My blog

ブログ

  • Beyond the Scoreboard: What Buddhism Teaches Us About Surviving — and Thriving — in a World…

    Beyond the Scoreboard: What Buddhism Teaches Us About Surviving — and Thriving — in a World Obsessed with Winning

    Explore how ancient Japanese wisdom applies to your modern life.

    Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash

    The Game Nobody Wins by Playing

    There is a particular kind of exhaustion I have noticed in people around me — in the faces of men and women who have, by every external measure, succeeded. They hold the titles. They command the salaries. They occupy the seats that others spent entire careers trying to reach. And yet something in their eyes tells a different story. A flatness. A restlessness that no achievement quiets.

    I am not here to tell you that competition is wrong, or that the modern economy is broken, or that we should all seek some imagined equality. I do not believe those things. Competition is real, hierarchy is real, and the desire to excel is, at its root, a form of life itself asserting its vitality.

    But there is a difference — a difference so important that Buddhism spent two and a half millennia trying to articulate it — between competing and being consumed by competition.

    “The one who fights the current exhausts himself. The one who understands the current moves with it — and arrives further.”

    The Decay from Child to Adult

    Watch a young child play. They are entirely inside the activity. There is no self-consciousness, no monitoring of how they appear to others, no tallying of wins and losses. They are, in the Japanese phrase, muga-muchu — absorbed in selfless concentration, lost in the thing itself.

    Now watch most adults work. The task is almost secondary. What occupies the foreground is positioning — where do I stand relative to others? Am I gaining or losing ground? Who noticed? Who didn’t?

    Buddhism calls this the construction of a fixed self — and considers it the primary source of human suffering. Not because the self is evil, but because it is fictional. The great insight of Śākyamuni Buddha was that what we call “I” is not a fixed entity but a fluid process — a constellation of relationships, conditions, and responses that is constantly arising and dissolving. The Sanskrit term is śūnyatā: emptiness, or more precisely, the absence of fixed, independent existence.

    We do not lose our selves when we stop clinging to them. We find something larger — the web of relationships from which we were never truly separate.
    This is not nihilism. It is liberation.

    The Middle Way Is Not the Average

    Buddhism’s famous Middle Way is frequently misunderstood as moderation — a kind of philosophical averaging, the lukewarm center between extremes. This is precisely wrong.

    The Middle Way is the path that refuses to be captured by either pole. Not “winning is everything” nor “winning is nothing.” Not “the self is supreme” nor “the self must be annihilated.” It is the ability to engage fully — with complete commitment — while remaining unattached to the outcome as the measure of your worth.

    Consider Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers pitcher who came to Los Angeles carrying the weight of perhaps the largest pitching contract in baseball history. On the mound, he faces situations of acute, public pressure. A full count. Bases loaded. The World Series on the line.

    And yet, those who watch him closely notice something. He does not look like a man fighting the moment. He looks like a man inside the moment — fully present, committed to the next pitch, not the final score. When he said, after winning the World Series, that losing was simply not an option, he was not expressing reckless confidence. He was expressing something closer to vow — a samurai’s resolve that does not inflate the ego but rather dissolves it into the task.

    The pitcher who fears the strikeout cannot locate his fastball. The executive who fears losing the deal cannot hear what the client actually needs.

    Science, Mystery, and the Danger of “Explain or Dismiss”

    There is a habit in contemporary intellectual culture — one I respect in its intention, but distrust in its reach — of treating anything that cannot be measured as therefore nonexistent. If it cannot be quantified, it is not real. If it cannot be replicated in a laboratory, it is superstition.

    Physicist Roger Penrose’s work on quantum processes in neural microtubules (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) is fascinating not because it proves anything about consciousness, but because it demonstrates how much our most rigorous science still does not know about the relationship between matter and awareness. The gaps are enormous.

    I grew up in the Kobe–Osaka area, and as I studied Zen and Buddhism more deeply — first in the temples of Kyoto, then in the classical literature of Japan — I found myself increasingly drawn to Shinto not as superstition, but as a sophisticated awareness of presence in the natural world. When I visit a local shrine in a mountain village, when I stand before an ancient cedar tree whose roots go deeper than any building I have ever entered, I am not worshipping in any evangelical sense. I am acknowledging something I cannot explain but refuse to dismiss.

    The Japanese concept of kami — often poorly translated as “gods” — refers more accurately to a quality of presence, power, and significance that inheres in certain places, objects, and phenomena. It is closer to what a physicist might call a field than what a theologian might call a deity.

    To say “I don’t understand this” is wisdom. To say “therefore it doesn’t exist” is a different kind of superstition.

    Altruism as the Exit from the Closed Loop

    Here is the structural problem with living for status and position: it is a closed loop. Every victory creates a new horizon of threat. Every seat you occupy can be taken. Every metric you optimize becomes the new floor.

    Buddhism’s answer to this is not to stop caring — that is the error of false detachment — but to redirect the care. The concept of metta (loving-kindness) and the Bodhisattva ideal are not sentimental. They are strategic, in the deepest sense. When you are playing to protect something beyond your own position — a family, a team, a genuine vision, a community — you are no longer susceptible to the anxieties of the status game in the same way. You can lose a battle without losing yourself, because yourself was never the point.

    The samurai who fought for his lord, the mother who sacrifices sleep for her child, the researcher who publishes findings that help others long after she is gone — these are not losers in the game. They have changed what game they are playing.

    The man who fights only for himself has everything to lose. The man who fights for something beyond himself has already found what he was looking for.

    What Changes — And What Doesn’t

    I want to be honest with you, because I find the current wellness industry’s relationship with honesty troubling. I will not promise you that reading this article, or practicing zazen, or studying the Tao, will make you more productive, more successful, more peaceful, or more anything.

    If any of this resonates with something you recognize in yourself, I would suggest something simple. Not a practice. Not a discipline. Just this: take a few minutes and look up at the sky. Watch the clouds shift. Watch the way wind moves through trees — how each branch responds slightly differently, how the whole thing is never still and never chaotic. Or, if you can manage it, spend one day on a weekend doing genuinely nothing. Not productive nothing. Not self-improving nothing. Just — nothing.

