’m not making a transaction. I’m not asking for anything. I’m acknowledging that I exist within a web of relationships — with the place, with the history, with the conditions that allowed me to be standing there.

Nicholas: I was raised Catholic. Didn’t stick. And I definitely don’t think there’s someone up there running the show. But what you’re describing doesn’t sound like religion to me. It sounds more like…

gratitude with an address.

Takeshi: (laughs) I like that. “Gratitude with an address.” That’s actually closer to it than most theological explanations I’ve heard.

Catherine: What about inga ōhō though — the karma side of it? Because that part gets complicated. Like, if everything is cause and effect, does that mean bad things happen to people because of something they did? That feels harsh.

Takeshi: Yes, and that’s where it gets misunderstood — badly, sometimes. The popular Western version of karma is very transactional. “You were mean, so now something bad will happen to you.” That’s not the Buddhist view, or at least not a sophisticated reading of it. The idea is far more systemic and far more humble than that.

Nicholas: Meaning?

Takeshi: Meaning that causes and effects are so deeply interwoven, across so many lifetimes in Buddhist thinking, across so many people and systems, that we cannot trace any single event back to a single cause and call it justice. It’s not that simple. What we can observe is that our actions do generate consequences — for us, for others, for the social fabric we’re all embedded in. The cause matters. The intention matters. But you can’t point at a person’s suffering and say “they deserved this.”

Catherine: That’s more nuanced than how it’s usually talked about online.

Takeshi: Most profound things are.

Nicholas: Okay so here’s my very American question. If I accept all of this — en, cause and effect, ichi-go ichi-e — what do I do with it? What changes on Monday morning?

Takeshi: Honestly? Maybe nothing changes on the surface. You still have your 9 AM meeting. You still want the Yankees to win. (Nicholas snorts) But maybe — and I’m saying maybe — you move through the day with a slightly different awareness. That the colleague you find annoying also arrived at this moment through an unrepeatable chain of causes. That the meeting you’re dreading is happening once, and then it’s over, and something else begins.

Nicholas: You’re saying it changes the quality of attention, not the content of the day.

Takeshi: If anything, yes. And even that I can’t guarantee. I’m not selling a system here.

Catherine: I think what I’m taking from this is… there’s something almost comforting about en. Like, I spent so much energy wondering if I made the right choice coming to Japan. If it was going to “pay off.” But if I take the en idea seriously — I’m here because of everything that came before, and what I do here becomes part of everything that comes next. The question of whether it was the “right” choice kind of dissolves.

Takeshi: (nods slowly) That’s a very honest thing to say.

Nicholas: For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here. This conversation wouldn’t be the same without you asking the questions you ask.

Catherine: (smiles) Thanks, Nicholas-san. That actually means a lot.

Nicholas: Don’t go soft on me, I’ve got a call in twenty minutes.

We wrapped up shortly after. Nicholas left for his call. Catherine had reading to finish. I walked home through Fukushima, past the old shotengai, past the shrine on the corner where I sometimes stop in the mornings.

I didn’t stop that evening. But I noticed it. Which, maybe, is enough.

What to Take Away

The concept of en resists being turned into a productivity tip or a morning routine. That’s part of its value.

At its core, en asks us to take seriously what we usually dismiss as coincidence: that the people in our lives arrived there through complex, unrepeatable chains of cause and effect. That we share a moment in time with them that will never be reconstructed. That the conditions making any encounter possible — any conversation, any friendship, any creative collaboration — are more fragile and more remarkable than we usually let ourselves feel.

Ichi-go ichi-e isn’t a call to be sentimental about every moment. It’s an invitation to be less absent from them.

And inga ōhō — cause and effect — isn’t a cosmic scoreboard. It’s a reminder that what we do now becomes a condition for what comes next. For us, and for others who will never know our names.

None of this requires adopting a new religion or belief system. You don’t have to stand at a shrine. You don’t have to call it Buddhism, or Shinto, or anything at all.

You only have to sit, occasionally, with the strange fact that you are here — at this specific moment in history, alive at the same time as the people around you — and that this, quietly, is extraordinary.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy through honest, unscripted conversation. Takeshi Kitagawa is a graphic and textile designer based in Osaka.