カテゴリー: The Cultural Lens

I did not want to clean.

For nine years, the bell at the end of the school day did not send us home. It sent us to our brooms and our buckets. Six years of elementary school, three years of junior high. Every child raised in Japan goes through this. If you know someone who grew up here, ask them whether they cleaned their own classroom for nine years. They will say yes, and they will not find the question strange.

What I hated most came in winter. On wiping duty, you carried a bucket to the tap, filled it, wet a rag in the cold water, wrung it out, and went over the shelves and the desks. Not your own desk only. Everyone’s. You wiped a classmate’s desk as carefully as your own, the cold rag pressed flat, since a desk half wiped was worse than a desk not touched. In winter the water was so cold that your hands felt as if they might come apart at the knuckles, and I wrung that rag with my fingers already aching, resenting every second of it.

And then I would look down into the bucket. The water had gone brown. I had been certain the desks were clean, and the proof that they were not sat right there, clouding the water I had carried in clear a few minutes before. It happened with the broom, too. You swept a floor you were sure held nothing, tipped the dustpan, and there was far more than nothing in it, a grey drift of dust. That is how I learned the room was dirty. Looking had assured me it was clean. My cold hands and the browning water taught me otherwise, and they did it by making me do the thing I did not want to do.

You might ask why I kept at something I hated. No one punished us for skipping it. There was no detention, no mark set against your name. We did it because we had done it together since the first week of elementary school, every child in the room, year after year, until it stopped being a thing you could question and became simply what you did when the lessons ended.

Something else came with the cold water, though I only understood it much later. On the days I was not on duty, my desk was already clean when I sat down, because someone else had wiped it. It was always clean. And because I knew the cold of that water from my own turns at the bucket, I could not take the clean desk as my due. Somebody’s hands had been in the cold for it. That left a small gratitude in me where I might otherwise have felt nothing.

I grew up hearing that this custom came down from the temple schools of the Edo period, an unbroken thread from some older and wiser Japan. That story is comfortable, and mostly untrue. The deeper root is the Zen idea of samu（作務) physical labour – sweeping, cooking, and repair, treated as the practice itself rather than as chores to clear out of the way before the real practice begins. What I performed as a boy was not ancient. It was written into the national curriculum after the war by planners assembling a new country. By the time it reached me, it had stopped looking like a rule at all. It was only what you did when the lessons ended, as ordinary as taking your shoes off at the door.

That ordinariness shaped me more than any lesson I sat through. Because I cleaned, dropping rubbish came to feel like a small shame, close to how a lie feels like a small shame. No rule produced that. Litter on the ground is simply work left undone, and the work was always ours. Cleaning was never a thing a paid stranger did after we went home. That single fact, set early and repeated for nine years, follows a person onto every train platform and into every borrowed room for the rest of their life.

There was another floor I wiped in those years, and no one ever forced me to.

From the age of six, I trained in kendo at a police dojo in Kobe. Some mornings, I would arrive early, certain I was the first, and find the boards already occupied, three or four others down on all fours, pushing wrung-out rags from one end of the hall to the other at a half-sprint. We had no mops then. You folded yourself over the cloth, pressed it flat with both hands, and ran.

No one assigned this. No teacher checked, and skipping it carried no penalty at all. But the dojo was a place we held as sacred, and wiping its floor was simply part of being there, no different from the bow at the threshold. It never once arrived as a choice. I cleaned, and two feelings grew in me while I did.

The first was plain: everyone else was down on the boards, so I could hardly be the one boy who stood and watched. The second was slower, and it has stayed with me longer. The work was cold and unpleasant, and because it was unpleasant, it felt right to be among the ones who took it up rather than the ones who waited to be told. You do not leave the thing people dislike for someone else to carry.

At school, I had been made to clean, and something in me pulled against it the whole time. At the dojo, no one made me, and I knelt to the cold boards willingly. The sacred floor gave the same cold labour a weight the classroom never troubled to give it. And so I had to give up an idea I had carried for years without examining it, that people clean only when they are forced to. Take the force away and the cleaning does not stop. Someone begins, unbidden, and the rest fold down beside him.

I have turned this over for a long time and cannot make it come out clean. I cannot even pretend the dojo was a fair test. Every boy on those boards had already spent years with a school rag in his hand. Perhaps the reverence I felt was real, and perhaps it was only the school reflex in better clothes, showing itself where no one was made to do anything. I have never been able to decide which.

Once a month, I take a bag around the Momozono garden at Osaka Castle with my neighbours, on our own time, though the city keeps a cleaning department that does the same job. When I watch them bent over it, none of them ever asking why they are giving up a Sunday morning to this, I feel the two things I felt as a boy.

There is the pride, which is real and which I will not pretend away. And under it, there is something colder. From a step back it can look like conditioning. It can look like a mouth full of teeth straightened in childhood, even and faintly unnatural, corrected long before the child was asked whether straight teeth were wanted.

Then I remember the dojo, where no one straightened anything, and the boys went down onto the boards anyway. Both pictures are true. I cannot lay one over the other and make them agree.

I am glad I was made to clean. I will say that without softening it. And I have stopped waiting for the gladness to answer the harder thing, which is whether it was right to require this of every child in the country, the ones it suited and the ones it did not, before a single one of us was old enough to be asked.

And I have no way to check the answer. There is no Japanese my age who was spared this, no unswept version of me or of anyone raised here to set beside the swept one. Ask whoever you like: they cleaned for nine years, which leaves me nothing to weigh the nine years against. A whole country, and not one of us was left out of it. Seen from outside, that may be stranger than the cleaning itself.

What I am left with is smaller than a verdict. The resentment and the habit did not arrive one after the other, the hating first and the gratitude later, the way these stories are supposed to go. They came together, two sides of one motion, and they have never come apart.

I am sixty-one now. I have forgotten the faces of most of the teachers from those years, and I have not forgotten the cold. Bring my hands near cold water in winter and the whole of it returns, the ache in the knuckles, the brown clouding the bucket, as near as yesterday. The room was dirtier than I thought. I found that out only because someone stood over me until I wiped it, and I still do not know whether I needed them there. I only know that I never stopped being the boy they stood over, and that whoever I am now was built around him.

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.

Katazuke: The Japanese Word for Tidying That Also Means Settling Things

On putting what’s out of place back where it belongs — including the parts of yourself you would rather not keep

I do graphic design for a living, and some afternoons the work simply stops moving.

It rarely stops for a good reason. I will have an idea, a real one, clean and whole, and then my own mind begins to crowd it. The client mentioned he liked a lot of white space. Smaller type is everywhere this season. Didn’t someone say the logo should breathe? None of it is wrong. All of it belongs somewhere. But none of it belongs here, in this moment, standing between me and the thing I had already found. The idea I was holding goes soft at the edges. It blurs, then drifts, and a hesitation appears where a moment ago there was none, over a choice I had no reason to doubt.

And the desk, meanwhile, fills up. When I try to force an idea, I pull references, I spread out printouts, I open six windows, and the surface in front of me turns into a landscape of half-finished thoughts. The room and the head go to pieces together.

So I stop trying. I gather the paper into a pile, close the windows, wipe the desk, and sit down again as if starting the morning over. And often, not always but often, a different idea surfaces on its own, while my hands are busy putting things away. I do not shout brilliant! I usually do not even notice the moment it arrives. I just find, some minutes later, that I am working again, and that the file goes in.

The thing you are looking for is most often found the moment you stop looking for it.

You know this. Everyone does. It is not Japanese, and it is not mystical. But Japanese happens to hold a small door onto it, in one ordinary word. What waits behind it is not a tip for working better. It is closer to being on decent terms with your own mind.

Two things the same word does

The word is katazuke（片付け）. Every Japanese child learns it before learning it means anything. A parent says it before dinner, a teacher says it at the end of the day. Tidy up. Put the room back in order.

But the same word carries a second life. We say we will katazukeru a problem, a dispute, an unfinished piece of business. There the sense is not tidiness at all. It is settlement: bringing a matter to its close, deciding what has hung unresolved. English keeps these two ideas in separate rooms: you tidy a desk, but you settle a score. Japanese keeps them under one roof.

Buried in the word is an even older gesture, hō o tsukeru（方をつける）, literally “to attach a direction,” to give a wandering matter its resolution. To tidy a room, then, is faintly to settle something, to bring a thing to rest.

I do not think a language builds a metaphor like that by accident. A culture that never split arranging from resolving comes, over centuries, to feel the order of the room and the settling of the mind as one continuous act. Straighten the outer thing and something inner quiets, not because you willed it, but because your own language never taught you the two were separate.

Not “spark joy”

Here I have to part ways, gently, with the most famous export of Japanese tidying.

Marie Kondo gave the world a word worth having, tokimeki（ときめき）, the small flutter of the heart. Hold each object; keep what sparks joy; thank and release the rest. Millions of people found real relief in it, and I would not take that from anyone. But notice what the method is for. It aims at something: a curated home, a lighter life, the self you mean to become. It is tidying pointed at an ideal.

And the moment tidying becomes a project aimed at an ideal, a quiet reversal sets in. You start walking the room hunting for things to be rid of. You stand holding an object you neither love nor need, negotiating with it. Should this go? Does this spark anything? The search itself becomes a low, grinding stress, and you have arrived exactly where you did not mean to be. In Japanese we would call it honmatsu tentō, the root and the branch changed places: you took up tidying to feel settled, and now the tidying is the thing unsettling you.

The instant tidying becomes a goal, it begins to undo the very calm you took it up to find.

What I mean by katazuke is smaller and less ambitious than a better life. It is not aimed at anything. It is only this: putting what is out of place back where it belongs.

The desk, and then the mind

Watch what the intruding thoughts actually were, that afternoon at my desk. The client’s preferences. This season’s fashions. Not garbage. Not noise to be thrown out. They were true and useful, reference material that belongs in a back drawer, pulled to the front at the wrong hour and left lying across the work.

So I do not throw them away. I put them back. And clearing the physical desk seems to do the same work on the mental one. The moment the surface is straight and the thing I was after comes back into view, the intruding thoughts lose their grip and recede on their own. They just returned to their drawer once there was room to see again.