    I am not asking you to drop out of the race. I would never presume to tell you how to live. But switching yourself off, even briefly, even imperfectly — that is not weakness. It is maintenance. And you may find, when you switch back on, that something has quietly rearranged itself.

    What I will say — carefully, from decades of practice and reflection — is that something shifts. Not always where you expect it. Not always in ways you can name. The man who sits in zazen for six months may not meditate better. He may simply become slightly less reactive in a difficult meeting. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

    The child’s capacity for muga-muchu — that selfless absorption — does not have to be left behind in childhood. It can be recovered. Incompletely, impermanently, but genuinely.

    That is what I am after. Not transcendence. Not optimization. Just — a little more of that.

    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.

  • Harmony Was Never Silence: The Forgotten War Behind Japan’s Most Misunderstood Idea

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

    Photo by József Szabó on Unsplash

    A Familiar Kind of Exhaustion

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

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

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

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

    Before “Wa,” There Was a Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Writing the Cure After Living the Disease

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What This Actually Looks Like, Day to Day

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

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

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

    The Same Failure, Wearing Different Clothes

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Question I’m Sitting With

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

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

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

    SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
    English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

  • The Book of Five Rings — The Fire Scroll: The Mirror in the Enemy’s Eyes

    The Book of Five Rings — The Fire Scroll: The Mirror in the Enemy’s Eyes

    What Miyamoto Musashi Understood About Pressure, Perception, and the Battle Inside the Battle

    Photo by Krys Amon on Unsplash

    This is one of the articles in the series on Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings”.

    There is a specific moment in a kendo match that every competitor knows.

    The score is one to one. The time remaining is under a minute. You need one more point to win, and so does your opponent. The match has been close throughout — neither of you has dominated, both of you have been tested. And now, with the clock running, something happens in your mind that has nothing to do with technique.

    You start thinking.

    If they come in high, I’ll counter with a do. If they feint left, I should watch for the kote. How much time is left? Is the judge on my right going to see the next exchange? I need to be more aggressive. No — I need to wait. What if I —

    The moment this begins, the match is effectively over. Not because your technique has deteriorated. Because your mind has left the present and started living in a future it is trying to control. And a mind that is somewhere else cannot perceive what is happening here.

    I lost matches this way more times than I want to count. I knew, even as it was happening, exactly what I was doing wrong. The knowledge made no difference. The thinking continued. The match ended.

    It was only later — much later — that I understood what Miyamoto Musashi was pointing at when he wrote, in the Water Scroll, that his teachings should not be treated as teachings, should not be imitated, should be found from within your own mind and made part of your body.

    He was not being philosophical for the sake of it. He was describing a practical reality: there are moments in which thinking is the defeat.

    What the Fire Scroll Is About

    The Fire Scroll — 火の巻, Ka no Maki — is where Musashi moves from the preparation and the qualities of mind into the heat of actual engagement. The Earth Scroll built the ground. The Water Scroll described the mind that must inhabit it. The Fire Scroll is what happens when that ground and that mind are tested by real conditions.

    Fire is the appropriate element. Fire does not deliberate. Fire responds to what is present — to the available fuel, to the direction of the wind, to the shape of the space it inhabits — without consultation, without hesitation, without a plan it is executing in advance.

    This is what Musashi wants from his practitioner in the moment of genuine combat. Not the execution of a memorized strategy. Not the application of a technique selected from a mental catalogue. Immediate, unmediated response to what is actually happening.

    And he knows — because he fought sixty-one times and survived — that this is only possible under one condition: that the preparation has been so thorough, and the practice so deeply absorbed, that there is nothing left to think about.

    Can this be taught? Musashi answers this question honestly: not directly. Not in words. Not in any form that transfers from the page to the body without the years of practice in between. The Fire Scroll can describe what genuine readiness looks like. It cannot install it. Only the training installs it.

    The Moment Thinking Becomes the Enemy

    In kendo, the transition from physical competition to mental crisis happens fast. One moment you are present, reading your opponent, responding without deliberation. The next moment — triggered by the score, by the time, by the weight of the outcome — you are somewhere else. Inside your own head, running scenarios, managing a future that has not yet arrived.

    The body is still in the match. The mind is not.

    Musashi understood this dynamic completely. He writes about the danger of what he calls fixation — the mind that catches on something and stops moving. An opponent’s weapon. A particular technique. The score. The result. Whatever it is, once the mind fixes on it, perception narrows. You stop seeing what is actually happening and start seeing only what you are afraid of, or what you are reaching for.

    The warrior in the Fire Scroll cannot afford fixation. The situation changes too fast, the consequences of misreading are too severe, and the opponent — if they are capable — will use your fixation against you.

    What Musashi prescribes is not focus in the conventional sense. It is something closer to wide perception — the capacity to take in everything without fixing on anything. To see the opponent’s eyes, their hands, their weight distribution, the space between you, all simultaneously, without the mind catching on any single element long enough to go blind to the rest.

    This cannot be achieved by trying to achieve it. It is what remains when the fixation has been trained away — through the years of practice, through the accumulated experience of being in difficult situations and learning, slowly, to stay present within them.

    The Shogi Player Who Was Too Calm

    I want to describe a different kind of pressure — one that has nothing to do with physical combat, but that I think illuminates the same principle from another angle.

    I play shogi occasionally. Not at a serious level — I am competent enough to enjoy the game and lose to people who take it more seriously than I do. But the game has taught me something that kendo, strangely, took longer to show me.

    There are opponents in shogi who, when you are clearly winning — when your pieces are advanced, their defenses are compromised, the position favors you by any objective measure — remain completely unruffled. No urgency in their moves. No visible adjustment to the pressure of the position. They take their time, they seem comfortable, and something about their composure makes you uneasy.

    And that unease, if you follow it honestly, is information.

    Because a player who is genuinely losing and genuinely knows it does not look like that. The calm you are seeing means one of two things: either they have accepted the loss and are simply playing it out, or they can see something you cannot.

