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  • Shinto Without Belief: Why the Japanese Still Bow at Shrines

    Shinto Without Belief: Why the Japanese Still Bow at Shrines

    I have prayed at shrines all my life and believe almost none of it

    The Kungaishō, a camphor tree said to be over a thousand years old, at Mishima Shrine in Osaka. Beside it stands a small shrine to the tree’s own kami. No statue, no idol. Only the tree (My picyure)

    I have visited Shinto shrines since before I can remember. The shrine of my childhood, in Nishinomiya, is called Koshikiiwa. Its object of worship is not a statue or a scripture but an enormous rock, and around it, scattered through the grounds, stand smaller sacred stones, each honored in turn. I bow at the main hall first, then walk to the great rock, then to the others, one by one. I have done this for decades.

    If I am honest, I feel almost nothing.

    I say this plainly, because the truth here is more interesting than the reverence a Western reader might expect. The bowing is habit. The order of the stones is form. I am not visited by the sacred. I am simply doing what I have always done, as automatically as I brush my teeth.

    And yet there is one thing I do feel, and it took me most of my life to notice it. At my childhood shrine, I feel at home. When I travel and stop at a shrine in some distant province, I feel like an uninvited guest, as if the place were saying, I didn’t call for you, or I don’t know who you are. A few shrines have unsettled me outright. Heitate Jingū in Kyushu, Ōmiwa in Nara, Hokura here near Kobe. At each of these I felt something close to fear.

    So the feeling is real. It is simply not the feeling the word “religious” prepares you for; it is closer to the difference between your own house and a stranger’s. Shinto has never asked me what I believe. It asks how I behave in a particular place, and that turns out to be a very different question.

    A religion you do, not a religion you believe

    Western observers have long been puzzled by a particular Japanese habit: we will say, flatly, “I have no religion,” and then go to a shrine at New Year, buy a protective charm, and bring our children for the shichi-go-san blessing. To an outsider this looks like hypocrisy, or confusion.

    Scholars of religion draw a useful line here. Some faiths are built on orthodoxy: right belief, the correct creed held in the mind. Others are built on orthopraxy: right practice, the correct action performed with care. Shinto sits firmly on the side of practice. What matters is less what you privately believe than what you do with your body: you bow at the gate, you rinse your hands, you observe the courtesy of the place.

    Let me describe how it actually feels to me. When I visit a shrine in a town I do not know, it is like arriving at a company for a meeting. Even if I could walk straight to the right department, I stop at the front desk, I say where I have come from, I write my name in the book. Reading the shrine’s founding history at the entrance (ah, so that is how this place came to be) is like greeting the head of the neighborhood association before holding a small event on their turf. It is not a confession of faith. It is manners.

    Or consider something even more ordinary. Most Japanese bathe every day. I do too, before dinner or before bed, so that I do not carry the day’s dust into my sheets. Is that a rite of purification (Shinto has always disliked kegare, defilement), or just hygiene? It is both, and the honest answer is that the question “which is it, really?” is the wrong question. My visits to unfamiliar shrines are exactly that ambiguous.

    I will confess something that makes the point sharper. When my mother died, the priest asked whether we wanted a posthumous Buddhist name for her. I said we did not need one. I do not believe, not by a millimeter, that chanting the right formula opens the gate to paradise. And yet, though our family’s ancestral graves lie in Yokkaichi, I placed my mother’s remains at Konkai-Kōmyōji, a temple a short walk from the center of Kyoto. I chose it, frankly, for its convenience: so that when work brings me to the city, I can slip away by taxi, stop in for a few minutes, and tell her how things are going. I believe none of the doctrine. I keep every one of the practices.

    The contradiction that isn’t one

    Here is the puzzle that makes people call Shinto illogical. It honors a rock and a dead statesman in the same breath: a mountain and the scholar Sugawara no Michizane, a waterfall and a fox. Nature worshipped as sacred, standing beside human beings who once actually lived and were later made into gods. To a mind trained to sort the world into clean categories, this is not a religion. It is a filing error.

    I felt that objection myself, once. Japanese companies often keep a small household shrine, a kamidana, in the office. As a child I thought nothing of it. As I grew up I began to wonder what it was for (a shrine is a sacred place; what is the point of a shelf in an accounting office?), and I noticed people fussing over which way it faced, careful not to point it north, which is really the territory of a quite different tradition. It struck me as incoherent.

    What changed my mind was standing in the grounds of Hokura Shrine, above Kobe. The shrine enshrines Susanoo and Ōkuninushi, deities of myth. But its grounds also hold ancient stone arrangements used in worship long before those myths were written down, and pottery has been dug from the same earth dating to centuries before Christ. Standing between the two, I came to think (and I offer this as my own reading, not as scholarship) that the ancient people did not draw the line we draw. Between what feeds you, what frightens you, and what you wish to become, they built no fence. Whether a thing was a mountain or a man who once lived did not decide which side of a boundary it fell on, because there was no boundary to fall on.

    The moment that felt like understanding was not when I finally saw the contradiction. It was when I began to suspect that the one pointing at it might be the one who is mistaken.

    Japanese philosophers, like Kitarō Nishida, spent their lives trying to render this refusal to choose into rigorous language, affirming reality with all its contradictions. I am not one of those philosophers. I only know it from the inside, as you know your own house in the dark.

    A ginkgo in the middle of an Osaka street, revered as Ryūō-Ōkami, the dragon god. The road was built to cavoid around it. No one was willing to cut it down (My picture)
    A ginkgo in the middle of an Osaka street, revered as Ryūō-Ōkami, the dragon god. The road was built to cavoid around it. No one was willing to cut it down (My picture)

    Merciless nature, and why people made offerings

    On New Year’s Day in 1995, I made my first visit of the year to Heitate Jingū in Kyushu, the very shrine that had once frightened me. Sixteen days later, the Great Hanshin Earthquake destroyed my house. Not one of my relatives was hurt.

    I still believe it was because of that visit. I also know, perfectly well, that the survivors were not all devout and the dead were not all faithless. Both of these things are true for me at the same time, and long ago I stopped trying to reconcile them.

    What the earthquake gave me was not a doctrine but a posture. Disaster is not an accident waiting for an explanation; it is a certainty to be lived beside. And nature, I learned in my own body, is not cruel. It is indifferent, which is somehow harder to bear.

    Consider what New Year’s Day means to a Japanese family. It is the most important day of our year. On the last night of the old year we gather and eat toshikoshi soba, the long buckwheat noodles, quietly grateful to have come through another year unharmed. When the sun rises we eat osechi from its lacquered boxes; even the children take a sip of otoso, the spiced sake, to mark the new year’s arrival. It is a day of homecoming, of relief, of blessing.

    On New Year’s Day in 2024, moments after families across the Noto Peninsula had performed exactly these rites, the ground convulsed and took their houses and hundreds of their lives. To the earth beneath them, it was not New Year’s Day. It was not any day. The date that means everything to us meant nothing whatsoever to the force that killed them. That is the indifference I mean. Nature does not hate us; it simply does not notice that we are here.

    And it does not end. In the summer of 2026 the ground tore open again in Kumamoto, on Kyushu, and again it killed. Prepare as we might, stay as watchful as we can, the earth still takes someone each time it moves. Suffer that loss over enough centuries and something settles into a people. Not faith, I would hesitate to call it faith, but a slow turning toward the ground itself, an impulse to enshrine the very earth as a kami and to keep, as best we can, the peace with it.

    Once you have felt that indifference from the inside, the old rites stop looking primitive. People offered the first rice of the harvest to the sun and the soil. They were not naive. Having no power at all over the ground beneath them, they chose relationship over helplessness. The harvest festival that had always puzzled me suddenly had a reason to exist, and the word animism, which until then I had only known, I now understood.

    Why do people do this?

    That question (why do people do this?) is what quietly replaced belief for me.

    My grandmother was devout. Every day she lit incense at the family altar and recited the sutras from memory. My mother, whom I never once thought of as religious, began murmuring the nenbutsu only after my grandmother was gone. I do little more than change the water on the altar. But when my mother died, I understood, at last, why the two of them had done what they did.

    As a boy at the family grave, I pressed my palms together and thought nothing at all. After my grandparents were laid there, I began cleaning the stone carefully each time I came, without ever deciding to.

    I did not reach any of this by believing. I reached it by doing, and by feeling, always too late, why others had done the same before me. Belief was the shallow question. This was the one that went all the way down.

    The margin in the heart

    I have contradicted myself throughout this essay, and I know it. A philosopher might reasonably ask me to point to exactly where the contradiction lies. I do not mind the question. Human beings live holding contradictions; the Zen koan is built out of them on purpose.

    To accept a contradiction is almost to say “either is fine.” But to leave a contradiction unresolved on purpose, you need somewhere to stand that leans toward neither side. I have come to think of it as a margin in the heart. Kokoro no yohaku: the blank space left intentionally on the page. It is not the shrug of “whichever, I don’t care.” It is room to breathe, room a settled mind no longer leaves itself.

    I promise you nothing. I cannot tell you what will change if you keep such a margin, or that anything will change at all. But I do not believe it changes nothing. Laozi wrote that through non-doing, nothing is left undone. Perhaps refusing to force a contradiction closed is not resignation but space, space to notice what a mind in a hurry to be right walks straight past.

    I still feel almost nothing when I stand before the great rock of my childhood. I still go. Not to be answered. Only to keep showing up. And, maybe, to live a little more like a human being.

    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.