The heart drifts, too

If the room mirrors the mind, and every language that fused tidying with settling seems to suspect it does, then the heart needs the same treatment, for the same reason.

Something dull and demanding lands on me: the month-end ledger, a tax form, a chore I cannot make interesting. And a part of the heart that ought to sit quietly in the back gets knocked loose and rises to the front. Irritation, mostly. It moves into the foreground, out of its proper place, and starts crowding the work exactly as the client’s half-remembered preferences crowded my design.

I cannot order it back. I learned this writing an earlier piece, about the swordsman’s fault the old teachers called igatsuki（居付き）, the mind that sticks fast where it lands and will not move. You cannot command a stuck mind to unstick, because the command is one more thing to stick on. “Settle down” is not an instruction the heart can obey. It never has been.

But I can tidy the desk. And I can let myself believe, without straining to prove it, that in putting the books back on the shelf I am also putting something inner back in its place. That belief costs nothing and demands nothing. The hands do an easy, honest thing, and the heart is invited, not ordered, to follow.

You cannot command the heart to settle. But you can put a book back on its shelf and quietly think: this, too.

I once wrote that when I flee my ledger to reorganize the bookshelf, I honestly cannot say what has happened: whether I cleaned to clear my head or cleared my head by cleaning. I still cannot say. But here is one thing I have come to suspect since. The books were never the point. Putting them back was.

The parts you cannot throw away

Some things in a heart look exactly like clutter, no different from the objects Kondo would have you hold up and release. Take sorrow. If you could, wouldn’t you throw it out? I think most of us, on a bad day, would hand over sadness itself and feel we had cleared some useless, painful thing from the house. Spark no joy; discard.

And yet a person who has never known sorrow cannot be gentle with anyone. The tenderness you show another human being is built, brick by brick, from the times you were hurt and survived them. Throw out the sadness and you throw out the kindness with it. It only looks like refuse. It is load-bearing. It cannot be discarded, because it is you.

Japan has an old feeling for this. Long before anyone systematized it, the tradition spoke of a single spirit wearing more than one face. Among them the aramitama（荒魂）, the wild and turbulent soul, and the nigimitama（和魂）, the gentle and harmonious one. (The tidy four-soul scheme some readers may know, the ichirei shikon, is a later, nineteenth-century systematization; I lean here only on the old rough-and-gentle pairing, and offer the reading that follows as my own.) The aramitama is no use at a calm dinner table. It rages and will not be soothed, and a well-ordered social life has no room for it. And it cannot be thrown away. Cut it out and you have not become gentler; you have become less.

So tidying the heart was never about discarding the wild parts, the sad parts, whatever embarrasses you at dinner. It is about returning them to their proper place, deep in the back, where they belong and hold the house up. You are not throwing them out. You are setting them down where they rest, and the manner of that return matters. You do it with care. The Japanese word for that care is itsukushimi（慈しみ）, to cherish. You cherish even the rough soul, because it is yours, and because the day will come when you need it.

Nothing is promised

I should tell you that I am bad at tidying. My own room is proof of it. And if the room really does mirror the mind, then I am probably no better at tidying the heart. The anxieties pile up on my inner desk exactly as the printouts pile up on the real one.

A tidy room, besides, does not stay tidy. Give it a week. And the heart is the same: return it to its place today and it drifts out again tomorrow, knocked loose by the next dull ledger, the next hard afternoon. This is not a technique that delivers a result. There is no result. There is only the returning, done again and again, for as long as you live in the room.

So I will not hand you a method. I will only tell you what I do, which is small. When the work stops moving and the desk has gone to pieces, I clear it, and while my hands put the books back on the shelf, I picture the desk as the inside of my own mind, and I imagine setting the anxiety and the irritation, gently, back where they came from, deep at the rear where they can rest. Whether anything actually returns, I could not say. I was never going to feel it happen.

But the file goes in. And something, I think, is quietly back in its place.

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.

Kibarashi: The Japanese Word for Cleaning When You Should Be Working

A diversion only clears your head when you forget it was supposed to.

It is the last week of the month, and the ledger is waiting.

Somewhere on my desk are the invoices and account books my tax accountant needs by Friday. I am terrible at this work. I dislike it in a specific, physical way: the columns, the receipts, the small dishonesty of pretending I remember what a given expense was for. So I have resolved to deal with it. I sit down. I open the folder.

Forty minutes later I am on my knees at the bookshelf, sorting paperbacks by height.

I did not decide to clean the bookshelf. At no point did I think, I will now avoid my taxes. The cleaning arrived sideways, the way weather arrives, and by the time I noticed I was fully inside it, absorbed, oddly content, dusting the tops of books no one has opened in years.

You know this feeling. Everyone does. The English-speaking internet even has names for it now (procrastination cleaning, productive procrastination), and a whole literature that treats it as a problem to be managed. Some of that literature scolds you: this is avoidance, a way to feel busy while the real task rots. Some of it forgives you and then immediately weaponizes the forgiveness. Set a ten-minute timer, ride the small dopamine reward, use the tidy desk to prime yourself for “real” work. Either way, the cleaning is a means. It gets judged by what it does for the thing you were supposed to be doing.

The word for clearing your head

Japan has a plainer word, and the plainness is the whole point.

The word is kibarashi（気晴らし）. It is not a philosophical term. Nobody sits you down to explain it; you absorb it as a child. A parent says it before a walk, a colleague says it on the way out for coffee, and no one imagines it means anything grand. Literally it joins ki（気） (mood, spirit, the weather of the mind) with harasu（晴らす）, the verb for a sky clearing after rain. To do kibarashi is to let the overcast lift. Not to force the sun out. To let it clear.

English keeps the same gesture buried in it (clear your head, get some air), so this is not some inscrutable Eastern secret. It is an ordinary human move that Japanese happened to name and keep. But naming a thing changes how a culture holds it. Because the word exists, stepping away carries no guilt and needs no defense. You require no therapist’s vocabulary, no app, no reason. The language handed you permission a long time ago.

Here is the strange part, the part that has stayed with me since I began paying attention to it.

The ledger is a duty, and I flee it. The bookshelf is also a chore (dusting is nobody’s idea of fun), and yet, dressed as kibarashi, I fall into it completely. Same drudgery, opposite gravity. As a task it repels me; as a diversion it draws me in.

The same chore I flee as a duty, I fall into as a diversion.

And when the shelf is finally straight and I stand up, I honestly cannot tell you what just happened. Did I clean in order to clear my head? Did I clear my head by cleaning? Was the tidying the point, or the escape? The two have dissolved into each other. I know only that I feel lighter, and that the ledger has somehow lost its teeth. I sit back down, and the work goes in.

Why you can’t do it on purpose

It would be easy to stop here and hand you the productivity lesson: clean the desk, unclog the mind, get more done. A magazine runs that article every week. But it is exactly wrong, and why it is wrong is the whole reason I am writing this.

The moment I clean in order to be productive, the spell breaks. Cleaning becomes one more item on the list, one more thing I am doing to get somewhere, and the absorption never comes. I stay half inside the ledger, resentful, watching myself dust. Nothing clears. It worked the first time precisely because I had forgotten the ledger, because I was not managing my mood but had genuinely lost track of it.

The moment I clean in order to be productive, nothing clears.

The philosopher Jon Elster called these “states that are essentially by-products.” Some things, he argued, can arrive only as the side effect of aiming at something else, and the direct attempt to produce them destroys them. You cannot decide to fall asleep, or to forget, or to be spontaneous on command. And you cannot, it turns out, clear your own weather by staring at it. The clearing comes only once your attention has been caught by something else: the shelf, the shop window, the film. By then the diversion has stopped being a diversion and become, for a while, the only thing in the room.

This is the thread running under the two essays that came before this one. Trying to relax makes you tense. Trying to make a day off “count” ruins the rest. And now: trying to clear your head on purpose keeps it clouded. The good things come in sideways, or they do not come at all.

The opposite of sparking joy

This is also, I think, why kibarashi never became a brand.

Consider the fate of the Japanese words that did travel. Ikigai（生き甲斐） crossed the ocean and came back a diagram, four overlapping circles promising you your reason to live. Tidying became a global method under Marie Kondo, whose KonMari approach asks you to take each object in your hands and keep only what she calls “spark joy,” tokimeku（ときめく）, a small flutter of the heart. Her bestseller promises that if you do it correctly, once, in the right order, you will never have to tidy again. Millions of us believed her. I was one of them.

I want to be careful here, because it would be cheap to sneer. Kondo’s method is gentle and, on its own terms, kind. But notice its shape. It has a procedure. It has a criterion. It has, above all, a promise: a result you are working toward. Tidying has been turned into a technique for getting somewhere.

Kibarashi is the quiet opposite. No procedure: you simply drift toward the shelf. No criterion: nothing is being decided. And no promise whatsoever. Nobody has ever claimed that kibarashi will change your life, or even that it will work. It asks nothing and guarantees nothing.

Kibarashi never crossed the ocean because it had nothing to sell.

That, I suspect, is the real reason the word stayed home while KonMari conquered the world. You can package a method. You can sell a promise. But you cannot bottle an experience whose entire nature is that you weren’t trying to have it. Turn kibarashi into a technique (do this to feel better) and you have rebuilt the ledger. It dies in your hands.

What the temple already knew

There is an older root beneath all of this, and I failed to see it for years.

Zen（禅） monasteries keep a practice called samu（作務）, the manual labor of the temple, the sweeping and weeding and cleaning of the grounds. An outsider reads it as the chores you finish so you can get to the real work of sitting. The priests I have known in Kyoto describe something else entirely. In their Sōtō（曹洞） understanding, the sweeping is already the practice, complete in itself; nothing is being led up to. The flagstones, the swing of the arm, the grit gathering at the foot of the wall. That is the whole of it.

Sweeping is not the road to the practice. Sweeping is the practice.

Kneeling at my bookshelf, having forgotten the ledger and forgotten myself, I suspect I am brushing against a domestic, secular echo of samu. And here I will say something that is my own reading rather than any established teaching: the kitchen version may be, in one narrow sense, purer. The monk with his broom at least knows his labor is meditation by another name; the frame is there, holding him. I, avoiding my taxes, had no frame at all. I was not trying to practice anything. Absorption simply arrived while my back was turned. Whatever it is that samu points toward, kibarashi may reach it precisely by never reaching.