    When I encounter this kind of opponent, I stop pressing. I look at what they are holding. I examine the board not for opportunities but for vulnerabilities — not where can I attack but where could this turn against me. I try to see the position the way they might be seeing it.

    And fairly often, I find it. The sacrifice they are setting up. The sequence that my aggressive advance has inadvertently made possible. The trap that only exists because I stopped looking at the whole board and started looking only at what I was winning.

    Focusing only on what is in front of you causes you to misjudge the balance of power. In shogi. In kendo. In any situation where the full picture matters and the full picture is larger than what your current attention is covering.

    Musashi understood this. The Fire Scroll is full of instructions about maintaining wide vision — about seeing the situation whole, not in fragments — and about the danger of what happens when you see only the part that excites or frightens you.

    The Enemy Who Is Also Afraid

    There is a passage in the Fire Scroll that I have found myself returning to more than almost any other in the book.

    Musashi writes:

    「世中をみるに、ぬすみなどして家の内へ取籠るやうなるものをも、敵をつよく思ひなすもの也。敵になりておもへば、世中の人を皆相手とし、にげこみてせんかたなき心なり。」

    Look at the world: even a thief who has barricaded himself inside a house considers his enemy to be strong. When you become the enemy, you face the whole world as your opponent, cornered with no way out.

    This passage asks something unusual of the warrior. Not: analyze your opponent’s technique. Not: identify their weaknesses. But: become them. See the situation from inside their position.

    And what you find, when you do this honestly, is almost always the same thing.

    They are also afraid.

    The opponent who is pressing hard is pressing because something in their position makes them need to press hard. The negotiator who seems aggressive is aggressive because aggression is covering something they don’t want examined. The competitor who appears dominant is working harder than they want you to know to maintain that appearance.

    This does not make them less dangerous. But it changes the nature of what you are dealing with.

    When I was a teenager in kendo, with one minute left and the score level, I was not the only one who was frightened. My opponent was also frightened. We were both doing the same thing — running scenarios, trying to control an outcome neither of us could control, slowly strangling our own perception with the grip of wanting.

    The difference between winning and losing that match was not technique. It was who managed to return to the present moment first.

    The Mirror the Enemy Holds Up

    But Musashi’s instruction to become the enemy is doing something more than strategic empathy. And this is where I think the Fire Scroll reaches its deepest point.

    When you genuinely attempt to see the situation from your opponent’s position — when you try to feel what they are feeling, to understand the fear or the overconfidence or the desperation driving their choices — something happens that has nothing to do with them.

    You see yourself.

    Because the qualities you observe in them — the fear, the fixation, the overreach, the false confidence — are not foreign to you. You know them from inside. You have felt them in your own body in other moments. And the act of recognizing them in your opponent throws them into relief in yourself.

    The thief barricaded in the house, as Musashi describes him, faces the whole world as his enemy. He cannot see clearly because his fear has made everything threatening. When you look at your opponent and see that same contracted, frightened state — when you recognize the shape of their desperation — you are also being shown a map of the territory you must not enter yourself.

    The enemy is a mirror.

    Not metaphorically. Practically. The clearer your perception of what is happening in your opponent’s mind, the clearer your perception of what is happening in your own. And the clearer your perception of your own mind — the fears, the fixations, the places where you are gripping too hard — the better positioned you are to release them before they cost you the match.

    真の勝者は、戦いの渦中にありながら、敵の心だけでなく、自分の心もまた完全に把握している者である。

    The true victor, in the midst of combat, does not only hold the enemy’s mind. They hold their own.

    What This Requires

    I want to be honest about what this demands, because I think it is easy to read the above and find it compelling without fully registering its implications.

    The capacity Musashi is describing — to observe your opponent with enough clarity to read their psychological state, while simultaneously maintaining awareness of your own — is not a skill you develop in a single practice session, or a year of practice sessions. It is the product of the entire preceding discipline: the nine principles of the Earth Scroll, the daily training and tuning of the Water Scroll, accumulated and embodied over years until the observation is no longer effortful.

    You cannot think your way into wide perception under pressure. You can only train your way there — slowly, through repeated exposure to difficult situations, through the gradual expansion of what you can hold in awareness without fixating on any part of it.

    The kendo match with one minute remaining. The shogi position that is better than it looks. The negotiation where one party is calmer than the situation warrants. The meeting where something under the surface is driving the conversation in ways the surface doesn’t show.

    In all of these: the person who can see the whole board, who can read what the other party is actually experiencing, who can hold their own reactions with enough awareness to prevent them from narrowing perception — that person has an advantage that no amount of tactical knowledge can replicate.

    And that person was built. Slowly. Through the work Musashi describes in every scroll that precedes this one.

    “Don’t Think. Don’t Imitate.”

    I come back, always, to Musashi’s instruction at the opening of the Water Scroll: do not treat this as teaching. Find it yourself.

    In the Fire Scroll, I think I finally understand why he said it.

    Because what the Fire Scroll is describing cannot be transmitted in words. The experience of being present under genuine pressure — of maintaining wide perception when everything in you wants to fixate on the outcome — is not something that can be installed by reading about it. It can only be discovered, in the actual conditions of actual pressure, by a person who has done the preparation that makes discovery possible.

    Musashi can describe the territory. He can tell you what it feels like when you have lost the present moment, what it looks like when your opponent has lost theirs, what the difference between fixation and wide perception actually is.

    He cannot make you capable of it. That is your work. And it begins not in the fire, but in the daily practice — in the ground and the water — long before the fire arrives.

    Previous : The Book of Five Rings — The Water Scroll: What Musashi Meant by Everyday Mind

    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.

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

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

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

    Photo by Jens Aber on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Morning the Ground Moved in Kobe

    I was thirty years old when the ground moved.

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

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

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

    What the Dojo Taught Before the Words Came

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

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

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

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

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

    And then, years later, the earthquake.

    The Earthquake Was a Mirror, Not a Teacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “First Cleaning, Second Practice, Third Study”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Next One Is Not Hypothetical

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

    And now there is the Nankai Trough.