  • All of Osaka Performs a Rite that No One Quite Believes In

    All of Osaka Performs a Rite that No One Quite Believes In

    Tenjin Matsuri and the god who began as a curse

    Tenjin Matsuri Land Procession (陸渡御, Rikutogyo) (My Picture)
    Rikutogyo (My Picture)

    Every July the river through the middle of Osaka fills with lantern-light and drums. This year I went down to watch again, as I have most summers, and stood among the crowd on the bank while the boats of the funatogyo (the boat procession) moved upstream against the dark water.

    Earlier in the day the rikutogyo (the land procession) had carried Sugawara no Michizane, the deity at the heart of this festival, out through the streets: three thousand people in Heian court dress, a portable shrine crowned with a phoenix, taiko rolling ahead of it like weather.

    All of it to escort one man home for the night. A scholar who has been dead for eleven hundred years.

    I looked at the faces around me. Families, office workers still in their shirts, teenagers filming the fireworks on their phones. Somewhere among them stood friends of mine who help organize the festival, who give it weeks of their year.

    And I found myself thinking a plain, slightly rude question: does anyone here actually believe that Michizane is coming down the river tonight?

    I don’t think so. I don’t think a single person on that bank believes it in the way one believes the train will arrive or the rent is due. And yet there they were. There I was. The Tenjin Matsuri has been performed since the year 951 — one of the oldest festivals in Japan — and it was not being performed by a handful of priests. It was being performed by a city.

    Belief had drained out of the rite somewhere over a thousand years, and the rite had not collapsed. That is the thing worth sitting with.

    Funatogyo and Fireworks (My Picture)
    Funatogyo and Fireworks (My Picture)

    The god who began as a curse

    To understand why the question is strange, you have to know who Michizane was, and how he became a god.

    He was a real man — a scholar, poet, and minister of the Heian court, born in 845. He rose high, made powerful enemies, and in 901 a rival faction accused him of plotting against the throne. He was exiled to Dazaifu in the far southwest, and he died there two years later, in disgrace, far from the capital he loved.

    Then the capital began to suffer. Drought, plague, fire. His accusers died. In the year 930 lightning struck the Seiryōden, the emperor’s own hall, and killed courtiers where they stood. The court read the sky and understood: this was the dead man collecting what he was owed.

    Michizane had become an onryō (a vengeful spirit) — one of the three most feared in Japanese history.

    So they did what the age did with a furious dead nobleman.

    They tried to calm him.

    His titles were restored, the order of exile burned, and in time he was enshrined and elevated to a god: Tenman Daijizai Tenjin, lord of thunder.

    This is the logic of goryō shinkō (belief in vengeful spirits): a soul wronged in life returns as disaster, and the way to survive it is not to defeat the spirit but to honor it — to promote it, quite literally, into a god.

    Here is the part I never fail to find astonishing. That thundercloud of a spirit, enshrined out of fear, slowly became something else. Over centuries the terror faded and the scholar remained, and Michizane settled into his present role: Tenjin, the gentle patron of learning, to whom students across Japan now pray before their exams.

    There are more than twelve thousand shrines to him. Children hang wooden plaques asking him for good marks.

    They are praying to a man who was deified because the living were afraid of him. Almost no one who prays there knows this. The fear has been forgotten, and the affection has stayed.

    The plaque I hung at thirteen

    I know those children because I was one of them.

    When I was thirteen, sitting for the entrance exam to the school I wanted, my family took me to Osaka Tenmangū — Michizane’s shrine, the heart of this whole festival — to hang an ema (a small wooden votive plaque), asking to pass.

    I remember writing my wish on the wood. I also remember what I privately thought, because I was a certain kind of boy: If hanging a plaque got you into school, everyone would get in. All these plaques, and only some of us pass. So the plaque does nothing.

    I was not wrong about the mechanics. The plaque does nothing to the exam.

    But I have carried that morning for fifty years now, and I understand it differently. The plaque was never a lever on the outcome. It was a way of setting something down. I had studied as much as I was going to study; the exam would do what it would do. Hanging the ema drew a line under the effort and handed the rest over. Whatever happens now, I have done my part, and I will take the result cleanly. It was, I think, a small rite of finishing — a way to stop carrying what I could no longer change.

    The plaque’s uselessness and its usefulness are the same fact seen from two sides. Had I believed the wood could pass me, it would have closed nothing — I’d have spent the spring anxiously waiting on it to work. Because I did not believe, it could serve as an ending.

    I want to be careful here, because this is the exact place where an essay like this goes wrong. It is tempting to finish the thought and say: so ritual is really just a psychological tool, a commitment device, a tidy way to manage your own anxiety. That explanation is clean, and I distrust it.

    It is the same move that has hollowed out meditation in the West — the reduction of something old and strange into a technique for self-improvement, a productivity hack with incense. If the ema were only a private mind-trick, I could have written my wish on any scrap of paper at my desk. I did not. I took it to a shrine, to a particular dead man, and hung it where he could see it.

    You already do this

    Whenever I raise this with Western friends, I watch them reach for the word hypocrisy, or at least inconsistency. If you don’t believe, why perform? Isn’t the honest thing to stay home?

    But scholars of religion have a useful distinction here: orthodoxy versus orthopraxy. Orthodoxy asks what you believe. Orthopraxy asks what you do. Much of Japanese religious life runs on the second and is largely indifferent to the first — the practice is the point, and the metaphysics behind it is left politely unexamined.

    And once you see it that way, the Western reader stops being an outsider to this. You may not believe a word of the liturgy yet still stand for a funeral. You may keep no faith at all and still put up a tree in December, still say “bless you” to a stranger’s sneeze, still touch the mezuzah, still not walk over a grave. None of these survive because the people performing them have checked the doctrine and found it sound. They survive as things done, and the doing carries a meaning the believing has long since stopped supplying.

    The Tenjin Matsuri is not a Japanese mystery, then. It is the same human act you already perform — only here it is done by an entire city, out loud, on the river, without embarrassment, and without interruption since the tenth century.

    Neither believed nor denied

    So what is left, if not belief?

    Standing on that bank, I don’t think what moved through the crowd was faith in Michizane’s return. Nor was it mere fondness, or gratitude, or civic pride, though all of those were in the air. It was something with no clean name — a low, steady sense that someone, somewhere, is watching. The god, the ancestors, the dead we owe. Not a proposition anyone would defend in daylight. Not a proposition anyone would deny, either.

    This is the register I find most honest and hardest to translate. It is not belief. It is not disbelief. It is a relationship held deliberately at low intensity, never forced to resolve into true or false. My friends who carry the shrine do not believe a spirit rides in it. They also do not, for one second, treat it as an empty box.

    This is my own reading, and I offer it as that. But I suspect this is what a culture gains when it declines to demand that its rituals be literally true: it gets to keep the relationship without paying for it in belief. The dead are not argued about. They are attended to.

    What the refusal shaped

    There is a habit of mind underneath all this, and I think it has shaped the people it raised — including me.

    Much of the world, faced with the dead and the divine, wants a verdict. Is it real or not; do you believe or not; draw the line and stand on one side of it.

    That instinct built extraordinary things — theology, law, science. It is also the same instinct that meets grief with the demand to reach “closure,” to settle the account with the dead and move on.

    Japan, on this one matter, mostly declined to draw the line. Nobody quite settled whether Michizane is a god or a ghost or a great man remembered, and nobody convened the trial that would decide it. The question was left open on purpose, and a thousand-year festival grew in the space the open question left.

    I don’t offer this as proof that one way is wiser. I only notice what it seems to have made: people who can hold a thing unresolved without needing to resolve it — who can keep the dead close without deciding exactly what the dead now are.

    I still cannot tell you where devotion ends and habit begins, or where a ghost becomes a god. I have been standing in these shrines my whole life and the line has never once shown itself to me. For a long time I took that as a failure of understanding on my part. Now I am not so sure the line is there to be found.

    The boats came up the river, the drums went on, and the crowd stayed to the last of the fireworks. No one was waiting to be told what any of it meant. They had come to do it, and they did it, and the doing was enough.

    I went home. Nothing was proven. But something had moved, quietly, and it is moving still.

    Glossary

    船渡御 (Funatogyo) — the boat procession
     The boat procession, held on the Ōkawa River (大川). Dozens of decorated boats carry the mikoshi, along with musicians and performers, upstream through the middle of Osaka after dark. It continues the deity’s journey by water and closes with fireworks over the river — the scene most people picture when they think of the Tenjin Matsuri.

    陸渡御 (Rikutogyo) — the land procession
     The land procession of the Tenjin Matsuri. Hundreds of participants in Heian-period (平安時代) court dress carry a mikoshi (神輿), a portable shrine, together with sacred objects, escorting the deity out from Osaka Tenmangū (大阪天満宮) and through the streets down to the river. It is the first half of the festival’s main event, and it delivers the procession to the waiting boats.

    絵馬 (Ema) — votive plaques
     Small wooden plaques offered at Shinto shrines. A visitor writes a wish or a word of thanks on the back and hangs the plaque at the shrine. The name means “picture horse”: worshippers once gave live horses to the gods, and over the centuries a painted wooden tablet took the horse’s place. Today the plaques often carry the year’s zodiac animal or a symbol of the shrine’s deity.

    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.

    Do you have an intercultural story or experience you want to share? We would love to hear it! Contribute to A-Culturated and join the community!