So I am not going to tell you to clean your desk.

The temptation in an essay like this is the one I have circled the whole way through: to close it with an instruction. Next time you’re stuck, tidy something; it’ll get you unstuck. But you understand by now why I can’t. The instant cleaning becomes the thing you do to get unstuck, it is no longer kibarashi. It is management. It is the ledger in an apron, and it will not lift a single cloud.

What I can offer is smaller and stranger than a technique. The next time the month-end paperwork defeats you and you catch yourself, without having decided to, wiping the monitor or squaring the edges of a stack of books, don’t correct yourself. Don’t name it avoidance and drag yourself back to your desk. Let the diversion be a diversion, which is to say, let it stop being one. Something is already clearing. You were never going to feel it happen. That was always the arrangement.

This essay belongs to The By-Product Essays. Read all three here.

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.

Somen: The Japanese Summer Noodle that Never Changes

A simple 1,200-year-old dish that Japanese have come to love

It is a little past eleven in Osaka, and I already know what I want for lunch. I want it most days this time of year, once the heat settles in: a bowl of thin cold noodles over ice, a small cup of chilled sauce, and a few slices of tomato beside it. Nothing else. This is sōmen (素麺) , and by late morning every August it is something I look forward to it.

I have wanted it, off and on, every summer for as long as I can remember. Despite it is seeming like the least interesting food imaginable, I never tire of it. the fact that it is so loved while being so simple is the first of many interesting things about sōmen.

What is sōmen?

For those of you who don’t know, sōmen is a wheat noodle drawn out by hand until it is nearly a thread — finer than spaghetti, pale and almost translucent. its made from just Flour, salt, water, a little oil.

You boil it for under a minute, rinse it, and eat it dipped in mentsuyu, a chilled broth of dashi, soy, and mirin. It is usually served over ice as is, called hiyashi sōmen.

It is Japanese summer food in its plainest form.

Plain is exactly the right word because sōmen offers you no choice. Just think of pasta with its dozens of shapes, whole-wheat and egg and semolina, and a whole shelf of sauces resulting in a different combination for every night of the week. Variety is half its pleasure. You could eat it for a month without repeating yourself.

Sōmen is the opposite. It has one shape, because a thread has only one shape. It has essentially one preparation, dipped in that cool sauce. No ragù, no cream, no herbs. Sōmen is only ever sōmen.

I used to think of this as a limitation. However, I have come to feel it as a benifit.

There is nothing to get bored of, because nothing was ever put there to entertain you. What looks like poverty becomes, after a while, a kind of rest.

A Battle for Less, not More

If sōmen bends at all, it bends in a single direction: how fine the thread is pulled. In Miwa — the noodle’s birthplace, which I’ll come to shortly — the makers grade their sōmen with real precision, and every grade measures the same quality — Thinness. Since a hand-pulled noodle changes thickness along its own length, they don’t bother with millimeters; they count strands. The standard grade, Homare (誉), runs seventy to eighty strands to ten grams. The finest, Kamisugi (神杉), packs more than a hundred and twenty into the same ten grams — drawn so thin that only a handful of makers attempt it, and only in the coldest weeks of the year.

Even its one axis of difference runs toward less. The highest grade of sōmen is simply the one that has come nearest to nothing at all.

A Famine, a Prayer, and a Sacred Mountain

Miwa is a small district in Sakurai, Nara, less than two hours from Osaka, and it is where hand-stretched sōmen began — around the year 827, in famine and plague.

By tradition, a man named Tanenushi, the second son of the chief priest of Ōmiwa Shrine, prayed for the starving people around him and received an answer: sow wheat in the hills, grind it with a stone mill, knead the flour with the mountain’s spring water, and draw it into fine threads. That food is remembered as carrying people through the famine, and as the root of every hand-pulled sōmen since.

The mountain is not a background detail. Ōmiwa Shrine is among the oldest in Japan, and it is known for what it lacks: no main hall. Worshippers stand at the prayer hall and bow toward Mt. Miwa itself, which is the object of worship.

Years ago I climbed it and had to register, wear a white sash, and go up in silence, without eating, drinking, or taking a single photograph. I remember the quiet more than the trail. I won’t insist anything divine dwells in that mountain, but I came down sure that something does. I had a new appreciation for the mountain’s water and soil from which the noodles in my bowl first came.

A Dish Born of Cold

Another interesting fact about Somen is that the noodles are eaten in the fiercest heat of summer but are made in the deepest cold of winter. True Miwa sōmen is stretched only in winter in a two-day process in freezing air. The cold is not endured; it is the reason the noodles are any good. Worked slowly at low temperature, the wheat’s gluten grows dense, and that gives fine sōmen its koshi — the firm, springy bite that survives boiling water. Its strength is drawn out of the season least kind to it.

Which brings me back to the bowl, and to the thing I find quietly remarkable about eating it. The noodles sit in ice, and as I eat, the ice melts. Little by little the meltwater slips into the mentsuyu and thins it. The sauce I began with — dark, salted, insistent — turns paler and softer with every dip.

Most food declines as it sits, but not sōmen. As the seasoning weakens, the noodle steps forward: first a clean sweetness, then the faint scent of wheat, flavors the strong sauce had been standing in front of the entire time. By the last few bites I am tasting the sōmen almost bare, and it is just as good as the first bite.

I never manage to taste the noodle by trying to. I taste it when the sauce quietly gets out of the way.

What Noodles Taught Me About Summer

I have started to think a food like this shapes more than a lunch hour. Our appetites now are trained on variety — new flavors, new products, some fresh thing to try before we’ve finished the last. Sōmen trains the opposite muscle. It asks you to eat one plain thing, over and over, and to discover that the reward is not novelty but attention: the longer you stay with the same small bowl, the more it hands back.

This is a summer discipline as much as a meal. It is the same instinct that meets the heat by taking away rather than piling on — less in the bowl, less on the body, relief found in yielding to the season instead of trying to beat it. A thin, unchanging noodle taught that to a great many people, one hot afternoon at a time.

I ate cold sōmen every summer because I wanted to, not because it is tradition. In fact, nobody even mentions the tradition. I learned only much later — reading, as an adult, about that famine and that mountain — that the plain thing I reached for by eleven each August morning had been reached for, in more or less the same way, for over a thousand years. It turned out to be sitting underneath it the whole time, like the wheat dissolved in the water.

I don’t eat sōmen to honor twelve centuries. I eat it because by late morning, when the heat presses in and nothing else appeals, I find that I want it — the same thin cold noodle, the same fading sauce, the same few slices of tomato. That it happens to be ancient only makes it that much more enjoyable.

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.

A-CULTURATED’S JULY 2026 WRITING PROMPT

An admission in Osaka, and what it taught me about the one form of care my culture almost never offers

Nicholas had been in Japan for five years when he said something he hadn’t planned to say.

Nicholas and I were at a café terrace on Nakanoshima, the kind of place where the river catches the light and the tables fill with people from everywhere. Catherine had joined us, still carrying her bag from campus. She set her iced coffee on the railing and Nicholas said the thing that changed the shape of the afternoon.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, “and I’m not proud of it.”

Catherine looked up. I waited.

“There’s a guy in my building. Moved in maybe three months ago — I think he’s from Southeast Asia, here on one of the technical visa programs. And last week I watched him put his garbage out on the wrong day, in the wrong bags. Raw food just loose inside, no inner bag. And I just — ” He paused. “I felt embarrassed. Not for him. For myself. Because I thought, people are going to see that and think: foreigners.”

He said the word carefully, as though setting it on the table between us.

“And then I hated myself for thinking it,” he added quietly. “Because I was that guy. When I got here five years ago, I was exactly that guy. I didn’t know you’re supposed to wrap raw food in a small bag first so the smell doesn’t draw crows. Nobody tells you that. The collection schedule, the color-coded bags — sure, that’s all printed. But wrap it tight so it doesn’t stink, because the neighbors keep their collection point spotless and the crows will tear your bag apart by dawn — that part, nobody writes down. You just find out when you see the mess in the morning and the look on your neighbor’s face.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. A breeze came off the river and moved the napkins on the table.

“What happened when you were that guy?” Catherine asked without being accusing.

Nicholas leaned back. “Nothing dramatic. That’s almost the worst part. People were polite. My neighbors smiled. The HR team at work gave me a binder — garbage schedule, ward office directions, emergency numbers, all of it. Very thorough.”

“So you had the information,” she said.

“I had all of it. And I still felt completely lost.” He turned his coffee cup slowly. “Because nobody told me the other things. Like, don’t leave the office before your boss, even if your work is done. Don’t pour your own drink at a work dinner, wait for someone else to pour it, and pour theirs first. Don’t say no directly; say you’ll think about it, and everyone will understand that means no. Nobody handed me that manual. I just got it wrong, over and over, and learned from the silence.”

“From the silence,” Catherine repeated.

“From the way people didn’t react. From what they didn’t say. That’s how you learn here — you learn from the shape of what’s missing.”

Catherine set her glass down and was quiet for a while. When she spoke, her words came slowly — thinking out loud, not quite finished yet.

“I want to tell you something from my side,” she said, “because I think it’s the same thing, but from a different angle.”

Nicholas nodded.

“At Handai — Osaka University — there are students from everywhere. Korea, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, France, Brazil. My lab alone has eight nationalities. And the interesting thing is, it’s not just the Japanese rules that are unspoken. Everyone brings their own invisible rulebook.”

She paused, choosing her words.

“There’s a Korean student in my cohort who was shocked that I called our professor by his first name in an email. Back in California, that was just normal — professors expected it. To her, it was unthinkable. A French student thinks nothing of disagreeing openly in a seminar, and a couple of the Japanese students told me later, privately, that they found it aggressive. None of these people are wrong. They’re all following rules that were never written down, that they learned the same way Nicholas learned — by breathing the same air as everyone around them.”

“So it’s not just Japan,” I said.

“No. That’s what I’m saying. Every culture has its silence. And when you put eight silences in the same room, none of them work.”