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

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

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

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

    Accept. Prepare. Then Return to Now.

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

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

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

    The Limits of What I’m Saying

    I want to be honest about those limits.

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

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

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

    How a Culture Shapes the Hand That Packs the Bag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Lao Tzu and Zen: What’s the Difference — and Why It Matters

    Lao Tzu and Zen: What’s the Difference — and Why It Matters

    One describes the destination; the other builds the road

    Lao Tzu and Zen: What’s the Difference — and Why It Matters
    Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

    I’ll Use a Word I Usually Hate

    If you have searched for the difference between Lao Tzu and Zen, you have probably found the same thing I have: comparison tables. Taoism on the left, Zen on the right. Origin, key concepts, practice methods, and goal. Neat columns that answer the question and somehow leave you no closer to understanding why any of it matters to you personally.

    So let me try something different. I am going to use a word I normally resist — a word that flattens things, that belongs to the vocabulary of productivity apps and business podcasts and weekend retreats that promise transformation by Sunday evening.

    I am going to call Zen a lifehack.

    Not because I believe that is all it is. But because, in a specific and honest sense, that is exactly what it did — and understanding why may be the clearest way into what those comparison tables never quite reach: what is the actual difference between Lao Tzu and Zen, and why does it matter to you?

    Bear with me.

    The Question Most People Don’t Think to Ask

    When Westerners encounter Zen — through meditation, through Japanese aesthetics, through the spare beauty of a Zen garden — they often assume they are encountering something distinctly Japanese, or perhaps distinctly Buddhist.

    They are less often told, however, that some of the qualities later associated with Zen have deep roots in ancient Chinese thought that predate the introduction of Buddhism there — in the Tao Te Ching, a text attributed to Lao Tzu, so old and so compressed that scholars still debate the details of its authorship and origins.

    Read the Tao Te Ching alongside the teachings of the great Zen masters, and you will feel something unmistakable: a family resemblance. The same quality of silence. The same refusal to explain. The same insistence that the thing worth knowing cannot be said directly.

    So what, exactly, is the difference?

    The OS and the Application

    I have been sitting with this question for a long time — long enough to arrive at a metaphor that I find slightly embarrassing, but also precise.

    If Lao Tzu described the operating system of being human, then Zen is one of the applications running on top of it.

    The OS — the Tao — contains guidance, but of a paradoxical and non-prescriptive kind. It describes how reality is structured: the interplay of opposites, the power of emptiness, the way yielding outlasts force, the way the river that does not fight the rock eventually moves it. What it does not give you is a systematic practice — a specific method for Tuesday morning.

    “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”

    The Tao Te Ching points at something that was already there before you arrived and will remain after you leave. Its eighty-one chapters offer orientation, not instruction. They tell you what the territory looks like; they do not hand you a map with a marked route.

    Zen, by contrast, gives you the route.

    Zazen. The koan. The precise choreography of the tea ceremony. The raked gravel of the karesansui — dry landscape garden — in which rocks become islands and sand becomes the sea. These are not decorations. They are methods. There are ways of using the body, attention, and daily habits to arrive at something that Lao Tzu could only gesture toward in paradox.

    How I Came to Understand This

    I did not come to Lao Tzu first. Almost no one in Japan does.

    I came to the dō — the way. Kendo as a child, in a police dojo near my home in Kobe, where the smell of sweat and lacquered wood and the sound of shinai striking were my earliest education in something I could not yet name. Later, Zen — at temples in Kyoto, where I sat with Sōtō and Rinzai priests, listened to their teachings, and was given nothing to hold on to, and where that nothingness slowly became interesting rather than frustrating.

    It was only later, when I began to read Lao Tzu seriously, that I had the curious experience of recognizing a landscape I had already been walking through.

    The Tao Te Ching describes what happens in the dojo when everything goes right — when the cut arrives before the intention to cut, when the body moves without the mind’s interference. It describes the quality of the tea ceremony at its best, when each gesture is neither effortful nor careless but simply appropriate. It describes the particular stillness of sitting zazen for a long time, when the effort to sit still has been completely surrendered and sitting simply continues on its own.

    Lao Tzu named this territory. Zen built a practice for entering it.

    This is, I think, the most honest way to describe the relationship: Lao Tzu tells you what the destination looks like. Zen gives you the road.

    Neither is complete without the other. A destination without a road is a dream. A road without a destination is just movement.

    And this leads to a question that puzzled me for years: why did Zen take hold so deeply in Japan, while Lao Tzu’s thought — as a direct philosophical practice — largely did not?

    How Japan Made Zen Its Own

    (What follows is my own interpretation, shaped by years of listening to Sōtō and Rinzai priests, and by a recognition that most Japanese people — myself included — encounter Lao Tzu not directly, but through the filter of Zen.)

    Taoist ideas entered Japan early, and in many forms — calendrical, divinatory, folk practices woven into the culture long before Zen arrived. And Zen itself came to Japan through the transmission of Chinese Chan Buddhism, carried by monks and shaped significantly by the social conditions of Kamakura Japan, where warrior culture found in Zen a compatible discipline.

    But something happened to Zen in Japan that did not happen in China. It changed. Sōtō Zen, which avoided political entanglement and emphasized quiet daily practice, developed differently from the Rinzai school that found favor with the samurai class. Both evolved away from their Chinese origins. And over centuries, the teachings of both schools seeped beyond temple walls into the broader culture — into the tea room, the flower arrangement, the garden, the dojo.

    My own view — and I hold this as a personal conviction, not a historical claim — is that this transformation was made possible in part by Shinto. Japan was not a blank slate when Chinese thought arrived. It already had a way of being in the world defined by relationship with place, with the unseen, with the weight of presence in a specific moment. A culture already oriented toward gesture, ritual, and the sacred in the concrete did not need to be convinced that practice mattered more than doctrine.

    What Zen offered was a practice that fit the soil already there.