  • An Earthquake Has Brought Down Kumamoto Castle’s Walls Again

    An Earthquake Has Brought Down Kumamoto Castle’s Walls Again

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

    The restored stone walls and main keep of Kumamoto Castle (My Picture)
    The restored stone walls and main keep of Kumamoto Castle (My Picture)

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

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

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

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

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

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

    No one to blame

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

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

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

    What is left is us

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

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

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

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

    The treasures of this world

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

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

    Stone walls still under reconstruction (My Pcture)
    Stone walls still under reconstruction (My Pcture)

    Enough to be going on with

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

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

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

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

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

  • Why Trying to Relax Makes You Tense

    Why Trying to Relax Makes You Tense

    What I learned about panic from a bamboo sword, and why “just let go” is the worst advice ever given

    Photo by B Vi on Unsplash

    I was fourteen, and my mind went white.

    Kendo has a team format. Five fighters a side, sent out in fixed order — vanguard, second, middle, vice-captain, and last, the taishō (大将), the captain. Three wins takes the match. I was the captain. Fourteen and the captain, which sounds like an honour and is in fact a particular kind of exposure: when the score reaches two-all, the whole thing lands on you. Your teammates are finished. They are kneeling at the edge of the floor, watching. Whatever happens now is what happened to all of them.

    That is roughly how the semi-finals always went, because by the semi-finals the teams are evenly matched and it comes down to the captains.

    And standing there — Kobe city championships, the prefectural tournament, it hardly mattered which — I would begin to think things that had never once entered my head in ten years of practice.

    What if I lose.

    I have to score first.

    That was all it took. Two sentences, then a rising static, then nothing. No plan. No body. A white room where a fourteen-year-old used to be. And a boy from another school, who was not thinking anything at all, would step in and hit me.

    The word for what was happening

    There is a term for this. Itsuki (居着き). It means, roughly, to settle in — to stick, to take up residence. It names the moment the mind fastens onto something — the opponent’s blade, a point just lost, an outcome badly wanted — and the body, obedient, stops. The feet die. Weight sinks into the floor. You become, for a fraction of a second, a statue with a plan.

    In kendo this is not treated as nerves, or as a bad day. It is one of the three classical openings, the moments a trained opponent is taught to strike into. And what makes it so hard to escape is its shape:

    The bracing is the vulnerability. They are not two things.

    I did not freeze despite wanting to win. I froze because I wanted to win. The wanting was the mechanism. My determination not to lose was the precise instrument by which I lost.

    You know this feeling. You have simply never had a word for it, and the absence of the word has made it feel like a personal defect rather than a mechanism.

    The same trap, in your bedroom

    Let me be careful, because I am about to sound like I am against something I am not against.

    If you burn incense and something in your shoulders drops — good. If an app has given you twenty minutes a day that belong to nobody else, that is real, and I would not take it from you. Clean sheets are a pleasure. Nobody should surrender a pleasure on my account.

    My worry is narrower. It is about what preparation does.

    Preparation creates a goal. A goal creates an obligation. And obligation is a form of tension — which means the apparatus you built to relax you is, structurally, made of the thing you were escaping.

    Watch how ordinary sleep is. You have done it every night since infancy, without instruction, without equipment. Then one night you have a flight at six, and you think: I have to sleep now. And sleep, which has never once required your cooperation, stands up and leaves the room.

    Nothing changed. It simply became a task.

    We do this to meditation constantly, and almost nobody notices. We take an ordinary human capacity — sitting still, letting the mind settle — and build an appointment around it. A cushion, a timer, a slot in the calendar. And having built the appointment, we have quietly converted stillness into a performance with a standard, and hired a small auditor at the back of the skull whose only job is to ask: is it working yet? am I doing this right?

    The auditor is the tension. The auditor was hired by the preparation.

    The laboratory agrees with the dojo

    I am not a psychologist. But psychology arrived here too, from the opposite direction.

    In the late 1980s an American social psychologist, Daniel Wegner, began studying what happens when people try to control their own minds — work that became known as ironic process theory, or the “white bear problem,” after the experiment in which subjects told not to think of a white bear could think of very little else.

    His explanation is itsuki rewritten as cognitive science. Try to suppress a thought or produce a state, and you start two processes. One is effortful, and looks for distractions. The other runs automatically underneath, checking whether the unwanted thing is happening — and to check, it must keep the unwanted thing loaded and ready. Under stress or fatigue, the monitor wins.

    His lab followed the logic exactly where you’d expect. People who tried to relax under cognitive load showed higher physiological arousal than people who didn’t try. People instructed to fall asleep quickly took longer.

    Trying to relax is a measurable way of not relaxing.

    A patrolman in Kobe with a bamboo sword, and a psychologist with a skin-conductance meter, describing the same trap.

    What kendo refuses to tell you

    Here is where the real cultural difference lies, and it is not where people usually put it.

    Kendo has an old and precise account of the mind under pressure: the shikai (四戒), the four afflictions — surprise, fear, doubt, confusion (驚・懼・疑・惑). Let any of them in and you stall. A skilled opponent will deliberately induce them in you, because a mind with a hook in it is a body standing still. The tradition is not naive about interior states. It has been mapping them for centuries.

    But notice what it never does.

    It never tells you to feel calm.

    Nowhere in that vocabulary is there an instruction that says be at peace, or stay present, or let it go. It tells you where to put your feet. Where to look. How to breathe, where to keep your weight, how to hold the sword. It tells you, endlessly, to repeat the form. And about how you ought to feel while doing it, it maintains a complete silence.

    For years I took this for gruffness — an old, emotionally illiterate way of teaching. I have come to think it is the most sophisticated thing about it.

    Because an instruction about your inner state is an instruction that cannot be obeyed. Be calm installs a target, a monitor and a failure condition in a single breath. It is the shikai handed to you disguised as help. Whereas keep your left heel light is simply a thing you can do, or fail to do — checkable from outside, requiring no auditor at all.

    The silence was not indifference to your mind. It was an understanding that the fastest way to ruin a state is to require it.

    And nearly every wellness product on earth breaks this rule — be present, be mindful, release your tension, arrive in this moment — issuing commands about interiority as though interiority took commands.

    It doesn’t. It never has.

    “Just let go” is the same trap wearing a disguise

    Now the obvious next move, the one you can feel coming, the one I very nearly made: so stop trying. Let go of your attachment to winning. Give up the desire to be calm.

    I want to be blunt. That advice is worthless.

    Not because it is false. Because it is another instruction about your inner state, standing one floor up, wearing a robe. Let go of the outcome is not something a fourteen-year-old with two-all on the scoreboard can do. It is not available at 1 a.m., and it is not available in the corridor while, on the other side of the door, people wait for you to speak. Saying it takes a second. Doing it is not on the menu.

    Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been the captain.

    So what actually worked?

    Nothing I did. Something I noticed.

    Across dozens of those matches, a pattern appeared that made no sense to me at the time. If I scored the first point, the panic lifted — naturally, I was ahead. But if I lost the first point, the panic also lifted. Nothing left to protect. Nothing to do but fight.

    Which meant the panic had never been about what I stood to lose. That was identical either way. What froze me was the undecided — hovering over an open question, guarding something not yet gone. Settle the question, even badly, and my body came back.

    And that gave me something I could actually use: the tension had always dissolved on its own. Every time. Without my help, without technique, without my surrendering anything. I had watched it happen so often that eventually I could not not believe it.

    That is the whole thing. Not a state — a belief.

    You cannot order yourself to be calm. But you can hold the thought: I am tense now, and it will loosen, because it always does.

    Read those twice and feel the difference. The first is a command to a nervous system that takes no orders. The second is a sentence, and sentences you can simply say.

    It asks nothing of your body. It does not require you to relax, or release, or surrender, or breathe correctly. It asks you to remember something you already have evidence for.

    Where the calm was standing

    You have had this, even if you’ve never called it anything.

    You were so absorbed in the presentation that at some point you noticed you had stopped being afraid — and could not say when. Or the speech began, and as it began some part of you understood there was no way out but forward, and the terror that had loomed thirty seconds earlier was simply not in the room any more. Not defeated. Just gone.

    Look at what happened there. The calm arrived while you were facing the other way. It did not come because you called it. It came because you stopped calling.

    And look at where it had been. Not far. Never far. It had been standing directly beside you the entire time — and that vast distance you felt, between the tense self and the calm self, was manufactured wholly by the reaching.

    The distance was the reaching. There was no distance.

    This is the law of the thing, and it has one more application — the one I actually live by.

    The doorway is already beside you

    The kettle hasn’t boiled. You are standing in the kitchen with three unclaimed minutes. You did not schedule this. Stay there. Don’t call it anything.

    You come round a corner and the trees have turned, and the light is doing something to them. You had somewhere to be. Stay a moment past the moment.

    The river is moving under the bridge on your way home and you notice you have been watching it. You could keep watching it.

    None of these were planned, and that is not incidental — it is the entire reason they work. No preparation, so no goal, so no obligation, so no auditor. Nobody checking whether it was working. Which is precisely why something loosened.

    Stillness, like calm, cannot be walked toward. It can only be arrived beside.

    And it already is beside you. It has been standing next to the kettle this whole time, waiting for you to stop insisting on the door you built.

    Not a habit. A tic.

    People will tell you to make this a habit. I have said it myself, and I would like to take it back.

    A habit is something you build. It has a schedule and a streak and a small tyrannical sense of falling behind. It is preparation wearing a longer time horizon — and preparation, as we have established, is how the auditor gets hired.

    What happened to me was not a habit. It was closer to a tic.