I had been listening more than talking, which is my habit when a conversation is doing its own thinking. But something Catherine said had opened a door I’d been standing in front of for a long time.

“Can I ask you something?” I said to her. “At the university — when they do make the rules explicit, the ones for international students specifically. How does that feel?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Relieved. Completely relieved.” Then she caught herself and laughed. “I know that sounds strange. Americans are supposed to resist being told what to do. But when I got the orientation handbook for international graduate students — the one that actually said things like do not eat in the library, reply to your supervisor’s email within 24 hours, this is how you address faculty in writing — I almost cried. Not because the rules were difficult. Because someone had finally made the invisible visible. I didn’t have to guess anymore.”

She paused, and then said something I wasn’t expecting.

“It felt like being cared for. That’s the only way I can describe it. Not the welcome party, not the campus tour — those were nice, but they were hospitality. The handbook was different. Someone had sat down and thought: what will she not know? What will trip her up that she can’t see coming? That’s care. That’s someone thinking about you before you even arrive.”

Nicholas set his cup down. “She’s right,” he said quietly. “I’ve never put it that way, but that’s exactly what I wanted when I got here. I didn’t want more smiles. I wanted someone to care enough to tell me what I couldn’t possibly figure out on my own — the things so obvious to everyone else that it never occurred to anyone they might need saying.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was genuinely taken aback. To me, rules had always been rules — necessary, sometimes tedious, occasionally harsh. The idea that someone on the receiving end would feel cared for by being handed a set of explicit expectations — I hadn’t considered that. It was almost the opposite of how I’d always understood care. In my culture, care is precisely what you don’t have to say. And here were two people telling me that care, for them, was the act of saying it.

The owner brought a fresh pot of coffee without being asked — a small, silent act that proved everything we were talking about.

“Here’s what I keep thinking,” I said eventually. “The reason we — Japanese people — don’t say these things out loud is not laziness. It’s almost the opposite. When you grow up in this culture, the unspoken understanding between people is something precious. I don’t need to explain, and you don’t need to ask, because we both already know. That wordless knowing is a kind of trust. It might even be a kind of love. To put it into words would feel like admitting the bond isn’t there.”

Nicholas was watching me carefully. “So spelling it out feels like a loss.”

“It does. It feels like saying: I don’t trust you to understand me without instructions. And that’s painful. It’s why your neighbor didn’t knock on your door and walk you through the garbage system. Not because she didn’t care, but because explaining would have meant acknowledging that you were outside — that the understanding she shares with everyone else on the street didn’t include you.”

“But it didn’t include me,” Nicholas said. “That’s the thing. It just didn’t.”

“No. It didn’t. And that’s what I couldn’t see until I watched it happen.”

Catherine leaned forward. “So here’s what I want to know, Takeshi. If saying the rules out loud feels like losing something — that silent understanding — then what do you gain?”

I thought about it longer than I usually allow myself in conversation.

“You gain the stranger,” I said.

She waited for more. I tried.

“You gain the person who wasn’t born inside the silence. You gain the guy in Nicholas’s building who put his garbage out on the wrong day — not as someone who broke a rule, but as someone who was never given one. You gain the eight nationalities in your lab, not as problems to manage, but as people you’ve actually invited in, because you told them where the walls are and where the doors are. That’s what you gain.”

“But you lose the beautiful fiction,” Nicholas said.

“Yes. You lose the fiction that understanding is natural, that it just happens between people who belong to the same place. You admit that your harmony was built, not born. And the moment you admit that, it becomes something you can offer to someone else. That’s the trade.”

We didn’t resolve anything that afternoon. We rarely do. But as we left the terrace — Nicholas heading back toward his office in Kitahama, Catherine toward the Midosuji Line and campus, me into the back streets of my neighborhood — I noticed something I might not have noticed before.

At the intersection, a woman was explaining to a young man, clearly new to the area, how the crosswalk signal worked — the one with the separate pedestrian phase that catches everyone off guard the first time. She wasn’t impatient. She wasn’t performing kindness. She simply spoke — naming what everyone who lives here already knows, because she had noticed that he didn’t.

It was a small thing. It was not nothing.

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

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.

This piece is written in response to A-Culturated’s July 2026 Writing Prompt, “Care Has a Culture.”

A-CULTURATED’S JULY 2026 WRITING PROMPT

The Care That Refuses to Be Spoken

In Japan, the kindest thing we do for a stranger is also the thing that leaves them most alone

A friend of mine said something over coffee last month that I haven’t been able to put down.

He is not Japanese. He has lived here a long time — long enough that the country no longer surprises him, long enough that he moves through Osaka the way I do, without thinking. We were talking about the newer arrivals, the ones who have come in the last year or two for work, and he lowered his voice slightly, the way people do before they admit something they aren’t proud of.

“Honestly,” he said, “sometimes I’m embarrassed. They don’t know the rules. And because they don’t, people look at all of us the same way. As foreigners.”

I didn’t say anything at the time. I just nodded, because that is what you do. But something in it stayed with me, and it took me a few days to understand what.

It was this: when he first arrived, years ago, he was the one being looked at. He has told me the stories himself — the neighbor who watched him sort his garbage and quietly re-sorted it after he left. He didn’t know, for example, that you are supposed to wrap raw food in a small bag first, tightly, so the smell doesn’t seep out and draw crows. The collection schedule was printed; the color-coded bags were explained. But wrap it tight because the neighbors keep even their garbage point spotless and the crows will shred your bag by morning — nobody writes that down. You learn it from the silence of the neighbor who cleaned up after you without saying a word. He told me about the silences in meetings he couldn’t read; the sense, everywhere, of a rulebook everyone else had been handed at birth and no one would show him. He had been the stranger who didn’t know. And now, safely inside, he had turned to look back through the same narrow eyes that once fell on him.

I don’t tell you this to shame him. I tell you because I recognized the shape of it, and the shape was mine too.

The moment you are finally let inside a culture, you inherit its blindness along with its comforts.

The rules no one will say out loud

I have lived my whole life inside those unwritten rules, and until I watched someone struggle against them, I could not see them at all.

They are everywhere in Japan, and almost none of them are written down. At work, you do not simply leave when your task is finished; you read the room. In many schools, the children clean their own classrooms, and no one ever quite explains why — it is simply what is done. There is an order to who speaks first in a meeting, a rhythm to how a decision is really made behind the decision that appears to be made. There is a whole grammar of wa, of harmony, of not being the one who disturbs the surface of the water.

To me, none of this was ever a rule. It was just air. And the air worked because everyone in the room was breathing the same way — I understand without being told, and so do you. That silent mutual knowing is itself a kind of intimacy, even a kind of love. To spell it out would be to admit the bond isn’t there. I breathed it without noticing, the way you don’t notice your own language until you hear someone else stumble through it.

And that is exactly the problem. A rule you cannot see is a rule you cannot teach. When something feels to you like nature itself, you don’t explain it — you just feel a quiet wrongness when a stranger fails to observe it, and you call that feeling manners, or common sense, when it is neither common nor sense. It is simply yours.

The newer arrivals my friend was embarrassed by had broken nothing that was ever explained to them. They had only failed to guess a code that no one guesses — that everyone is simply raised inside.

We call it support. But is it care?

Here is where I want to be careful, because it would be easy to end on a comfortable note about tolerance, and I don’t think tolerance is the point.

Japan, in fact, offers newcomers a great deal. So do most countries I know anything about. There are orientation booklets, city-hall counters with translation, guides to garbage days and health insurance and where to register your address. Volunteers give their weekends to it. It is genuine, and it is kind, and I don’t want to diminish it.

But I have come to think it is not quite care. It is support. And the two are not the same.

Support hands you the surface: here is the form, here is the day the truck comes, here is the number to call. Care would do something harder. Care would say: the reason you feel lost is not that you missed a form. It is that we, the people around you, have agreed to understand each other without speaking, and that agreement has no door in it for you. Let me hold the door.

Nobody hands you that. The unspoken assumptions stay unspoken, because to the person inside, they don’t feel like assumptions at all. And so the newcomer is given every leaflet and still, somehow, left alone — fed the map of the streets but never the map of the silence.

Support gives a stranger the rules of the place. Care gives them the reasons no one thought needed saying.

What a Legalist understood two thousand years ago

When I think about this gap — between the support we offer and the care we withhold — I keep arriving at the same question: what would it actually look like to make the invisible visible? To take the unspoken and speak it? There is an old Chinese thinker who asked a version of that question over two thousand years ago, and I’ll introduce him briefly because he is easy to misread.

His name was Han Feizi (韓非子）, and he lived in the third century BCE, in an age of collapsing states and constant war. The dominant idea of his time — the Confucian idea — was that a good society runs on virtue: cultivate good people, model good conduct, and order will follow from the inside out. Han Feizi (韓非子） didn’t fully trust this. Virtue, he noticed, is invisible and unevenly shared. It works beautifully among people who already understand one another, and fails the moment a stranger walks in who was never taught the same unspoken things.

His answer was the opposite: write the rules down. Make them explicit, clear, and the same for everyone. For centuries he has been read as cold for saying so — the hard Legalist against the warm humanist.

But I have come to read him almost tenderly. Because an unwritten rule only serves the people who already know it. The instant you make a rule explicit, you have done something generous: you have made it available to the person who wasn’t born knowing. A written rule is the only kind a stranger can actually follow. What looks like severity is, from the outside, the first thing that resembles welcome.

The hardest form of hospitality

I keep thinking about my friend, and the version of himself he’d forgotten.

What he wanted, back when he was the one being watched over the garbage bins, was not more kindness. People were often kind. What he wanted was the map — the thing no one would say aloud, because to them it wasn’t a thing at all. And now that he finally holds that map, the most generous thing he could do with it is not to guard it, and not to feel embarrassed by those who lack it, but to speak it. To turn to the next person who doesn’t know and simply say the silenced part out loud.

That is the care my own culture is least good at. We are extraordinary at the unspoken — at anticipating, at sensing, at the wordless accommodation between people who share a world. It is one of the most beautiful things about this country. But it is a gift we can only give each other. To everyone else, our fluency in silence is a wall with no handle on their side.