    And the result — this is what I find most interesting — is that most Japanese people today understand Lao Tzu, if they understand him at all, through Zen. The thought arrived in Japan already filtered, already embodied, already transformed into something you could do rather than something you could only contemplate.

    In that sense, Zen did not simply import Lao Tzu’s ideas. It translated them into a different medium entirely.

    What This Means for Practice

    I practiced kendo for nearly a decade before I read a word of Lao Tzu. And when I finally did read him, the experience was not of encountering something new. It was about being handed the name for something I already knew in my body.

    “In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.”

    I had dropped something in the dojo, many times, without knowing what it was called. The moment when the technique stops being performed and starts being inhabited. The moment when the opponent across from you stops being a problem to solve and becomes something else — a mirror, a partner, a part of the same field of attention.

    Lao Tzu named this. Zen gave me a way to practice arriving there.

    Why This Matters Now

    We are living in a moment when both Zen and Taoism are being absorbed into the vocabulary of productivity and self-optimization. Meditation apps. Minimalism as a lifestyle brand. “Flow state” as a competitive advantage.

    I understand why this happens. The ideas are genuinely useful, and usefulness is not a crime.

    But something is lost when the OS is stripped of its depth and handed to you as a feature, and when the practice is reduced to a ten-minute timer before your morning meetings.

    What is lost is the relationship between the two — the understanding that the practice is not the destination, and the destination cannot be reached by effort alone. What Lao Tzu understood, and what Zen embodied over centuries of transmission and transformation, is that the biggest changes are not achieved. They happen, slowly, in the space created by sustained attention and the willingness to keep showing up without demanding results.

    “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”

    I have been trying to answer that question, in one form or another, for most of my life.

    I am not sure I have succeeded. But I think the asking itself is the point.

    A Note on What This Series Is

    This essay is part of an ongoing series exploring Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching — not as an academic exercise, but as a living inquiry into how these ideas intersect with Japanese philosophy, with practice, and with the texture of contemporary life.

    The perspective throughout is personal: I am writing as someone who came to Lao Tzu through Zen, through kendo, through years of listening to priests explain things that resist explanation. This is not philosophy from the outside. It is philosophy as I have encountered it, filtered through a particular life in a particular place.

    I am not going to tell you what to do with any of it.

    But I do think that if you sit with these ideas long enough, something quietly shifts. Not because the ideas are persuasive — Lao Tzu was, famously, not interested in persuasion — but because they describe something that was already true, and recognition, in my experience, has a way of rearranging things.

    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.

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

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

    Osaka Castle photographed from a nearby hotel (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)
    Osaka Castle photographed from a nearby hotel (Photo by Takeshi Kitagawa)

    I live near Osaka Castle.

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

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

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

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

    The Castle You See Is the Third One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Summer of 1615

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

    Few know what that means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What Authenticity Actually Means

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What Stays With You

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

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

    This is what I come back for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Or it may not. That is fine too.

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

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

  • D.T. Suzuki Pointed at the Moon. We Photographed His Hand.

    D.T. Suzuki Pointed at the Moon. We Photographed His Hand.

    How the man who introduced Zen to the West became the beginning of a very long misunderstanding — A conversation at a kissaten near Nakanoshima

    Photo by Maayan Nemanov on Unsplash

    Two Men Named Suzuki

    Nicholas has, by his own admission, owned a copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind for eleven years. He bought it at an airport bookstore in 2013, read the first chapter on the flight to Tokyo, and hasn’t opened it since. He is not alone in this.

    “I always figured that was the Suzuki,” he said. “The Zen one.”

    “That’s Shunryu Suzuki,” Catherine said — she’d clearly done some reading before this conversation. “He founded San Francisco Zen Center. The beginner’s mind one.”

    “Right. And the other one?”

    “Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki,” I said. “D.T. Suzuki. Born 1870, died 1966. He’s the reason you’ve ever heard the word satori in English.”

    They are completely different people. Shunryu Suzuki was a Soto Zen priest who came to California in 1959 and spent the rest of his life teaching people how to actually sit — how to practice. D.T. Suzuki was a scholar and philosopher who spent most of his adult life translating the idea of Zen for Western thinkers, decades before most of them had ever met a Japanese person.

    Both were essential. They just did entirely different things. And confusing the two — which nearly everyone does — is itself a small illustration of the problem we were about to discuss.

    What He Was Actually Trying to Do

    D.T. Suzuki spent decades in the West — London, New York, Columbia University — and he had one fundamental problem: how do you describe something to people who have no frame of reference for it at all?

    He wasn’t trying to teach Westerners how to practice Zen. He wasn’t that kind of teacher. What he was trying to do was something stranger and, I think, more ambitious: he wanted Western thinkers to understand that a particular kind of human experience existed. That it was real. That it had been documented, explored, and refined for over a thousand years in Japan and China — and that it had nothing to do with what they assumed religion was.

    He called it satori. And he described it not as a theological event but as a psychological phenomenon. A shift in consciousness. Something that happens to a person rather than something a person achieves.

    “Like a breakthrough moment?” Catherine asked.

    “Something like that. But not one you can engineer.”

    “Jung was completely fascinated by him,” she said. “I’ve read some of their correspondence. Jung wrote the foreword to one of Suzuki’s books.”

    Yes — and that tells you something important about how the work was received. It wasn’t Buddhist monks who first responded to Suzuki with excitement. It was European philosophers and psychologists. Jung. Erich Fromm. Later, Heidegger engaged with the ideas. These were people who had spent their careers mapping consciousness and the depths of the human mind, and Suzuki was showing them territory they’d suspected existed but had no language for.

    “So basically,” Nicholas said, “he was doing philosophy. Not religion.”

    “He was doing both, in a way. But he understood which audience he was writing for.”

    Nicholas nodded. “Okay. I can respect that. Guy identified the market and positioned accordingly.”

    I let that one sit for a moment.

    A Rainy Afternoon in the Desert

    Here is where it gets complicated.