    I did not construct it. I do not remember acquiring it. At some point I simply became a man who stops — who has, more than once, surfaced at the kitchen counter beside a cold kettle with no idea how long he had been standing there. It is not always convenient. I could not undo it now if I wanted to, and I stopped wanting to.

    Ask me what it has done for me and I have nothing for you. No metric, no before-and-after. It became ordinary, and ordinary things do not report their effects; you would have to remove them to find out, and I cannot.

    That is the honest end of this, and I would rather leave you there than somewhere more satisfying.

    Do not build anything. Do not schedule anything. Do not try, tonight, to relax.

    Just — next time you catch yourself already stopped, somewhere you did not plan to be: do not start moving again quite so quickly.

    That is all. That is the whole practice.

    Whatever it does, it will do without telling you.

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

    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.

  • How Shinto Finds the Sacred in Ordinary Things

    How Shinto Finds the Sacred in Ordinary Things

    What a mountain with no gods and a god with no face taught me about the way things actually are

    Sumiyoshi Taisha, located in Osaka, was founded in 211 AD. (My picture)
    Sumiyoshi Taisha, located in Osaka, was founded in 211 AD. (My picture)

    There Are No Gods Inside a Shinto Shrine

    If you visit a Shinto shrine for the first time expecting to find what you find in a church or a temple (e.g. an image or figure of the divine), you will be sadly disappointed.

    The honden, the inner sanctuary, contains no paintings, no statues, and no face. What it contains, in most shrines, is a shintai — a sacred object. The most common shintai are mirrors, swords, or stones. The object is not the god. It is more like an antenna — a focal point through which something that cannot be depicted makes itself available to human attention.

    Near the shrine there is almost always something older such as a mountain, tree, or a rock formation that has been there longer than anyone can remember. This is where the kami resides. Not in the building. In that place.

    This is the animistic sensibility at the heart of Shinto — the ancient, indigenous worldview of Japan. Shinto, unlike Western religions, is not a dogma. It has no founding text, no creed to recite, and no deity whose will must be obeyed. It is closer to a way of paying attention to the world around us and recognizing that it is already alive in some sense that exceeds easy explanation.

    The Mountain That Is the God

    In Nara Prefecture, there is a shrine called Ōmiwa Jinja (大神神社). It is among the oldest in Japan — some say the oldest. What makes it unusual, even among Shinto shrines, is that it has no honden at all. No inner sanctuary. Because the sanctuary is the mountain behind it.

    Mount Miwa is the shintai (神体). The mountain itself is the sacred object.

    The current haiden — the hall of worship — was rebuilt in 1664 (Kanbun 4) under Tokugawa Ietsuna, the fourth shogun of the Edo period. But the form of worship it preserves is far older: worshippers face the mountain directly through the mitsu-torii, the triple torii gate, without any image or statue as intermediary. The mountain is what you face. The mountain is what you address.

    For most of its history, the mountain was kinsokuchi (禁足地) — forbidden ground. No one entered. The shrine existed simply as the place where humans could approach the boundary of something that did not belong to the human world.

    In recent years, entry has been permitted. But the conditions are strict. No photography. No sketching. No conversation. And whatever you see or hear on the mountain, you do not speak of afterward.

    There are no penalties for breaking these rules. No authority enforcing them. No surveillance cameras in the cedar forest.

    Only this: you made a promise. To the mountain. And you know whether you kept it.

    I have been inside that forest. I made that promise, and I intend to keep it — so I will not recount what I saw or heard there. What I can say is that the air was different. The quality of silence was different. Something in my body registered a change that I could not explain and did not try to.

    You could tell me that this was suggestion — that I felt what I expected to feel because I had been told the mountain was sacred. Perhaps. I cannot disprove that. But I also cannot unfeel what I felt. And I have learned, over the years, to take seriously the things my body notices before my mind has had time to have an opinion about them.

    The God in the Tool Drawer

    There is a concept in Japanese culture called tsukumogami (付喪神).

    The idea is this: objects that have been used and cared for over a long period of time acquire a spirit. A needle used by a seamstress for decades. A kitchen knife that has prepared ten thousand meals. A writing brush worn down to its last few hairs. These things, the tradition says, become inhabited.

    I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to present this as charming folklore — the kind of thing that gets printed on the packaging of Japanese souvenirs. That would miss the point entirely.

    The point is not that tools are literally alive. The point is the orientation that the concept produces in the person who holds it.

    If you believe — or even half-believe, or find it natural to act as if — the knife in your hand has accumulated something through years of use, then you handle it differently. You clean it. You store it properly. You do not throw it across the kitchen in frustration.

    No one is watching you. No one will know. There is no penalty.

    But you will know.

    “Returning to the root is called stillness. Stillness is called returning to one’s destiny.” — Lao Tzu, Chapter 16

    The Japanese hold ceremonies for worn-out objects — kuyō (供養) — in which needles, brushes, kitchen knives, and even factory machinery are thanked and formally retired. Not because anyone requires it. Because something in the relationship between a person and the things they use deserves acknowledgment before it ends.

    This is not religion in the Western sense. There is no theology behind it, no doctrine. It is closer to a habit of attention — a way of moving through the world that keeps alive the sense that nothing is merely a means to an end.

    What This Has to Do with Lao Tzu

    Chapter 25 of the Tao Te Ching contains a line that I have returned to more times than I can count:

    人法地、地法天、天法道、道法自然。

    Humanity follows the earth. The earth follows heaven. Heaven follows the Tao. The Tao follows only itself — which is to say, it follows what is natural.

    The Tao takes nature itself as its standard.

    When I read this alongside everything I have described above — the mountain that is the god, the tool that accumulates spirit, the shrine that points toward a place rather than a face — I do not feel that I am encountering two different ideas. I feel that I am encountering the same idea in two different languages.

    What Lao Tzu is saying, in his compressed and difficult way, is that the deepest order is not something imposed from outside. It is not a commandment. It is not a system. It is what was already there before any system was invented — the structure of things as they actually are, which does not need your belief or your approval to continue operating.

    The Shinto sense of kami — the recognition that certain places, certain objects, certain encounters carry a quality that exceeds ordinary explanation — is, I think, a way of staying in contact with that order. Not through doctrine. Through attention.

    The world is sacred. It cannot be improved. If you tamper with it, you will ruin it. — Lao Tzu, Chapter 29

    How Shinto Changed What Zen Became

    Before exploring how Shinto shaped Japanese Zen, it is worth noting that the relationship between these two traditions has never been one of simple conflict or separation.

    Through a centuries-long process known as shinbutsu-shūgō (神仏習合) — the syncretism of kami and buddhas — the divine figures of Shinto and the bodhisattvas of Buddhism came to be understood not as rivals but as overlapping expressions of the same underlying reality. This blending was not confusion. It was a distinctly Japanese way of holding two things at once without forcing them into contradiction.

    Chinese Chan Buddhism, from which Japanese Zen descends, was a tradition shaped by the encounter between Indian Buddhist thought and the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi. Its emphasis on the ineffable, on paradox, on the limits of language — all of this carries the imprint of that earlier meeting. In that sense, Zen arrived in Japan already bearing Lao Tzu’s fingerprints.

    But something changed when it reached Japanese soil.

    The Chinese tradition, particularly in its Linji (Rinzai) form, placed great weight on the koan — those paradoxical exchanges and riddles designed to exhaust the rational mind and force a breakthrough beyond language. There is a certain intellectual sharpness to this, a willingness to push the limits of what words can do by using them aggressively against themselves.

    Japanese Zen, especially in the Sōtō school founded by Dōgen in the thirteenth century, moved in a different direction: shikantaza (只管打坐) — just sitting. Nothing more. No goal. No breakthrough to achieve. The practice is the practice.

    My own sense — and I hold this as personal conviction — is that this shift was made possible in part by Shinto’s deep-rooted suspicion of words. The Japanese concept of kotodama (言霊), the spirit of language, carries within it an awareness that words are powerful precisely because they are dangerous — that saying too much risks diminishing what is real. The Shinto tradition of kotoage sezu (言挙げせず) — not making things explicit, not declaring what need not be declared — found a natural resonance with the silent, embodied practice of just sitting.

    And there is something else. Chinese Chan spoke of sunyata — emptiness — as an abstract philosophical category. Japan already had a different relationship with emptiness: the emptiness of the shrine interior that points toward the mountain, the emptiness of the tea room that makes space for the encounter between host and guest, the emptiness of the raked gravel garden in which a single stone carries the weight of an island.

    These were not philosophical abstractions. They were lived forms. And when Zen encountered them, it did not so much transform them as recognize itself in them — and, in doing so, became something that could take root not only in the monastery but in the kitchen, the garden, the tearoom, and the dojo.

    The Buddhist teaching of mujo (無常) — impermanence — underwent a similar transformation. In its original Indian context, impermanence is primarily a teaching about suffering: things pass away, attachment to them causes pain, liberation requires releasing that attachment. This is not pessimism, but it carries a certain orientation away from the world as it is.

    Japan already had mono no aware (物の哀れ) — the bittersweet recognition that things are beautiful precisely because they do not last. The cherry blossom is not tragic. It is perfect. Its falling is not a failure but a completion.

    When Buddhist impermanence met this sensibility, something shifted. The teaching did not lose its depth, but it changed its direction — from a turning away from the world toward a deeper turning toward it. Impermanence became not a reason to detach but a reason to pay attention, now, to what is here.

    This, I think, is one of the most distinctive things about Japanese Zen — and I believe it is inseparable from the Shinto ground in which it grew.