To put the unspoken into words costs us something. It breaks the pleasant fiction that we simply understand one another by nature. It admits that our harmony was learned, and therefore teachable, and therefore not ours alone. That admission is uncomfortable. I think it is also the beginning of actually caring for someone who did not grow up inside your silence.

I am not going to end with advice, because I distrust essays that do. I only notice this, and offer it the way you’d offer a chair: the next time you feel that small, righteous irritation at someone who doesn’t know the rule — the one that everybody knows — it may be worth asking who ever told you. And whether the kindest thing you own is not the knowing, but the willingness to say it out loud.

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.

This piece is written in response to A-Culturated’s July 2026 Writing Prompt, “Care Has a Culture.”

How a 1,400-year-old constitution, born out of civil war and religious violence, still has something to say to a world that has forgotten how to disagree?

A Familiar Kind of Exhaustion

I’m writing this in the summer of 2026, and I don’t think I need to convince anyone that the world feels unusually combustible right now. In the United States, a fragile ceasefire with Iran hasn’t done much to calm a domestic climate where political violence keeps returning to the headlines. In Japan, we have our own versions of the same fever: heated arguments online about immigration and the so-called “great replacement,” bitter fights over gender roles, and a quieter, slower-burning resentment between generations who feel they inherited very different economies.

None of this is unique to any one country. But I’ve noticed something specific in how Westerners often talk about Japan in the middle of all this. There’s a common assumption — usually offered as a compliment — that Japan is peaceful because it’s homogeneous. One people, one language, one culture, therefore less to fight about.

I understand why the idea is appealing. I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think it was ever true. Japan’s reputation for social harmony wasn’t the absence of conflict. It was built, quite literally, on top of one of the most violent identity crises in its early history — and the phrase most associated with that harmony was written specifically because the alternative had already been tried, and it had failed catastrophically.

I want to tell you about that war, because I think the myth of a naturally peaceful Japan is doing us a disservice. The real story is more useful than the myth.

Before “Wa,” There Was a Civil War

Here is what most people outside Japan don’t know: in the 5th and 6th centuries, Japan was not a unified nation. It was closer to what we might now call a fragile federation of regional warlords — powerful clans called gōzoku, each with its own army, its own land, and its own ambitions. The emperor did not hold absolute power. He was more of a symbolic center that these clans competed to control. Alliances shifted. Assassinations were common. It was, structurally, not so different from the fractured, anxious environments many of us recognize today.

Then, in either 538 or 552 AD — historians still debate the exact year — Buddhist statues and sutras arrived officially in Japan from the kingdom of Baekje, on the Korean peninsula. This wasn’t a peaceful cultural exchange that everyone simply absorbed. It detonated an existing rivalry.

Two powerful clans found themselves on opposite sides of the new religion. The Soga clan, closely tied by marriage to the imperial line, embraced Buddhism and the continental technology and learning that came with it. The Mononobe clan, allied with the Nakatomi, held that worshipping foreign gods would offend Japan’s native kami and invite disaster. Both sides framed the dispute in religious terms. Neither side was really fighting about religion alone. This was a fight over who would define Japan’s future — the isolationists or the internationalists — dressed in theological language.

In 587, it stopped being a debate and became a war: the Battle of Shigisan, also recorded as Teibi no Ran. The Soga and Mononobe armies met near Mount Shigi, close to what is now Osaka. According to the Nihon Shoki, the Mononobe forces initially held the advantage. The Soga were driven back, demoralized, close to collapse.

There is a detail from that battle I find hard to shake. Among the Soga ranks was a boy not yet fourteen years old — the future Prince Shotoku. As his side neared defeat, he is said to have carved a small image of the Four Heavenly Kings, the Buddhist guardian deities, from the wood of a sacred nurude tree, and prayed with everything he had: if we win, I will build you a great temple. Whether you read that as legend, propaganda, or something that actually happened in some form, the underlying reality is not in dispute — the Soga rallied, the tide turned, and the Mononobe clan was destroyed as a political force. Its survivors changed their names to erase the association.

I want to be clear about what this war actually was, because it’s tempting to soften it into a tidy story about “Japan choosing Buddhism.” It wasn’t a debate settled by argument. It was total war between clans, and the losing side didn’t just lose an argument — it lost its land, its name, and in many cases its life. That is the actual, unromantic origin point of what would later be called Japanese harmony. Not agreement. Annihilation of one side by the other.

Shotoku kept his vow. In 593, once the dust had settled and he had become regent under his aunt, Empress Suiko, he began building the temple he’d promised — what is now Shitennoji, in Osaka, one of the oldest Buddhist temples in the country and a place I have walked past more times than I can count.

Writing the Cure After Living the Disease

Eleven years later, in 604, Shotoku issued Japan’s first constitution — seventeen articles of moral and political guidance. Its opening line is the one line from ancient Japan that most Westerners have actually encountered, usually stripped of everything around it:

以和為貴、忤ふること無きを宗とせよ。
“Harmony is to be valued, and the avoidance of wanton opposition is to be honored.”

Read in isolation, it sounds like an instruction to keep quiet. Read against the backdrop of a civil war that had just torn the court apart within living memory — a war this same young man had personally survived, arrow-close, at thirteen — it reads very differently. This isn’t a philosopher’s abstraction. It’s the constitution of someone who had watched what happens when a society runs out of ways to disagree without destroying each other, and was trying, urgently, to write the antidote.

And the article doesn’t stop at that first line. It continues:

上和らぎ下睦びて、事を論うに諧うときは、すなわち事理おのずから通ず。
“When those above are harmonious and those below are friendly, and there is concord in the discussion of matters, right understanding will spontaneously arise.”

This is the part that gets left out of the postcard version. Shotoku isn’t asking people to agree before the conversation starts. He is describing a process — one where people of different rank and different views actually talk, at length, until something true is allowed to surface on its own. The harmony he’s prescribing isn’t the harmony of silence. It’s the harmony that is only reachable by going through disagreement, not around it. He had just watched the alternative. The alternative was Shigisan.

What This Actually Looks Like, Day to Day

I don’t want to leave this at the level of ancient history, because the instinct Shotoku was trying to install thirteen centuries ago is something you can still watch operate in ordinary Japanese life, in miniature, almost every day.

A common sequence: a misunderstanding happens. Someone acted on a wrong assumption, and something went wrong as a result. The person who caused the problem says, roughly: “気が付かず申し訳ないです。そういう意味だったんですね。” — “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. So that’s what you meant.” 
And the person who was, technically, correct in the dispute responds: “いえいえ、こちらももう少しちゃんとお伝えするべきでした。” — “Not at all — I should have explained myself more clearly.”

Neither statement is really about logic. Nobody is declared right. The tension dissolves because both people took a small step toward each other at the same time. Western observers sometimes mistake this for evasion — nobody “won,” so it looks like nobody took responsibility. I’d argue the opposite is true. This is what it looks like when the goal has quietly shifted from being right to staying in relationship, which is a much harder thing to do and a much rarer skill.

The Same Failure, Wearing Different Clothes

I don’t think Japan has some permanent monopoly on this. Far from it. Wa, pushed to its unhealthy extreme, becomes kuuki wo yomu — “reading the air” — a pressure to suppress disagreement so completely that meetings become performances where everyone nods and nobody says the thing that actually needs saying. I’ve watched that erode workplaces and, in the worst cases, people.

And I’d argue that both Japan and the West are currently making a related mistake, just from opposite directions. Japan’s failure mode is often wa without the process Shotoku actually described — surface smoothness standing in for the hard work of genuine discussion. The failure mode I see more often in the U.S. and elsewhere right now is closer to the opposite: an environment engineered — by algorithms, by news cycles, by the sheer speed of everything — to reward the fastest, loudest declaration of who’s right, with the “staying in the room” part treated as a weakness or a waste of time nobody can afford anymore.

Different symptoms. Same underlying collapse: the abandonment of the slow, unglamorous process of working through disagreement, in favor of either silence or noise — two ways of avoiding the same uncomfortable conversation.

What I Take From a War I Didn’t Live Through

I keep returning to the image of a not-yet-fourteen-year-old on a losing battlefield, carving a small figure out of wood because there was nothing else left to do. I don’t offer that as a lesson in optimism. I offer it because it’s the honest origin of an idea that gets sold, especially to Western business audiences, as some kind of timeless cultural serenity. It wasn’t serene. It was earned the hard way, by people who had personally watched what the absence of it costs.

I can’t promise you that adopting anything from this — the patience, the willingness to be the first to soften, the discipline of staying in the room — will resolve the specific arguments consuming your own country, your own family, your own comment sections right now. I genuinely don’t know if it will. What I notice, from where I sit, is that the times I’ve seen this kind of harmony actually fail, the failure was rarely in the idea itself. It was in people leaving the room too early.

A Question I’m Sitting With

There’s a strange postscript to all of this that I’ve been reluctant to write, because it complicates a story I clearly find moving. The language and phrasing used in the Seventeen-Article Constitution shows signs, according to several historians, of vocabulary and expressions drawn from Chinese texts that weren’t compiled until after Shotoku’s death in 622. Which raises an uncomfortable possibility: that some or all of what we call “Shotoku’s constitution” may have been written later, by someone else, and retroactively credited to him — possibly because Japan, generations afterward, needed a founding figure whose authority nobody would question.

I’m not going to resolve that question here. It deserves its own essay, and I intend to write one. But I’ll leave you with the shape of it, because I think it’s thematically honest to end here rather than pretend the story is tidier than it is: if the man who taught Japan to value harmony over conflict may himself be, in part, a story Japan told about itself after the fact — what does that do to the lesson? Does it weaken it? Or does it tell us something true about how every culture, including the ones we admire, eventually has to compose the story it needs, out of the war it actually lived through?

I don’t have the answer yet. I’m still sitting with it, the way I sit with most things worth carrying.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
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.

What Osaka Castle Doesn’t Tell You — And Why That Silence Matters

I live near Osaka Castle.

Not a short train ride away, not in the general neighborhood — close enough that on certain evenings, I can see the top of the keep from the end of my street. And yet I find myself, with some regularity, taking the long way through the park to sit at the Starbucks inside the old military headquarters building — now called Miraiza — with a coffee, watching tourists stream past the windows.