    Imagine you’ve spent your entire life in a desert region where it never rains. Not as a metaphor — literally. You’ve never seen rain, never heard it against a window, never felt the particular drop in air pressure that comes before a storm rolls in. And someone tries to explain to you the feeling of a rainy afternoon in November. That specific mood — the gray light, the way time seems to slow, a melancholy that isn’t quite sadness but sits in your chest like something heavy and familiar.

    No matter how many words they use, you won’t get there. Not really.

    And here’s the thing: that feeling is not a technique. It isn’t a skill. It’s a phenomenon — something that happens to a person under particular conditions. You can’t learn it. You can’t practice your way into it. It either arrives or it doesn’t.

    Satori, as Suzuki described it, is something like this. I’m not saying they’re the same thing — that would be exactly the kind of overclaiming I want to avoid. But structurally, the situation is similar. It’s a category of human experience that resists instruction. Suzuki knew this. He wasn’t writing instruction manuals. He was writing something closer to weather reports from a place his readers had never been.

    Catherine was quiet for a moment. “So when people talk about achieving mindfulness…”

    “They’re asking how to manufacture the feeling of a rainy afternoon,” I said. “Which is the wrong question entirely.”

    “But — “ Nicholas leaned forward. “If someone meditates every day and their stress actually goes down, isn’t that real? That’s measurable. That matters.”

    “Of course it does.”

    “Then what’s lost?”

    I thought about it. “Nothing is lost for that person in that moment. What gets lost is what Suzuki was actually pointing at. The wellness industry took his weather report, removed all mention of weather, and started selling people techniques for recreating the feeling of humidity.”

    He was quiet for a second. “Okay. That’s a fair distinction.”

    “Takeshiさん,” Catherine said, with that careful way she has of addressing people older than her, “do you think Suzuki knew this would happen? That the meaning would drift like this?”

    Honestly? I think he suspected it might. But I think he also believed — and maybe he was right — that even an imperfect transmission was better than silence. That pointing at the moon imperfectly was better than never pointing at all.

    The question is what happens when people forget about the moon and start photographing the hand.

    How It Traveled

    The journey from D.T. Suzuki to your morning meditation app is not a straight line, but it has a certain logic to it.

    Suzuki’s work reached the Beat Generation in the 1950s — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gary Snyder. They received it not as philosophy but as liberation, which is a very American thing to do with a foreign idea. Zen became tangled up with freedom from conformity, from postwar materialism, from the whole suffocating machinery of mid-century American life. That interpretation was romantic, and it was genuine, and it was also about thirty degrees away from what Suzuki had been describing.

    Then Shunryu Suzuki — the other Suzuki — arrived in San Francisco in 1959 and started teaching actual practice. Sitting. Breathing. The physical reality of Zen as a discipline. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind came out in 1970 and landed in exactly the right cultural moment.

    Meanwhile, Jon Kabat-Zinn was building what would become Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at UMass in the late 1970s. He was a molecular biologist, a meditator, and a committed pragmatist. He took the sitting practice, deliberately stripped out the Buddhist philosophical framework — because he wanted it accessible in clinical settings, to people dealing with chronic pain and anxiety — and created something measurable, teachable, and reproducible.

    That was a genuine contribution. MBSR has helped a lot of people.

    “But,” Nicholas said.

    “But,” I agreed.

    What came after MBSR was the productization. The eight-week program became an app. The app became a subscription. The subscription became a line item in corporate wellness budgets. Somewhere in that sequence, the weather report became a thermostat.

    “Hold on.” Nicholas wasn’t ready to concede this. “I use one of those apps. Ten minutes in the morning, most days. My stress is down. My sleep is better. I’m telling you this is real.”

    “I believe you.”

    “So then — “

    “I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m saying it’s something different from what Suzuki was describing. Both things can be true.”

    He looked at me, then at Catherine.

    “You know,” she said carefully, “it’s like — maybe the app gives you some of the humidity. But you still haven’t seen rain.”

    Nicholas stared at her. “Did you just use his analogy against me?”

    “I’m just saying both things can be true.”

    “I genuinely cannot tell whose side you’re on.”

    “I don’t think that’s how this works,” she said, and smiled into her coffee.

    The Paradox of This Article

    I want to be honest about something.

    Everything I’ve written here — this entire conversation, this article — is doing exactly what D.T. Suzuki did. And exactly what the wellness industry does. I’m using words to describe an experience that is, at its core, resistant to words. I’m pointing at the moon.

    I cannot give you satori through a Medium article. I couldn’t give it to you if we sat together for a month. I’m genuinely uncertain that a lifetime of practice guarantees it — and I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise.

    What I can do is what Suzuki did: describe the territory as honestly as I’m able to and trust you to understand the limits of the map.

    The difference — and this is the only distinction I’m claiming — is that Suzuki knew he was drawing a map. The wellness industry sold people the map and told them the map was the destination.

    “So what are we actually supposed to do with any of this?” Nicholas asked. It wasn’t a hostile question. He was genuinely sitting with it, which is not something he does often and which I’ve come to recognize as a sign that something has landed.

    I didn’t have a good answer.

    Catherine looked at her coffee for a moment. “Maybe not having a good answer is the most honest thing you’ve said all morning.”

    Nicholas picked up his cup. After a pause, he said: “You know what Statcast still can’t measure? What it actually feels like to stand at the plate in the ninth inning with two outs and the game on the line. All that data, and that’s still invisible.”

    I looked at him.

    “I’m just saying,” he said. “I think I understand the point.”

    What We Didn’t Figure Out

    We stayed at that kissaten for another hour. The conversation drifted, as it usually does — Nicholas brought up Aaron Judge’s contract extension, Catherine mentioned something about her thesis, I watched the street outside and thought about nothing in particular, which is about as close to practice as I get on most days.

    We didn’t resolve anything. We didn’t arrive at a conclusion about what modern mindfulness is missing, or whether the drift from Suzuki’s original intention has any practical consequence for the person who feels genuinely calmer after ten minutes with an app. We didn’t agree on where legitimate adaptation ends and fundamental distortion begins.