    The Ordinary Is Not the Opposite of the Sacred

    Here is where I want to be direct about something, because I think it is the most important point in this essay and also the one most easily misunderstood.

    The important takeaway is that the Shinto orientation toward the sacred is not reserved for mountaintops and ancient shrines. It is not a special mode that one enters at the shrine gate and exits on the way home.

    When I say that the sacred is in ordinary things, I mean this literally.

    The meal that begins with itadakimasu — a word that acknowledges the life given so that you could eat, the labor of the people who grew the food, the chain of relationships that brought it to your table. The morning sweep of the path outside the house — not because anyone requires it, not because guests are coming, but because the space around you is part of the world and the world deserves that attention. The careful washing of a bowl after tea.

    These are not spiritual practices in the sense of being elevated above daily life. They are daily life, conducted with a particular quality of attention.

    And that quality of attention — this is what I find most interesting — does not require that you believe anything specific. You do not need to believe in kami. You do not need to have read Lao Tzu. You only need to be willing to treat the things in front of you as if they matter. As if the knife deserves to be cleaned. As if the path deserves to be swept. As if the mountain deserves silence.

    What happens when you do this consistently, over time, is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. But something in your relationship to the ordinary world quietly shifts.

    What I Actually Believe

    I want to be honest about my own position, because I think honesty is more useful here than a tidy philosophical conclusion.

    I do not know whether kami exist in any literal sense. I cannot tell you what I encountered on Mount Miwa — whether it was something real or something I constructed from expectation and silence and the particular quality of cedar forest light on an autumn morning.

    What I can tell you is that the framework — the habit of approaching the world as if things matter, as if places carry histories that deserve respect, as if the objects in my life have accumulated something through use — has changed how I move through my days. Quietly. Without drama. In ways that I would find difficult to measure and do not particularly want to.

    Lao Tzu wrote that the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. I take this seriously. I am not going to tell you that what I experienced on the mountain was the Tao, or kami, or anything else with a name. Names are what we reach for when we want to stop paying attention.

    What the mountain asked of me was to stop reaching. To be in that place, in that silence, without converting the experience into something portable.

    Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? — Lao Tzu, Chapter 15

    I am still practicing.

    A Note on Practice

    If any of this resonates — and I say this without prescription, because this essay is not a set of instructions — the entry point is simpler than it might seem.

    All you have to do the next time you use something is just notice it.

    The next time you enter a place, notice what changes in you. The next time you prepare a meal, let the moment before eating be a moment of actual acknowledgment rather than habit.

    Someone reading this might reasonably ask: and what has this practice changed in you? It is a fair question, and I find I cannot answer it — not because nothing has changed, but because these habits began so early, and have been so continuous, that I have no version of myself without them to compare against.

    I cannot see the change the way you can see a before and after. It is more like asking someone who has always lived near the sea what it is like to smell salt air. They may not notice it at all. But take it away, and something essential would be missing.

    That is all. It may amount to nothing. Or it may be the beginning of a very long and quiet conversation with the world you already live in.

    About the Author

    Takeshi Kitagawa was born in Kobe in 1965 and now lives in Osaka. He practiced kendo for nearly a decade at a police dojo in Kobe, and studied Zen and Buddhist philosophy at temples in Kyoto, where he had the opportunity to listen directly to Sōtō and Rinzai priests over many years. His writing explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and the dō traditions — not as cultural artifacts to be admired from a distance, but as living orientations toward how to be in the world.

  • The Most Caring Thing You Can Do Is State the Obvious (A Dialogue)

    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

    The terrace seating of a café in Nakanoshima, Osaka, bustling with international visitors (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)
    The terrace seating of a café in Nakanoshima, Osaka, bustling with international visitors (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)

    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.”

  • The Zen of the Quiet Day Off: Why “Doing Nothing” is the Wrong Goal

    The Zen of the Quiet Day Off: Why “Doing Nothing” is the Wrong Goal

    The problem was never how we spend our free time — it’s that we can’t stop trying to spend it well.

    The Shirakawa River flowing through the streets of Kyoto, where traditional buildings remain (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)
    The Shirakawa River flowing through the streets of Kyoto, where traditional buildings remain (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)

    Twice a year I visit a temple in the eastern hills of Kyoto — Konkai-Kōmyō-ji (金戒光明寺), though everyone here calls it Kurodani (黒谷)— where my mother and father are buried.

    From my station it is about ninety minutes. The efficient way is to ride to Jingū-Marutamachi and walk a few minutes uphill. But over the years I have taken to getting off two stops early, at Gion-Shijō, and walking the last hour along the Shirakawa: a narrow old canal lined with houses that have not changed in a lifetime.

    The purpose of the trip is plain. I go to visit my parents’ grave. And yet, somewhere along that hour, the purpose loosens its grip. This year the green of the trees over the water was unusually deep, and I slowed without meaning to, just to look at it. On the way back I chose a different street for no reason at all. There is a sweet Kyoto is known for, nama-yatsuhashi, which you can buy at any station kiosk — but I decided that since I had come all this way, I would walk to the original shop and buy it there instead. By evening I could not honestly have told you what I had gone to Kyoto to do.

    I did go to the grave. But the grave was no longer quite the point.

    We call it rest, and come home tired

    I think of this because of the way most of us spend a day off.

    When I look at my friends here, their free days are full. They go to a crowded department store, or to Universal Studios packed shoulder to shoulder with tourists, or out to a barbecue. I have no wish to criticize any of it — I am often right there beside them, in the same queue, under the same sun. And at the end of it we say the same thing to ourselves: I feel refreshed.

    But I have come to suspect that many of us finish these days more tired than we started, and that we quietly refuse to notice. We reach the evening and hand ourselves a verdict — that was a good use of the day — because the alternative is unbearable: the thought that a day might have been wasted.

    The trap hidden inside “doing nothing”

    The obvious remedy would be to do nothing. The West has even imported words for it — the Dutch niksen, the Italian dolce far niente — and, as tends to happen, turned them into products: books, apps, and retreats that will teach you, for a fee, the art of doing nothing.

    Here is the trouble.

    The moment you make emptiness a goal, it stops being empty.

    I feel the same unease watching what has become of zazen（座禅）, seated Zen meditation, in the wellness market — sold as a device for focus, productivity, better sleep, as though sitting still were a machine you feed your time into and collect a result from. Anyone who has actually tried to sit knows the first trap by heart. You are told to empty your mind. So you try to empty it, and the trying fills it. The effort to reach stillness is the very thing making the noise.

    A day off behaves the same way. Decide today I will do nothing, and you spend the whole day supervising your own emptiness, glancing at it to see whether it is working yet.

    Just sitting

    I am not a priest or a scholar. I studied Zen and Buddhist thought at temples in Kyoto from my university years, and what I say here is only how I have come to understand it through practice, not from any authority.

    But there is a form of Zen called shikantaza（只管打坐）, usually rendered as “just sitting.” Not sitting in order to arrive at calm, or insight, or anything else. Just sitting. When it goes as it should, the question what am I sitting for? quietly dissolves. You forget you came with a purpose at all.

    That, I have come to think, is the real thing — and it is exactly what happened on the walk to my parents’ grave. An errand carried me out the door. Somewhere along the way the errand stopped mattering, and only the walking remained: the green water, the unfamiliar street, the shop at the far end of town.

    The purpose brought me there, and then let go of me.

    There is a strange loop in this. The duty — the grave — brings the empty hour, the walk. But the empty hour is so good that, before long, I half go to the grave for the sake of the walk. Which is the means now, and which the end? I can no longer say. And I have stopped needing to.

    A place kept in order

    I lean heavily on Shinto, and I have done so since I was a child without ever deciding to. I go to Hirota Shrine, in Nishinomiya, because I always have. I also go often to Miyakojima Shrine in Osaka, near the Ōkawa river — in the middle of a dense city, and yet very quiet.

    I do not go because it is a “power spot,” or because I am certain that a god resides there. Whether or not something is literally present does not, for me, come into it. What I notice is only this: the priests and the people of the neighborhood keep the grounds swept and clean, always. The place has the feeling of something set in order — in Japanese, totonotte-iru. Many people treat it with respect, and when you stand in a place that many have treated with respect, your own mind seems to fall into order alongside it.

    To put it in the language of the moment: visiting a shrine, with no purpose whatsoever, has quietly become a kind of mindfulness for me — though I would never have thought to call it that.

    I think this says something about how a culture shapes the people inside it. Shinto has never much cared what you believe. It asks that you do — bow, rinse your hands, keep the grounds clean — and it leaves the belief behind the gesture an open question. Over centuries, that trains a particular habit of being: you can arrive at a settled heart through the act itself, without first arranging your convictions. You do not have to feel reverent to be steadied by a reverent place.

    Not everyone has a shrine. If you are reading this far from Japan, you may be wondering where such a place is supposed to be for you — and I would gently steer you away from that question, because it turns quickly into a search for the perfect quiet spot, which is one more errand. What matters about the shrine is not that I found it by looking for stillness. It is that I was already going there. You have places like that too: a library you pass, a park on the way home, the kitchen before anyone else is awake, a path you walk for the dog and not for yourself. The invitation is not to go somewhere new. It is to visit a place you already visit, and quietly leave one of its purposes at the door.

    The quiet day, not the empty one

    Now let me bring this down to an ordinary day off, and confess something.

    Some Sundays I mean to do the laundry. While the machine runs, I pick up a book I bought months ago and never opened, and it turns out to be far better than I expected — and I look up to find the laundry long finished and the light gone amber. If I had errands to run, I let them go. Never mind. Next weekend.