There is something quietly disorienting about that moment. The coffee is good. The view is beautiful. Outside, hundreds of visitors from every corner of the world are photographing a gleaming castle against a blue sky, laughing, posing, living their lives. And behind all of it — beneath it, literally — is one of the heaviest accumulations of violence and grief in Japanese history.

I am not saying this to spoil anyone’s afternoon.

I am saying it because I believe the weight makes the visit more, not less.

The Castle You See Is the Third One

Let me begin with a fact that surprises most visitors when they learn it: the tower you are looking at was built in 1931, from reinforced concrete.

The main tower is a reconstruction — the third on this spot since Toyotomi Hideyoshi raised the first in 1583. The original was destroyed in the fires of 1615. The Tokugawa shogunate built a new one, but in 1665, the main tower was struck by lightning and burned down. The tower you see today was funded by donations from Osaka citizens during the early Showa period, when Japan was modernizing at a pace that left little room for wooden reconstruction. They chose concrete, an elevator, a museum interior. They chose survival over replica.

This is not, as some travelers conclude, a reason to feel disappointed. It is, if you let it be, the most interesting thing about the place.

The Tokugawa shogunate buried the original Toyotomi stone walls deep underground to erase the previous regime’s legacy. For nearly three and a half centuries, those walls lay sealed under the earth — until excavations in the 1950s began to uncover them. A museum dedicated specifically to those buried walls opened in April 2025, and is now included in the main tower admission. You can go down and look at them: stones laid by Hideyoshi’s hands, sealed over by the men who defeated him, rediscovered by the grandchildren of the people who built the 1931 concrete tower above.

Three castles. Three erasures. One place. This is not corruption of history — it is the history.

When I stand in the park and look up at the keep, I am never quite sure which layer I am seeing. The 1931 exterior, shaped to resemble the Edo-period Tokugawa version. The buried Toyotomi foundation somewhere beneath the ground. The ghost of the original — Hideyoshi’s castle, the one that burned — invisible, present.

In Japanese, there is a word for this quality of things: mujō (無常). Impermanence. Not as tragedy, but as the nature of all forms. The castle does not resist its own history of destruction and reconstruction. It carries it.

The Summer of 1615

Most visitors know, vaguely, that there was a battle here.

Few know what that means.

The Siege of Osaka was divided into two stages — the Winter Campaign of 1614 and the Summer Campaign of 1615. Together, they put an end to the last major armed opposition to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The Winter Campaign ended not in victory but in negotiation — and in deception. Under the terms of the withdrawal, Hideyori granted Ieyasu permission to fill in the castle’s outer moats. Ieyasu went further than agreed, dismantling inner defenses as well. When Hideyori protested, Ieyasu requested that he remove himself from Osaka Castle entirely.

By the following summer, there was nothing left to negotiate.

The summer campaign culminated in the fall of Osaka Castle, as Ieyasu’s forces overwhelmed Hideyori’s troops. Hideyori and his mother, Yodogimi, took their own lives before the last part of the fortress fell.

I have my own view on what happened in those final hours — a view I hold personally, not as historical fact. I believe the Toyotomi era did not end with a military defeat. It ended with Yodo-dono’s death. She had been the political center of that world, the one who held it together and, ultimately, the one who made the final choice. In that sense, the fall of Osaka Castle was less a conquest than a closing — the quiet, terrible end of a certain idea of Japan.

The scale of what surrounded that ending is difficult to absorb. Western missionary accounts from the period record that the dead from both campaigns, including civilians, may have numbered in the tens of thousands. The Osaka of 1615 was briefly reduced to ash and silence. The great city — already one of the most important trading centers in Asia — disappeared into smoke, and had to be rebuilt from almost nothing.

The park you are walking through was, for a time, a field of the dead.

I do not say this to perform grief. I say it because I think it changes the quality of attention you bring to the place. When you know what happened here, the cherry blossoms in spring carry a different kind of beauty. The Japanese call it mono no aware — the pathos of things, the bittersweet awareness that beauty is inseparable from its own passing.

What Authenticity Actually Means

Western visitors sometimes feel a vague disappointment when they learn the castle is concrete, that the interior is a museum, that there are elevators. They came for something “real,” and this feels like a reproduction.

I understand the feeling. But I think it mistakes the nature of what is real here.

Consider: after the castle fell in 1615, the Tokugawa buried the old walls and built new ones. After the Tokugawa keep burned in 1665, the site stood empty for over two centuries — a stone platform with no tower, a hill that still commanded the skyline simply by virtue of its foundation. Then Osaka’s citizens, in 1931, raised money to build the current structure. Not from nostalgia, but from a civic desire to reclaim something. During World War II, Allied bombing destroyed much of Osaka. The concrete castle survived. To a city emerging from those ruins, the sight of the keep still standing was not nothing.

It transformed from a mere historical monument into a testament to the city’s indomitable spirit.

This is the Japanese relationship to place. Not the Western insistence on original materials, on authentic wood and authentic stone. Something else — an understanding that what a place means survives its physical destruction, and that rebuilding is itself an act of continuity.

The Ise Grand Shrine has been ritually rebuilt every twenty years for over a millennium. Each time, it is both new and ancient. Osaka Castle works on the same logic — even if the logic was partly accidental.

I am not saying authenticity does not matter. I am saying that in Japan, authenticity sometimes lives in the practice of a place — the returning, the rebuilding, the choosing to maintain the form — rather than in the unchanging matter.

What Stays With You

There is a moment that happens, if you let it, somewhere between the Starbucks and the castle.

You stop somewhere along the stone path, in the shadow of one of the old walls — the real walls, the Edo-period granite walls that survived everything — and you look up at the tower. The tour buses are somewhere behind you. The selfie sticks are somewhere ahead. And for a few seconds, the present and the past are occupying the same space in your chest.

This is what I come back for.

Not the museum. Not the observation deck. Not even the coffee, though the coffee is excellent and the view is unreasonable.

I come back because the place does something to time. The layers press against each other — Hideyoshi’s ambition, Yodo-dono’s death, the buried stones, the 1931 concrete, the postwar recovery, the tourists laughing just now outside the window — and for a moment, the distance between 1615 and this afternoon becomes less than you thought.

You do not need to be Japanese to feel this. You only need to arrive already knowing what happened here.

That is why I wrote this. Not to teach history — there are better sources for that — but to suggest that knowing changes seeing. That a castle visited with some awareness of its weight is a different experience than a castle visited as backdrop.

There is no promise in this. No productivity gain, no transformation guaranteed. The park will be crowded regardless. The elevator will have a line.

But if you stand in front of those ancient stone walls, and you know what lies beneath them, and you know what was built above them, and you know what was lost on the ground between them — something in the landscape may speak to you in a language that requires no translation.

Or it may not. That is fine too.

The castle will still be there. It has survived worse.

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 Train That Shames Your Country

Prologue

What Japan Does to You — If You Let It

Japan gets under your skin not through spectacle, but through accumulation. Each small surprise lands quietly, until one day you realize you’re not just observing a different culture. You’re holding a mirror up to your own.

[Read the full series prologue here]

Episode 2: The Train That Shames Your Country

Punctuality, silence, invisible order — why do people follow rules no one enforces?

This is the second episode in our series “Culture Shock: An American’s Japan.” Last time, we explored why a city with almost no trash cans has almost no litter. This time, we go underground — and ask a harder question.

We were on the Midosuji Line, heading south from Umeda.

It was 8:47 on a Tuesday morning — peak rush hour — and the car was packed. Salarymen in dark suits, students with oversized backpacks, an elderly woman reading a paperback novel. The train was full enough that you could feel the warmth of strangers. And yet —

Almost no sound.

Nicholas was standing beside me, gripping the overhead handle, staring at the scene with the expression of a man trying to solve a math problem in his head. Catherine was next to him, earbuds out, equally absorbed.

The doors closed. The train moved. Precisely on time.

We found a quiet corner at a coffee shop near Namba station. Nicholas spoke first.

Nicholas: Okay. I need to talk about the train.

Takeshi: (smiling) I figured.

Nicholas: I’ve ridden the subway in New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Seoul. Every major city. And nothing — nothing — prepared me for this. It’s not just that it’s clean, or that it’s on time. It’s the atmosphere. A hundred people in a metal tube and it’s somehow quieter than my apartment.

Catherine: I actually got self-conscious about my own breathing my first time.

Nicholas: Yes! And nobody’s making you be quiet. There are little signs suggesting you put your phone on silent, but — you’re telling me a sign did that? A sign made a hundred New Yorkers silent?

Takeshi: (laughing) A sign would do very little for New Yorkers, you’re right.

Takeshi: So let me ask you something first. When you’re on a crowded train in America, what does the social contract feel like?

Nicholas: Honestly? Every man for himself. You’re tolerating each other’s proximity. There’s an unspoken agreement to just — survive the commute. Get to your stop. Don’t make eye contact.

Catherine: In my experience it’s more like… everyone’s performing their own private world. Loud music, phone calls, eating. Like they’re trying to pretend the public space is actually their bedroom.

Takeshi: That’s a very sharp observation, Catherine. And it gets at exactly what’s different here.

In Japanese train culture, the concept is almost the reverse. The public space is not your private space. It is a shared space, and being in it requires a certain… diminishment of self. You turn yourself down, so that others aren’t burdened by your existence.

Nicholas: “Diminishment of self.” That sounds almost harsh.

Takeshi: In Western terms, maybe. But in Japanese thinking, it’s not self-erasure — it’s courtesy as a form of respect. You are saying, without words: I acknowledge that you are here. I will not impose on you.

Catherine: Takeshi-san, is this connected to what we talked about last time — the idea that the space belongs to everyone, so everyone is responsible for it?

Takeshi: Directly connected. But on the train, it goes one step further. Last episode we talked about physical space — the street, the sidewalk. On the train, you’re managing something more delicate: other people’s inner state.

Nicholas: Say more.

Takeshi: If I make a loud phone call on a Japanese train, I’m not just littering the space. I’m entering your mental space without permission. I’m forcing my conversation into your head. And to a Japanese person, that’s a kind of violation. Almost an aggression.

Nicholas: (pausing) I never thought about noise as a form of aggression before. But now that you say it…

Catherine: It kind of is, isn’t it? Like, you’re taking up space inside someone else’s mind.