    What stays with me is the rain metaphor — not because I’m proud of it, but because it named something I’ve felt for a long time without being able to say clearly. Suzuki stood in front of the Western world and tried to describe the feeling of a rainy November afternoon. And the world — eager, well-meaning, genuinely moved — built a humidifier and called it weather.

    Whether that matters to you depends entirely on what you were looking for in the first place.

    What was D.T. Suzuki trying to give you — and do you still want it?

    A solo essay about Daisetsu Suzuki

    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.

  • What Is Taoism? Lao Tzu’s Philosophy and Why It Still Matters Today

    What Is Taoism? Lao Tzu’s Philosophy and Why It Still Matters Today

    Lao Tzu Wrote This 2,500 Years Ago — and He Was Talking About Us

    This article is the introductory chapter to a series about Lao Tzu.

    Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

    The Exhaustion Nobody Talks About Honestly

    You already know the feeling.

    The Sunday evening unease that arrives before the week begins. The performance review that reduces three months of your life to a number on a rubric. The LinkedIn feed that turns professional development into a competition you did not sign up for but somehow cannot leave. The quiet pressure to reskill — again — because the thing you spent years mastering is now threatened by automation, restructuring, or a market that has simply moved on.

    This is not burnout, exactly. Burnout implies a flame that has gone out. This is something more like a fire that is never allowed to stop burning — a permanent state of mobilization, of straining forward, of measuring yourself against benchmarks you did not choose toward a finish line that keeps moving.

    The language around this has become familiar: hustle culture, the rat race, the comparison trap. We have named it. We discuss it. We generate content about it.

    And yet almost nothing changes, because the system that produces the exhaustion is the same one that produces the advice about how to manage it.

    More productivity frameworks. More morning routines. More optimization.

    I want to offer something different. Not a system. Not a solution. But a perspective that is, in a sense, 2,500 years old — and was written, with uncanny precision, for exactly this moment.

    A World That Will Feel Familiar

    The philosopher we know as Lao Tzu lived — if he lived at all in the form tradition describes — during the late Spring and Autumn period of ancient China, sometime around the 6th century BCE.

    China at that time was not a unified state. It was a fracturing collection of rival kingdoms, each competing for territory, resources, and dominance. And the nature of that competition was changing in ways that would have been unrecognizable to earlier generations.

    War, which had once been the domain of trained aristocratic soldiers — almost a ritualized affair, conducted according to conventions — was transforming into something altogether more total. Entire populations were being drawn into conflict. Peasants conscripted. Resources stripped from the land to feed military campaigns. The old hierarchies were being dismantled not through wisdom but through sheer force of ambition.

    Everyone was competing. Every state, every court, every minister was positioning, strategizing, grasping. The air must have felt, to anyone paying attention, thick with a particular kind of desperation — the desperation of people who have accepted someone else’s definition of winning and are exhausting themselves trying to achieve it.

    It was into this world that the Tao Te Ching was written.

    And the first thing to understand about it is that it was, from its opening line, an act of resistance.

    The Contrarian Who Said Almost Nothing

    Lao Tzu did not write a strategy. He did not offer a better method for winning the competition. He did not, in any conventional sense, provide answers.

    What he wrote was eighty-one short chapters — some barely a paragraph — that circle around a single concept so elusive that he announced its elusiveness in the very first line:

    道可道、非常道。
         “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”

    The Tao (道) — usually translated as “the Way” — is not a path. It is not a method. It is closer to the underlying pattern of all things: the rhythm by which water finds its level, seasons turn without effort, and the ten thousand things of the world arise and return without anyone directing them to do so.

    You cannot grasp the Tao. You can only stop obstructing it.

    This is, to put it mildly, not what the competing warlords of the Spring and Autumn period wanted to hear. It is also not what the productivity industry wants you to hear today. Which is, I suspect, precisely why it has lasted 2,500 years while most of what passes for advice does not survive a single business cycle.

    Why the Same Exhaustion Keeps Returning

    The world Lao Tzu was watching was one in which an entire civilization had organized itself around a single imperative: win. Expand. Accumulate. Outmaneuver. The metrics were territory and tribute. The cost was paid in human lives and in the quiet destruction of everything that did not serve the campaign.

    The world you and I inhabit has different metrics. Revenue. Engagement. Career trajectory. Market position. The cost is paid differently — in chronic stress, in the erosion of attention, in the particular modern grief of reaching a goal and feeling, almost immediately, that it was not quite the right one.

    But the structure is the same.

    Everyone facing the same direction. Everyone competing by the same externally defined criteria. The winner determined not by what they have built but by how they compare to whoever happens to be in the adjacent lane.

    Lao Tzu watched this and asked a question so simple it is almost offensive:

    What if the direction everyone is moving in is wrong?

    Not wrong in a moral sense. Wrong in the sense that a river is wrong when it strains against its banks — not because straining is evil, but because it is unnecessary, and exhausting, and ultimately futile.

    “To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”

    What I Found in the Dojo

    I want to come at this from a different angle for a moment — through something physical, because I think the body understands Lao Tzu before the mind does.

    I practiced kendo for nearly a decade as a child, at a police dojo near my home in Kobe. I was not exceptional. I lost matches I should have won, and won some I had no business winning. But what I remember most clearly from those years is not the matches at all.

    It is the kata.

    In kendo — as in judo, karate, and the other do traditions — the kata (form) holds a significance that tournaments do not. In the higher examinations, you are not evaluated simply on whether you defeat your opponent. You are evaluated on the quality and integrity of your movement itself. The force of your posture. The clarity of your intention. The beauty, even, of the technique — whether it has been refined through repetition into something that no longer looks effortful.

    The standard, in other words, is not the opponent.

    The standard is yourself.

    I did not have language for this at the time. I was a child, doing what my teachers showed me. But I was absorbing something that I would only recognize years later, reading Lao Tzu in a quiet room in Kyoto:

    The most powerful movement is the one that requires no excess force.

    The practitioner who has done ten thousand repetitions does not strain. They do not perform effort. When the moment comes, the technique simply happens — as naturally as water finding its level.