    Notice what that day actually was. It was not “doing nothing.” There was laundry, a book, an errand left undone. But nothing was grasped. I was not standing over myself, checking whether I had relaxed yet.

    Coffee is the smallest version of the same thing. I make it in the morning in order to drink it. But some mornings, watching the steam lift and catching the smell of it, the drinking quietly stops being the point, and the few minutes of warmth and scent become the whole of it.

    The cup was the errand. The pause was the day.

    This is what I mean by a quiet day off, as opposed to an empty one.

    The difference is not in what you do, but in whether you are reaching for a result while you do it.

    It is closer to a quality of attention than to a schedule.

    And I want to be honest about how hard this is, because it is genuinely hard. In a well-known set of studies published in Science in 2014, the psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues left people alone in a bare room for six to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. Most did not enjoy it. In one version, participants could press a button and give themselves a mild electric shock — the same people who had said, earlier, that they would pay money to avoid that shock. Among them, sixty-seven percent of the men and twenty-five percent of the women pressed it at least once rather than sit quietly with their own minds. One man pressed it a hundred and ninety times.

    I do not read this as proof that our minds are unbearable. I read it as permission. If sitting with truly nothing is more than most people can stand — and it seems it is — then forcing yourself into pure emptiness on your one free day is not wisdom. It is one more demand. So let there be laundry. Let there be a book, a walk, an unhurried cup. Only don’t reach.

    You did not waste the day

    The real problem was never the department store or the crowded theme park. It is the verdict we hand down at the end of the day: I did nothing, I wasted it.

    But look again. If you truly did nothing worth regretting, then there is nothing to regret. And if, without your noticing, your mind fell quietly into order somewhere along the way — as it does on a swept shrine path, or an hour beside a canal — then the day was not wasted at all. You might, if you like, simply call it that: the heart was set in order. I offer this only as a way of seeing. I would not press it on anyone.

    And if you are someone who has typed, late on a Sunday night, some version of why can’t I relax on my day off — perhaps the beginning of an answer is here. You may be reaching for rest the way a beginner reaches to empty the mind: reaching so hard that the reaching is the very thing holding it away. You cannot schedule the loosening. But you can stop standing guard against the wasted day, run your small errands without hurry, and leave a door open for the hour when the purpose quietly forgets itself.

    If you want somewhere smaller to begin, the errands you already have will do. On a day off, make the coffee more slowly than usual, and notice how it differs from the cup you throw back on a Tuesday. If you must go to the shops, take a road you have never taken to get there. These are not techniques, and I would not want them read as a list to complete — the same slow coffee, drunk with now I am relaxing held tight in your mind, becomes one more thing to get right. The point is only that an ordinary errand, done a little more slowly and reached by a slightly longer way, leaves more room than usual for the purpose to slip loose on its own. That is all. Whether it does is not up to you, and not up to me.

    Nothing is promised. I have never once been able to promise myself that the door will open on a given afternoon. But I know that it exists — because I have walked through it, beside a green canal, with somewhere to be and all the time in the world.

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

    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.

  • When Respect Becomes Law: What Han Feizi (韓非子) Saw Coming 2,300 Years Ago

    When Respect Becomes Law: What Han Feizi (韓非子) Saw Coming 2,300 Years Ago

    A reflection on the limits of unspoken rules — and why the coldest philosopher in the East may be the one every globalizing society now needs

    Japan fla
    Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

    There is a Japanese phrase I grew up believing was a kind of strength: iwanakutemo wakaru — “you understand without being told.”

    For most of my life, it was true. You did not need a sign in the park telling you to keep your voice down at night. You did not need a law telling you to lower your head slightly when an elder entered the room. You did not need a statute instructing you to treat a flag with care. These things lived in the air. We breathed them in as children and exhaled them as adults, and the whole arrangement held together without anyone writing it down.

    This is a Japanese story, and I will tell it as one. But if you live in a society where the shared assumptions have thinned — where things that once went without saying now have to be spelled out, litigated, legislated — I suspect you will recognize the shape of it long before the end. The particulars are Japanese. The predicament is not.

    I still believe in that world of the unspoken. I bow at shrines when no one is watching. I feel something when I see a flag — not only my country’s — treated carelessly, a small internal flinch I cannot fully explain. Respect, for me, is not a rule. It is closer to a reflex, or a form of attention.

    Which is exactly why, a few days ago, I felt uneasy.

    On June 30, 2026, Japan’s House of Representatives passed a bill creating a new crime: the desecration of the national flag. The penalty is up to two years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to 200,000 yen for anyone who publicly damages, removes, or defiles the flag “in a manner that causes significant discomfort or disgust.” The bill passed the upper house on July 17 — the same day this essay was published — and is now law.

    The timing felt almost too precise. The question this essay asks — whether law can hold what virtue has lost — is no longer hypothetical.

    And my unease was not political. It was philosophical. I found myself thinking: this is not something a law should hold. That the law now exists does not change the thought. If anything, it sharpens it.

    Where the bill came from — a quarrel with no shared floor

    To understand why this is happening, you need the small story underneath the large one.

    In the summer of 2025, at campaign rallies for a rising nationalist party, protesters began holding up the Japanese flag marked with a large X. Images spread across social media and drew a great deal of attention. To the protesters, this was speech — a constitutionally protected act of objection, and lawyers confirmed that marking a flag you own is not, in itself, a crime. To those who revere the flag, it was desecration, a defilement of something close to sacred. The party’s leadership pointed to these images and said, in effect: this is why we need a law.

    Notice what actually collided here. Not two laws. Two feelings — each sincere, each certain, and with no shared floor beneath them to resolve the difference. One side felt they were exercising a freedom. The other felt they were watching something holy be profaned. In an earlier Japan, a quarrel like this might have been absorbed by the atmosphere, settled by the pressure of shared assumption before it ever reached the Diet. But the atmosphere no longer held. And when the air can no longer settle a dispute, people reach for the written word.

    There is an irony I cannot resist pointing out, because it is the whole essay in miniature. The specific act that started all this — holding up an X-marked flag — was quietly dropped from the bill during negotiations, deferred to a review three years after enactment. The law, in the end, could not even touch the thing that provoked it. It reached for the fire and closed its hand on smoke.

    Han Feizi (韓非子) could have predicted that too.

    The moment respect leaves the body and enters the statute book

    I was not alone in my unease. Iwaya Takeshi, a former foreign minister and a member of the very party that drove the bill, walked out of the chamber and abstained. His reason, given to reporters, was almost exactly the sentence that had formed in my own chest: that reverence for the flag should grow naturally, and is not something to be forced by criminal punishment.

    Here is what fascinates me, and what I want to sit inside for this essay. The bill itself seems to know it cannot do the thing it wants to do. Its stated protected interest is “the feelings of citizens who cherish the flag.” Yet the drafters were careful to say the law will not inquire into the offender’s inner intent — whether they meant to insult or not — and will judge only the outward act.

    Read that again slowly, because it is one of the most quietly revealing sentences in recent Japanese lawmaking. The law wants to protect a feeling. But it promises to look only at behavior. It reaches for the heart and then, at the last moment, admits it can only touch the hands.

    The law reaches for the heart, then admits it can only touch the hands.

    This is not a flaw the drafters overlooked. It is the oldest problem in political philosophy, and 2,300 years ago a Chinese thinker named Han Feizi (韓非子) built his entire worldview on it.

    The philosopher we in the East prefer not to quote

    Those of us who love East Asian thought have our favorites, and Han Feizi (韓非子) is usually not among them.

    We quote Laozi (老子): the sage governs by doing nothing, and nothing is left undone. We quote the Zen masters, with their moon reflected in water and their fingers pointing away from themselves. We build our aesthetics on wu wei, on effortlessness, on the faith that if you cultivate a person’s inner nature, right action flows out of it like water finding its level.

    Han Feizi (韓非子) is the cold water thrown on all of it.

    He was a prince of the state of Han, a stutterer who wrote rather than spoke, and a student — this matters — of the Confucian Xunzi (荀子), the philosopher who argued that human nature is not good but bent, and must be straightened by effort. Han Feizi (韓非子) took his teacher’s pessimism and removed the comfort. Where Confucius said govern by virtue and the people will follow like grass bending in wind, Han Feizi (韓非子) said: no. People do not move reliably by virtue. They move by reward and punishment. Build your state on that, or watch it dissolve.

    To a reader raised on Zen, this sounds monstrous — a philosophy for tyrants, and indeed it armed the ruler who became China’s first emperor. For most of my life I filed Han Feizi (韓非子) under “the villain,” the necessary dark that made the light of Laozi visible.

    I have stopped reading him that way. And the flag bill is why.

    What Han Feizi (韓非子) actually understood

    Han Feizi’s central insight was not that people are evil. It was more precise, and more uncomfortable: that a system cannot run on the assumption that everyone shares the same inner feeling.

    A village can. A family can. A dojo where everyone has trained together for ten years can. In those places, iwanakutemo wakaru works, because the “you” who understands without being told and the “I” who does not need to tell you have grown from the same soil. We share reflexes. The unspoken rule is real because it lives in both of us.

    But Han Feizi (韓非子) was not writing for a village. He was writing for a state — a thing made of strangers, of people from different regions, different loyalties, different gods, who would never share a single reflex. For such a body, he argued, virtue is not a foundation. It is a hope. And you cannot run a country on the hope that the person beside you happens to feel what you feel.