Takeshi: There’s a phrase — meiwaku wo kakeru (迷惑をかける). It means “to cause trouble for others,” but the feeling behind it is deeper than the translation suggests. It’s closer to: to be a burden upon someone’s existence. For Japanese people, the avoidance of meiwaku is instinctive. Almost physical. You feel discomfort when you think you might be imposing on someone.

Nicholas: That’s wild. Because in American culture, there’s almost a pride in taking up space. Being loud, being visible, that’s confidence. That’s success.

Takeshi: Yes. And neither is wrong, exactly. They’re different philosophies about what a public self should look like.

Nicholas: Okay, I want to bring up something that’s been bothering me since I moved here, because I think it’s related. The red light thing.

Takeshi: Go on.

Nicholas: I was walking home late — maybe 1am, empty street, zero traffic in any direction. And there’s a red light at a crosswalk. And I stopped. Why did I stop? Because every single Japanese person around me just… stood there. Waiting. No cars. No police. No cameras that I could see. Just red, and everyone waiting.

In New York, I’d have crossed without a second thought. Here, I felt like I’d committed a crime just thinking about it.

Catherine: That happened to me too! I actually stepped off the curb once and then stepped back, because the two salarymen next to me didn’t react at all. They just kept staring at the light. I felt so embarrassed.

Takeshi: (nodding slowly) That moment — that moment where you stepped back — is more important than it seems.

Takeshi: In Japanese, there’s a value at work there that goes beyond traffic safety. It’s connected to a word: yakusoku — 約束. Promise.

A traffic signal is a kind of social promise. The system says: when this light is red, this space belongs to the cars. When it’s green, it belongs to you. If you cross on red — even when no cars are coming — you are breaking a promise. Not with the law. With the system itself. With the agreement that makes civilization function.

Nicholas: That’s almost philosophical. It’s just a traffic light.

Takeshi: Is it? Think about what the traffic light actually represents. It’s a miniature social contract. Every time someone crosses on red, they’re saying: the rules apply to others, but I’ll decide for myself when they apply to me.

Nicholas: (quietly) Which is kind of the foundation of a lot of problems, when you scale it up.

Takeshi: Precisely. In Japan, the thinking is:

if you want to live in a system you can trust, you have to be trustworthy within that system— even when no one is watching.

Especially when no one is watching.

Catherine: That connects to what you said last time, right? About haji — the internal compass, not the external judgment.

Takeshi: Exactly. The watcher is inside you. Not the state. Not the police. You.

Nicholas: Let’s talk about punctuality. Because the trains here have broken my brain a little.

Takeshi: In what way?

Nicholas: I looked it up. The average delay on the JR Yamanote Line last year was something like 30 seconds. Seconds. And when there’s a delay — even a five-minute delay — there are official apology announcements. The conductor apologizes. Passengers get a delay certificate to show their employers.

A delay certificate. For five minutes.

Catherine: I got one once. My boss in Osaka — my Japanese boss — actually looked impressed that I had it. Like I’d done something correct by obtaining it.

Takeshi: (smiling) Yes. Because you had entered the system properly. You had documentation. The chain of accountability was intact.

Nicholas: In New York, if you told someone your train was 40 minutes late, they’d say “yeah, that’s Tuesday.” It’s a joke. A badge of shared suffering. Here it would be a national incident.

Takeshi: Let me tell you something about Japanese train culture that most foreigners don’t know.

The precision isn’t just operational. It’s philosophical.

There’s an aesthetic in Japan — which we’ll come back to many times in this series — of doing the ordinary thing with extraordinary care. The train doesn’t run on time because the engineers are geniuses, or the technology is magic. It runs on time because thousands of people — drivers, conductors, station staff, maintenance workers — treat their exact role in the system as a matter of personal integrity.

Catherine: So it’s like… the sōji thing? What we talked about with the students cleaning? Everyone owns their piece of the system?

Takeshi: Very good. Yes. In Japanese work culture, there’s a concept called shokunin — 職人. It’s usually translated as “craftsman” or “artisan,” but the real meaning is deeper. A shokunin is someone who has given themselves entirely to their craft — who finds meaning not in fame or recognition, but in the perfect execution of their specific role.

A train driver who stops the train within three centimeters of the marked spot on the platform — every time, every stop, every day, for thirty years — is a shokunin. Not because anyone told him to be. Because that’s what it means to him to do his job.

Nicholas: Three centimeters. I want to make sure I heard that right.

Takeshi: Three centimeters. There’s a practice called teii-tei-sha — precision stopping. Drivers are trained to stop the train so that the doors align exactly with the floor markings. They use reference points outside the window. It takes years to master. And most passengers will never know it’s happening.

Nicholas: (staring) That’s insane. And I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to give.

Catherine: Takeshi-san, can I ask something kind of personal?

Takeshi: Of course.

Catherine: When you travel abroad — like, when you go to America or Europe — does it bother you? The noise, the delays, the… looseness of everything?

Takeshi: (thinking for a moment) Honestly? It used to bother me more. Now I’ve learned to adjust my internal expectations before I arrive.

But I’ll tell you what I notice most. It’s not the noise or the delays per se. It’s the attitude toward them. In many Western countries, when a system fails — a train is late, a street is dirty, a rule isn’t followed — the response is often a kind of resigned shrug. “What can you do? That’s how it is.”

In Japan, the same failure would produce something closer to genuine distress. Not panic — but a felt sense that something has gone wrong. That a promise has been broken.

Nicholas: And you think that distress is healthier?

Takeshi: I think that distress is the engine. If you don’t feel it when the system breaks, you don’t work to fix it. The Japanese obsession with punctuality, with cleanliness, with quiet on the train — it’s not about perfection for its own sake. It’s about maintaining a social promise. And promises matter because people believe they matter.

Nicholas: (slowly) So the system works because people believe the system deserves to work.

Takeshi: Yes. And they act accordingly, even at midnight, at an empty intersection, with no one watching.

The three of us were quiet for a moment.

Outside the coffee shop window, a Midosuji Line train slid past — on time, on schedule, carrying its cargo of silent passengers through the city.

Catherine: I think I understand something now that I didn’t before.

Takeshi: What’s that?

Catherine: In America, we talk a lot about freedom. Personal freedom. The right to do what you want. And I always thought of Japanese social rules as the opposite of that — like, constraint. Restriction.

But listening to you, I’m starting to think it’s not constraint. It’s more like… a form of mutual gift. Everyone gives a little, and everyone receives a lot.

Takeshi: (quietly) That’s a very mature way to see it.

Nicholas: (to Catherine) Did you just out-philosophize both of us?

Catherine: (laughing softly) I’m a fast learner.

What to take away

The silence on a Japanese train isn’t shyness. The punctuality isn’t engineering. The red light at midnight isn’t fear of punishment.

They are all expressions of the same thing: a culture that has chosen to locate the enforcement of social agreements inside the individual, rather than outside. No cameras, no fines, no conductors with whistles. Just millions of people who have internalized the same quiet conviction:

A promise is a promise, whether or not anyone is watching.

That’s not a rule. It’s a philosophy. And it runs on time.

Next episode — Episode 3: The Bow That Means Everything. 礼節 — Etiquette, respect, and the moment you realize that a gesture contains an entire worldview.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy through honest dialogue between cultures. If this resonated with you, follow for the next episode.

Why Aren’t Japanese People Fat? A Conversation About Food, Discipline, and the Body You Live In

Rethinking health not as an achievement, but as a byproduct of how we live. A cross-cultural dialogue on the Japanese relationship with food.

“A bowl of miso soup, a small plate of grilled fish, steamed rice, pickled vegetables. This is what many Japanese people eat for breakfast. Not because they are disciplined. Because it is simply… breakfast.”

It started with an offhand comment Nicholas made over lunch.

We were sitting at a teishoku restaurant near Shinsaibashi — one of those no-frills spots where the set meals come on a lacquered tray, everything portioned, everything accounted for. Nicholas had ordered the same thing I did. Catherine was picking at her rice, apparently still not used to eating this much so early in the afternoon.

Nicholas put his chopsticks down and looked around.

Nicholas: You know what I noticed since moving to Osaka? I haven’t gained a single pound. Back in Chicago, I’d put on weight just walking past a pizza place. Here I’m eating full meals every day and I’m actually… lighter. What’s going on?

Takeshi: laughs That’s a question I get from a lot of foreigners.

Nicholas: I’m serious. Is there something in the water? Some secret Japanese metabolism thing?

Takeshi: No secret. No special metabolism. But maybe a different relationship with food.

Catherine: What do you mean by “relationship”? Like, emotionally?

Takeshi: In a way, yes. But let’s start with what’s actually on the tray in front of you.

It’s Not a Diet. It’s Just Eating.

Nicholas: Okay, break it down for me. Because in the States, everyone’s obsessed with diets. Keto, paleo, intermittent fasting — you name it, someone’s done it. But Japanese people don’t seem to be on any “diet.” They just… eat.

Takeshi: That’s exactly right. And I think that’s the first thing to understand.

In Japan, food has never been separated from daily life as something to manage or optimize. You eat because it’s time to eat.

You eat what’s seasonal, what’s local, what’s affordable. There’s no particular ideology behind it.

Catherine: But the results are kind of remarkable, right? Japan consistently ranks among the countries with the longest life expectancy, and obesity rates are incredibly low compared to the U.S. That can’t just be coincidence.

Takeshi: It’s not coincidence. But it’s also not a single cause. It’s a combination — of what people eat, how much they eat, and maybe something harder to measure. The culture around food.

Nicholas: Okay, so what do Japanese people actually eat that makes the difference?

Takeshi: Let me give you five things you’ll find in almost any Japanese household, almost every day. Not superfoods in the trendy sense — just food that happens to be very good for you.

The Five Foods

Takeshi: First — miso. Most Japanese people have miso soup every single day. Sometimes twice a day. Miso is a fermented soybean paste, so it’s full of probiotics, amino acids, B vitamins. It’s warming, it’s savory, it’s cheap. And crucially — it’s eaten as part of a meal, not as a supplement.

Nicholas: So you’re getting gut health benefits without even trying to get gut health benefits.