    Virtue is not a foundation. It is a hope. And you cannot run a country on the hope that the person beside you happens to feel what you feel.

    So he proposed something that still sounds harsh: make the rule explicit. Write it down. Apply it to everyone the same way, minister and commoner alike. Do not ask what is in a person’s heart, because you cannot see it and cannot govern it. Ask only what they did.

    Now return to the flag bill, which promises to judge only the outward act and not the inner intent. Whoever drafted that clause was, whether they knew it or not, thinking exactly like Han Feizi (韓非子). They wanted to protect a feeling, discovered they could not legislate a feeling, and retreated to the only ground law can actually stand on — behavior. Han Feizi (韓非子) could have told them that in 250 BCE. In a sense, he did.

    This is not only a Japanese dilemma

    If the problem were purely Japanese, it would be a curiosity. It is not.

    A flag, a law, and the raw feelings around them are not a Japanese invention. Other countries have had their own versions of this exact quarrel — the United States among them, where the question of whether a flag may be defaced in protest reached the highest court in the land. I will not walk through the ruling or its reasoning here; the details differ, the political weather differs, and dragging them in would only turn this into a comparison of legal systems, which is not what I am after. What matters is simpler. The collision itself — a shared reverence on one side, a claimed freedom on the other, and no common ground left to settle it — is not ours alone. It shows up wherever the old assumptions have thinned.

    So this is not a story about something peculiar to the Japanese. It is a story about what happens to any society when a feeling that used to be shared stops being universal — and someone reaches for the law to hold it in place. The West is not the teacher here and Japan the student, or the reverse. We are speaking two dialects of one predicament.

    Why the law is leaking in now

    So why is this happening in Japan specifically, now? Why, in a country famous for unspoken harmony, is respect suddenly being written into the criminal code?

    My answer — and I offer it as personal observation, not sociological fact — is that the air is thinning.

    Iwanakutemo wakaru was never magic. It was infrastructure. It ran on a shared upbringing, a relatively homogeneous society, and a sense of haji — of shame, of the eyes of others — that regulated behavior more powerfully than any police officer. That infrastructure is now under strain. Values have diversified. The society is opening to the world, and the old shared assumptions are thinning faster than new ones can form to replace them. The neighbor who “just knows” is increasingly standing beside a neighbor who genuinely does not — not out of malice, but because they were never breathed into the same air.

    When the unspoken stops being shared, it stops being a rule and becomes a mere assumption. And into that gap, law seeps like water into a crack. The flag bill is one drop of that seepage. So, in a gentler register, are the “best-effort obligations” scattered through Japanese law — the bicycle helmet you are urged but not required to wear — those strange half-rules that assume you will do the right thing without being made to.

    Japan is discovering, law by law, what Han Feizi (韓非子) knew: that when a society can no longer assume shared feeling, it must start writing things down.

    “But Japan already had an insult law” — a necessary objection

    Here a reader who knows Japan well will raise a hand, and rightly. Japan has had a crime of insult since 1907, they will say. Article 231 of the Penal Code. Respect has been written into your law for over a century. Why call this new?

    It is a fair challenge, and answering it precisely is the fastest way to see what is actually happening. Because the insult law and the flag bill look like cousins and are, on closer inspection, strangers.

    Consider what the old insult law protects: the honor of a specific person. There is a victim — someone named, someone injured — and, historically, they had to bring the complaint themselves. Its origin is telling. It was enacted in the Meiji era, just as the samurai class dissolved, and it reads almost as the state stepping into a role the sword had vacated: where a warrior might once have answered an insult to his honor privately, the modern state now said, let us handle it. The insult law is virtue’s replacement in the narrow domain of one person’s honor against another’s.

    The flag bill protects something with no victim at all: “the feelings of citizens who cherish the flag.” Not a person — a mood. A diffuse, shared reverence that belongs to everyone and therefore to no one in particular. Nobody is named. Nobody files a complaint. The injury is to the atmosphere itself.

    So the skeptic is right that respect has long been in our law, and wrong that this makes the flag bill unremarkable. One guards a concrete right; the other guards a feeling in the air. They come from different centuries and different instincts.

    And yet — here is the turn I did not expect when I started writing — underneath, they are the same event.

    Look at when the old insult law was last strengthened. In 2022, Japan sharply raised its penalties, adding imprisonment where before there had been only token fines. Why? Because of online abuse. Because in the anonymous spaces of the internet, haji — the shame that once regulated us through the eyes of others — stops working. When no one can see your face, the air that used to restrain you evaporates, and the old sense of “you understand without being told” restrains nothing at all. So the state reached, again, for the written rule.

    Strengthening the insult law and inventing the flag crime are two vents of a single eruption: the shame that governed us is losing its grip, and law is rushing into the space it leaves.

    That is the deeper unity. The insult law being sharpened and the flag law being born are not two separate stories. They are two places where the same underground pressure — the thinning of shared feeling — has broken the surface. One over a private injury, one over a public one. Han Feizi (韓非子) is not disproven by the 1907 law. He is confirmed twice.

    The reframing I want to offer

    Here is where I want to turn the cold philosopher into something other than a villain — and I want to be honest that this is my reading, not Han Feizi’s intent. He wrote to help a ruler control his subjects. I am borrowing his tool for a different purpose, and he would probably not approve.

    We in Japan tend to dislike explicit rules. We find them yabo — crude, graceless, a little cold. To need a written rule between two people can feel like an admission of failure, as if the relationship were too thin to trust. This is why the flag bill unsettled me, and unsettled Iwaya: writing respect into law feels like a defeat of respect.

    But consider the other side.

    The unspoken rule is only warm if you are already inside it. To the person who did not grow up breathing the same air — the newcomer, the foreigner, the young person raised in a different world — the unspoken rule is not warmth. It is a trap. It is a standard they are being held to without ever being told it exists, judged by an atmosphere they cannot read. “You should have known” is a cruel sentence to say to someone who had no way to know.

    Seen this way, writing the rule down is not coldness. It is a kind of hospitality. To make a rule explicit, transparent, and equal is to release people from the tyranny of reading the air — to let the stranger stand on the same ground as the native, knowing the same things, owed the same clarity. The explicit rule does not bind people together against their will. It frees them from a game whose rules were never shared.

    Making a rule explicit is not distrust of the other person. It is how strangers become equals.

    This is the ethic I think Han Feizi (韓非子) accidentally offers a globalizing world: not a cold instrument for doubting people, but a transparent, fair tool for those who do not yet share the same air to live together anyway.

    How a culture of the unspoken shaped us — and what it costs now

    I said I would ask, in each of these essays, how a cultural inheritance shapes the way we think and act. So let me be direct about this one.

    Centuries of governance-by-virtue, of iwanakutemo wakaru, gave the Japanese a genuine and rare gift: the capacity to sense — to read a room, to anticipate a need before it is spoken, to hold a harmony so fine it needs no enforcement. This is real. Anyone who has been cared for by that sensitivity knows it is not a myth.

    But the same inheritance planted something else in us: the feeling that needing a rule is a kind of loss. We were shaped to experience the explicit, the written, the contractual as slightly shameful — mizu kusai, we say, “smelling of water,” meaning a coldness where there should be warmth. We do not dislike law because we are lawless. We dislike it because we were formed to feel that a relationship requiring law has already failed.

    That formation served a village beautifully. It serves a globalizing society poorly. And the discomfort I felt reading about the flag bill — the discomfort Iwaya felt walking out of the chamber — is, I now think, the sound of that old formation grinding against a new world. If you come from a culture that writes everything down by instinct, you may find this hard to feel from the inside. But you have your own version of it: the moment a handshake stops being enough and someone asks for it in writing, and something in the room goes cold. That cold is what we feel at the scale of a whole society.

    What I am not saying

    I am not saying Japan should legislate every unspoken rule. The opposite. A society that must write down “respect the flag” has already lost the thing the law is trying to protect, and no punishment will grow it back. Han Feizi’s tool controls the hand, never the heart, and we should be honest that a flag protected by fear of imprisonment is not a flag that is loved.

    Nor am I saying the warm world of the unspoken should be discarded. The sensitivity it gave us is one of the most beautiful things about this culture, and I would not trade it away.

    What I am saying is smaller, and I hope more useful. There is governance by virtue, the lubricant of human relationships — invisible, warm, and irreplaceable between people who share the same air. And there is the explicit rule, the architecture strangers need to stand beside one another as equals. A mature society does not choose one and reject the other. It learns which is which, and when to reach for each — and it stops mistaking the second for a betrayal of the first.

    And yet — a confession I cannot resolve

    I have argued that writing rules down is a hospitality, and I believe it. But I would be dishonest if I ended there, because there is a second feeling in me that will not lie down next to the first.

    Japan may be one of the last places on earth where a vast web of rules with no punishment attached still, mostly, works — where millions of people do the right thing not because they will be caught, but because it does not occur to them to do otherwise. That is not nothing. It is, I think, something close to a miracle, and it is disappearing everywhere, including here. If you have spent time in Japan, you have felt it: the quiet of a city that runs on trust you did not have to negotiate. That quiet is the thing I am afraid of losing.

    And so I find myself unable to fully celebrate the tool I have just defended. Yes — the explicit rule welcomes the stranger. Yes — it frees people from an atmosphere they cannot read. But I wonder whether the day iwanakutemo wakaru stops working entirely is also the day Japan stops being Japan. Not a political Japan. A Japan of a certain quality of attention between people, a quality that cannot be legislated into existence and cannot survive being replaced by law.

    Every society that has industrialized, diversified, and connected itself to everyone else has felt some version of this loss — the handshake replaced by the contract, the nod replaced by the terms of service, the neighbor replaced by the notice on the door. Japan is simply meeting it later, and therefore more visibly, than most. Which may make it a useful place to watch the thing happen. What we lose when we finally write it down is not always small, and it is worth knowing the name of what we are trading away.

    I do not know how to hold both of these truths at once. The hospitable rule and the vanishing air. I suspect I am not supposed to resolve it — that the honest position is to keep both in my hands and feel their weight.

    So I will leave you the way the question leaves me. The next time you feel that flinch of yabo at a written rule — that instinct that says this should not need saying — I would ask you to hold it a moment longer than usual. Wonder whether the rule is there to bind you, or to let someone who was never told finally come in from the cold. And then wonder, as I do, what quiet thing we lose on the day we finally need it written down.

    Something may shift in the holding. It did in me. It has not yet stopped.

    Takeshi Kitagawa writes on Japanese thought, aesthetics, and their uses in contemporary life for the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT. Born in Kobe in 1965, he lives in Osaka.

  • The Care That Refuses to Be Spoken

    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

    Photo by Atikah Akhtar on Unsplash

    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.”

  • Thirty Years of Zen, and I Still Can’t Tell You If It Works

    Thirty Years of Zen, and I Still Can’t Tell You If It Works

    Everyone from Tom Hanks to the app on your phone now promises meditation will change you in five minutes. After thirty years near Zen, here is the honest version — including what I can’t promise.

    A tofu restaurant in Kyoto that I often visit (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)
    A tofu restaurant in Kyoto that I often visit (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)

    A little while ago I came across some advice from Arianna Huffington: don’t wait until you can sit for twenty or thirty minutes. Start with five. Even a few minutes, she says, is enough to crack a door open.

    I read it and felt two things at once, and they did not cancel each other out.

    The first was agreement. She’s right that people wait for the perfect version — the empty schedule, the cushion, the silent room — and in waiting, never begin. Five honest minutes beats a beautiful intention. I know this better than most, because my own practice, after a lifetime of it, is smaller than five minutes on most mornings.

    The second feeling was harder to name. Something closer to unease.

    Because lately the words around all of this — meditation, mindfulness, Zen — have taken on a particular shape. Tom Hanks tells the story of how he used to collapse every afternoon, useless from three o’clock to seven, until someone taught him to meditate; now those are the most productive hours of his day. Kendall Jenner took up the same practice to manage the anxiety and burnout of an impossible schedule. And the people who write about where all this is heading in 2026 have a name for the condition it’s meant to treat: tired and wired — exhausted but unable to rest, alert without clarity, the nervous system never quite finishing one stress before the next one starts.

    I recognize that state. I imagine you do too. And I don’t doubt for a moment that meditation helps with it.

    So here is my unease, stated plainly: I’m not sure the thing that helps with being tired and wired is the thing I’ve spent my life near. It might be. It might even be better than the thing I know. But it has borrowed a very old word, and I’d like to talk about what that word had inside it — before we quietly agreed it meant “a doorway to a more productive afternoon.”

    I don’t doubt meditation helps. My unease is smaller and stranger: I’m not sure the thing that helps is the thing I’ve spent my life near.

    Let me make my own confession first, though, because I don’t want to sound like I’m standing above any of this.

    The kettle

    I grew up inside it. Kendo and judo from childhood. Years studying in the temples of Kyoto. Enough hours on the cushion to have worn through the knees of several pairs of trousers. If anyone should be able to tell you what Zen delivers, it ought to be someone with my mileage.

    And my daily practice, described honestly, is this. In the morning I put water on for coffee, and I sit for however long the kettle takes to boil. Two minutes. Three. Then the water is ready, and I get up.

    I don’t do it to achieve anything. I’ve never once sat down thinking, this will make me calmer, sharper, better. If you asked me whether it’s correct — whether a monk would even recognize what I do as practice — I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me what it’s for, I have no answer that would satisfy you.

    It is closer to brushing my teeth. I do it because not doing it feels faintly wrong, and I stopped asking why a long time ago.

    My practice is a few minutes while the kettle boils. I can’t tell you if it’s correct. I can’t tell you what it’s for. I’ve simply stopped being able to walk away from it.

    I’m not speaking from the far side of some accomplishment, in other words. I’m speaking from the kettle.

    What it doesn’t promise

    I’ll try not to lecture here, because the moment I lecture, I’ve already missed the point.

    Zen does not promise you anything.

    Not clarity. Not peace of mind. Certainly not a cleaner inbox or a better morning routine. The version being sold to you — the five-minute session, the article headlined How Ancient Japanese Monks Got More Done — I’m honestly not sure what that is. It may be useful. It may even be good for you. But it has kept the word and quietly set down the thing.

    What’s missing is the destination — and not in the tidy way people mean when they say the journey matters more than the arrival. I mean there is no arrival. No graduation. No moment when anyone, the master included, gets to say I’ve finished, I understand now. The tradition is full of people who were certain they’d reached it — satori, the whole of it — and were sent back to sit more. What felt like arrival was the gate.

    I’ve been standing near that gate for thirty years. I think.

    What it did give me

    There are things this practice has given me. Not promised — given. They are simply not the things the apps advertise.

    I notice more. Not in a sharpened, high-performance way — more that I’ve grown slower to file things away as background. The green of the trees in Osaka in early October is not the green of late October, and the difference matters to me, though I couldn’t defend why it should. My tiredness on certain evenings is a specific tiredness, asking for a specific thing, and I’ve slowly learned to hear the difference.

    None of this makes me more productive. It contributes to no measurable outcome. But it does give me the sense that I am actually here, inside my own life, rather than moving through it at a slight remove.

    And here is the one cultural observation I trust. A practice with no goal, repeated for centuries, doesn’t stay on the cushion. It leaks. It shapes how a culture uses silence in a conversation, how a craftsman relates to a task he has done ten thousand times, how a garden is built to make you feel something that has no name. When the point of an activity is not its result, attention itself changes character. That, more than any doctrine, is what Zen did to the people who grew up breathing it — myself included.

    I did my first meditation at six, though I didn’t know that’s what it was. Before kendo practice, the whole class would kneel, bow, and then sit in mokusō — two or three minutes of silence — before we ever picked up the shinai. Several times a week, from six until sixteen. Nobody explained it. Nobody said it was for anything. You closed your eyes because that was simply what you did before you began.

    Which means I have no idea what it did to me. There is no earlier version of me to measure it against — no Takeshi who never sat in that silence.

    When you’ve done a thing since before you could think to question it, you can’t isolate its effect. You can’t step outside your own life to check.

    The trouble with a goal

    Every self-improvement system is built around a goal. Less anxious, more focused, more content — more something. The practice is the means; the goal is the end; and when you arrive, you know it.

    The practice I’m describing has no such shape. You sit. You return to the sitting. When the mind wanders — and it wanders constantly, mercilessly — you return. Not to achieve a quiet mind, but because the returning itself, over and over, without scolding the wandering, may be the entire thing.

    I have felt, on certain mornings, that something opened and I could see a little further in. Every teacher I’ve ever trusted has met that feeling the same way. Good, they say. Now sit more.

    So I sit more.

    The mirror it doesn’t give you

    There’s a fear I understand completely, because I’ve felt it myself reading the breezy version of all this: there’s no effect. I’ve been wasting my time.

    Weight training never lets you feel that. The muscle grows; you see it in the mirror; you know it worked. Meditation offers no mirror. And here is the part that sounds like a contradiction but isn’t: the longer you continue, the harder the effect becomes to see at all. It stops being something that happens to you and becomes part of the ground you stand on — and you cannot see the ground you’re standing on.

    So I won’t tell you what continuing will give you. I’m only certain of the other direction. If I stopped, I would lose something. I can’t tell you what that something is — only that its absence would be real.

    Brushing your teeth is like this. You feel nothing while you do it. Then one day, if you had stopped, there is the cavity. Some practices announce their results. Others only ever announce their absence.

    I can’t tell you what continuing gives me. I’m only certain of the other direction: stop, and you lose something you were never able to name.

    Then why write about it

    If I’m honestly unsure whether I understand this, and if it can’t be summarized or applied like a method — then why write about it at all? A fair question. I’ve put it to myself.

    The only honest answer I have is: because the alternative is worse.

    The alternative is to leave the word entirely to the people packaging it as a productivity system, a seven-step path to inner peace. I’m not angry at them; the tired-and-wired need is real, and five minutes at the kettle is a kind thing to offer someone drowning in a day. But if the word drifts far enough from what it names — if Zen comes to mean only “calm and uncluttered” — then something real goes quiet, and is lost.

    I’m not the right person to guard that gate — I’ve already admitted I’m not sure what’s behind it. But I can stand near it.

    What I’m carrying

    What a lifetime beside this thing has actually felt like is this: long stretches of nothing, occasional glimpses of something, a steady uncertainty about what it all means, and a stubborn inability to stop even when I can’t justify it.

    If that sounds familiar — not the Zen part, but the being-pulled-toward-something-you-can’t-quite-name part — then maybe that’s the conversation worth having.

    Here is the smallest version of what thirty years has taught me: sometimes knowing yourself means knowing, honestly, that you don’t know — and sometimes that honesty is the closest thing to healing on offer. I can’t promise it is. I’ve stopped needing it to be.

    That’s what the kettle is for, if it’s for anything. It boils. I get up. And for a moment, I am here.

    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.