Takeshi: Exactly. No one in Japan is taking a probiotic capsule and thinking they’re being health-conscious. They’re just having soup.

Catherine: That’s kind of beautiful, actually. It’s like the benefit is embedded in the habit before you even think about it.

Takeshi: Second — natto. This one’s harder to sell to foreigners.

Nicholas: grimaces I’ve tried it. I respect it. But I am not there yet.

Catherine: laughs Same. It smells like… something died near some cheese.

Takeshi: laughs Yes, I know. Natto is fermented soybeans — sticky, strong-smelling, very much an acquired taste. But it contains nattokinase, an enzyme that’s been studied for cardiovascular health. It’s high in vitamin K2, which is important for bone density. Again, eaten at breakfast, without anyone thinking about cardiovascular health. It’s just on the tray.

Nicholas: What’s the third one?

Takeshi: Green tea. Not in capsule form, not as a detox product. Just tea, drunk throughout the day. The catechins in green tea have been associated with reduced inflammation, better metabolism, some studies suggest lower cancer risk. In Japan, it’s what you drink instead of soda. It’s at every restaurant, every convenience store, every office.

Catherine: I’ve actually switched completely to green tea since moving here. I used to drink like three coffees a day. Now I barely think about it.

Nicholas: I still need my coffee. That’s a hill I’ll die on.

Takeshi: laughs No judgment. Fourth — seaweed. Kombu, wakame, nori. These are eaten daily in soups, in salads, as garnishes. They’re rich in iodine, which supports thyroid function. They contain unique polysaccharides that may support gut bacteria. They’re extremely low calorie. And they’re in the food, not in a supplement bottle.

Nicholas: I notice a pattern here. All of these things are just… embedded in the regular food. Nobody’s taking special measures.

Takeshi: That’s the whole point. And fifth — fish. Particularly fatty fish. Salmon, mackerel, sardines, tuna. Japan is an island nation, so seafood has always been central. The omega-3 fatty acids in fatty fish are linked to lower rates of heart disease, better brain function, reduced inflammation. Japan consumes more fish per capita than almost anywhere in the world. And again — this isn’t a health decision people are consciously making. It’s just dinner.

But Is It Just the Food?

Catherine: Takeshi-san, can I ask something that might sound a little naive?

Takeshi: Of course.

Catherine: Is it really just the food? Because when I look at Japanese people — especially older people — there’s something else going on. Like, my host family’s grandfather is in his eighties and he walks everywhere. He gardens. He’s just… present in a way that feels different. I don’t know how to explain it.

Takeshi: No, you’re right. It’s not just the food.

Nicholas: What else then?

Takeshi: There’s a phrase — ikigai. You’ve probably heard it. A reason to get up in the morning. I’m a little cautious about that word because it’s been so commercialized in the West. But there’s something underneath it. Many older Japanese people maintain a sense of purpose, community, routine. They’re not retired in the way Americans retire — fully stepping away from engagement. They stay involved. A grandfather tends his garden every day. A grandmother runs her neighborhood association. That continued sense of purpose seems to have very real effects on physical health.

Nicholas: That actually makes a lot of sense to me from a business perspective. I’ve seen it in executives too. The ones who retire cold turkey tend to deteriorate fast. The ones who stay involved — even in small things — do much better.

Catherine: So it’s like the body follows what the mind is still connected to?

Takeshi: There’s an old idea in Japanese martial arts — shin gi tai. Mind, technique, body. Not as three separate things, but as one integrated system. The idea that you can’t really separate mental state from physical condition. I’ve felt this personally through Kendo. When your mind is scattered, your body moves poorly. When your mind is clear and present, your body is more capable. Whether or not that maps onto longevity science, I honestly don’t know. But I don’t think it’s irrelevant.

The Quantity Question

Nicholas: Okay, but let’s be honest about something. Portions. Japanese portions are smaller than American portions. That has to be part of it, right? I went back to the States last month for a work trip and I’d forgotten — the sizes are just insane. The “medium” soda at a gas station is the size of a small child.

Takeshi: laughs That’s a real difference, yes.

Nicholas: Is there a cultural reason for that? Or is it just economics — food is more expensive in Japan, so people buy less?

Takeshi: Some economics, yes. But there’s also a concept — hara hachi bu. Eating until you’re about eighty percent full. It comes from Confucian thought and has been passed down in Okinawa in particular. Okinawa has historically had unusually high longevity rates, and some researchers have pointed to this practice as a factor.

Catherine: Eighty percent full sounds uncomfortable at first. Like, aren’t you just hungry?

Takeshi: You have to eat slowly enough to notice. That’s the other part. If you eat fast — and many Americans eat very fast — you don’t register satiety until you’re already past full. Japanese meal culture tends to be slower. Small dishes. Chopsticks, which naturally slow you down. Conversation. You notice your body more.

Nicholas: I’ve actually noticed I eat slower here. Chopsticks, smaller dishes… I finish a meal and I’m satisfied but not stuffed. In the U.S. I’d always finish a meal feeling like I needed to lie down.

Catherine: Takeshi-san, do you ever think about food consciously? Like, do you think “I should eat healthy today”?

Takeshi: Rarely. When I’m at home, I cook what I grew up eating. Miso soup, fish, rice, vegetables. When I’m at a restaurant, I eat what’s good and seasonal. I don’t think about it much. And I think that’s actually the point. If every meal requires a decision about whether it’s healthy enough, that’s a kind of exhaustion. It shouldn’t be that hard.

The Shintoism of Eating

Catherine: Takeshi-san, can I ask a slightly different question? You’ve mentioned before that you visit shrines — not to ask for things, but to report and give thanks. Does that philosophy carry into how you think about food too?

Takeshi: That’s a perceptive question. Yes, in a way. There’s a phrase you hear in Japan before meals — itadakimasu. Most people translate it as “let’s eat” or “thank you for the food.” But it literally means something closer to “I humbly receive.”

It acknowledges that the food in front of you came from living things — plants, animals, the labor of people. You’re receiving something, not just consuming it.

Nicholas: I’ve heard it but I thought it was just politeness.

Takeshi: Politeness carries meaning. When I go to a shrine on a trip and say “I’m here, I arrived safely” — that’s not superstition. It’s an act of noticing. Of not taking the journey for granted. Itadakimasu is the same. It’s a moment of noticing what’s in front of you before you eat it. In the Shinto worldview — and I do genuinely hold this — there’s a kind of spirit or life force in everything. Food holds that too. Eating with gratitude isn’t mystical. It’s attentiveness.

Catherine: That’s… that actually really moves me. I think I’ve been eating mindlessly for years. Just feeding myself without any awareness of what I’m doing or why.

Nicholas: I’m not going to get spiritual about my tuna sashimi, but I’ll admit — there’s something to the pausing. Even just a moment before diving in. I’ve noticed I taste things more.

Takeshi: That’s all it takes. No belief required.

So What’s Actually Making Japanese People Healthier?

Nicholas: Okay, let’s try to pull this together. Is it the food itself? The portions? The culture around eating? The lifestyle stuff — walking everywhere, not driving, staying active?

Takeshi: Probably all of it, and I want to be honest — I’m not a nutritionist or a longevity researcher. I can only speak from what I’ve observed and experienced. But when I look at the people in my own family, my neighborhood, the older people I grew up around —

I don’t see people who were trying to be healthy. I see people who lived in a particular way, and health was one of the outcomes.

Catherine: That’s a pretty profound difference. In America — and honestly in my own life before coming here — health is this goal you’re always chasing. It’s aspirational. But here it seems more like… a background condition.

Nicholas: Like it’s the default, not the achievement.

Takeshi: Maybe. Though Japan has its own problems — mental health, overwork culture, certain chronic diseases. I don’t want to paint this as some kind of paradise. It’s not. But on the specific question of food and physical health — yes, I think the relationship with food here is fundamentally different, and I think that difference matters.

Nicholas: I’ll tell you what I’m taking away from this. It’s not “eat natto every day” — because I’m not doing that. It’s more: stop making every meal a project. Just eat real food, eat with people, eat slowly enough to notice. That doesn’t require a philosophy degree or a belief in kami.

Takeshi: laughs I think that’s exactly right. And for what it’s worth — the kami don’t mind if you skip the natto.

Catherine: laughs Thank goodness.

What to Take Away

This conversation didn’t start as a conversation about philosophy. It started with Nicholas noticing that his body felt different in Japan. And that small observation opened into something larger — not a lecture about superfoods, but a question about how a culture relates to the act of feeding itself.

A few things are worth sitting with:

The benefit of embedded habits. The Japanese foods associated with better health outcomes — miso, natto, green tea, seaweed, fish — aren’t eaten because people are health-conscious. They’re eaten because they’ve always been eaten. The health benefits are, in a sense, a side effect of culture. This is a fundamentally different model than the Western approach of identifying a problem and engineering a solution.

The question of portions and pace. Hara hachi bu — stopping at eighty percent — only works if you’re eating slowly enough to notice. The structure of Japanese meals (small dishes, chopsticks, communal pacing) supports a different relationship with satiety. The Western habit of eating quickly and at volume is a relatively modern phenomenon, and its consequences are visible.

The mind-body connection isn’t mystical. When Takeshi talks about shin gi tai, or the way Shinto attentiveness shapes something as simple as saying itadakimasu, he isn’t asking you to believe anything supernatural. He’s pointing at something practical: presence. Noticing what’s in front of you before you consume it. That act of pausing — however brief — seems to change the quality of the experience and, perhaps, the choices that follow.

No single cause, no silver bullet. Japan’s health outcomes are the product of geography, culture, economics, genetics, infrastructure (people walk because cities are walkable), and a hundred other factors. No individual in the West can import all of that. But the underlying orientation — eating real food, eating with others, eating without urgency, eating with some awareness of what you’re receiving — is available to anyone.

You don’t have to love natto. You don’t have to visit a shrine. But the next time you sit down for a meal, you might try pausing for a moment before you start. Not to pray. Just to notice.

That might be enough.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy and culture through candid dialogue. Nicholas and Catherine are composite characters based on real conversations. Nothing here is meant as medical or nutritional advice — just honest observation, from one table to another.