    This is what Lao Tzu called wu wei (無為): non-forcing action. Not passivity. Not withdrawal. The opposite of those things, in fact — because achieving wu wei requires more discipline than mere effortfulness. But it is discipline directed inward, toward the refinement of your own form, rather than outward, toward the defeat of whoever happens to be standing across from you.

    “Stepping Back” Is Not the Same as Retreating

    I want to be precise here, because this idea is often misread — sometimes deliberately, by people who want to use Eastern philosophy as permission for inaction.

    When Lao Tzu suggests withdrawing from the competition of external metrics, he is not suggesting you stop caring, stop working, or stop wanting things.

    He is suggesting something more demanding: that you define your own standard of measurement.

    知人者智、自知者明。
    勝人者有力、自勝者強 。
    “Knowing others is intelligence. Knowing yourself is true wisdom.
         Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.”

    The kendo practitioner who trains through ten thousand repetitions of a single technique is not avoiding competition. They are doing something harder — holding themselves to an internal standard that does not shift based on what the person next to them is doing. They are not chasing the benchmark. They are deepening the root.

    And Lao Tzu understood something about time that our productivity culture has nearly erased:

    “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

    A seed does not bloom the morning after it is planted. This is obvious. And yet we live — and are encouraged to live — as though human development is exempt from this law. As though our timelines should be compressible, our growth accelerable, our results available on demand.

    The Tao Te Ching gently, persistently, refuses this assumption.

    The right conditions, tended with patience, produce what forcing cannot. Not as a promise — Lao Tzu promises nothing — but as a description of how things actually work, when you stop fighting against them.

    What This Series Is

    I have been writing about Japanese philosophy for some time — about Bushido, about Miyamoto Musashi and the Book of Five Rings, about the samurai traditions that shaped how Japan understands discipline, beauty, and the relationship between effort and outcome.

    Lao Tzu is not Japanese. But he is woven through all of it — through Zen, through the aesthetics of ma (間, negative space), through the way the do traditions understand what practice is actually for. He is part of the water these traditions move through, even when his name is not spoken.

    In the essays that follow, I want to explore specific ideas from the Tao Te Ching — wu wei, the philosophy of water, what Lao Tzu understood about simplicity, leadership, and the nature of power — and set them against the texture of contemporary life.

    I am not going to tell you what to do with any of it.

    That would be, in its own way, a betrayal of what Lao Tzu was doing — which was not prescribing, but pointing. Showing the direction of a river, and trusting that anyone who looks long enough will understand something about how water moves.

    Whether that understanding changes anything is, as it should be, up to you.

    Next in this series: [Lao Tzu and Zen: What’s the Difference — and Why It Matters]

    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.

  • Sasaki Kojiro by Murakami Genzo: The Warrior Who Chose Beauty Over Victory

    Sasaki Kojiro by Murakami Genzo: The Warrior Who Chose Beauty Over Victory

    Sasaki Kojiro, the Tsubame-gaeshi, and the Lost Art of Perfecting Your Craft

    Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

    There is a small island off the coast of Kyushu.

    It sits between what was once the domain of the Hosokawa clan and the island of Tsushima, at the narrowest point of the Kanmon Strait. You can walk across it in minutes. There is almost nothing there except rock, sea wind, and the faint residue of something that happened on the morning of April 13, 1612.

    The island is called Ganryūjima — 巌流島. It takes its name from a man, not a place. His name was Sasaki Kojiro, and the style he founded was called Ganryū-ryū — the style of the cliff, the style of the current.

    He lost the duel that took place on that island. He died there, outwitted and outmaneuvered by Miyamoto Musashi — who arrived hours late, carved a wooden sword from the oar of his boat on the journey over, and ended the fight in a single blow.

    Musashi went on to write The Book of Five Rings and become the most celebrated swordsman in Japanese history. Kojiro’s body was left on the beach.

    And yet.

    When I think about Ganryūjima, it is not always Musashi I see first.

    A Craftsman Who Happened to Carry a Sword

    Murakami Motozo’s novel Sasaki Kojiro — one of the most beloved works of Japanese historical fiction — does something unusual. It does not tell the story of a warrior destined for glory. It tells the story of a craftsman in search of perfection.

    From boyhood, Kojiro’s relationship with the sword was not that of a soldier with a weapon. It was closer to what a sculptor feels for stone, or a poet for language. He was not training to defeat enemies. He was training to do one thing perfectly.

    That one thing was the 燕返し — Tsubame-gaeshi. The Swallow Return.

    The name comes from the motion of a swallow banking in mid-flight — that impossible, instantaneous reversal of direction that the eye can barely follow. Kojiro spent years watching swallows. Then he spent more years trying to make his blade move the way they moved. A single strike that descended, then reversed its arc before the opponent could register what had happened. A technique so fast that the sword seemed to cut in two directions at once.

    In Murakami’s telling, the Tsubame-gaeshi was not a weapon. It was a culmination. The distillation of a life’s observation and practice into a single, unrepeatable gesture.

    “Like a swallow cutting the sky — not to kill, but because cutting the sky was what it was made to do.”

    I am not a sword practitioner. But I spent nearly ten years studying kendo at a police dojo in Kobe, and I understand, in my own modest way, what Kojiro was pursuing. There is a quality of movement that cannot be faked. It comes only from years of repetition so deep that the body begins to act before the mind has time to instruct it. You stop performing the technique and start being it.

    Kojiro reached that point with the Tsubame-gaeshi.

    And it destroyed him.

    The Price of Total Commitment

    Musashi arrived on Ganryūjima between two and three hours late.

    We know this. The accounts agree. What we don’t know — what historians and novelists have argued about for four hundred years — is why Kojiro lost his composure.

    He had waited on the beach. He had felt the sun move across the sky. He had watched Musashi’s boat approach from the distance, finally, and seen the figure aboard doing something with his hands — shaping something from the oar. An insult, perhaps deliberately staged.

    When Musashi finally stepped ashore, Kojiro drew his blade — the famous nodachi, a long sword few swordsmen had the reach and power to wield effectively — and threw the scabbard into the sea.

    Musashi, by some accounts, smiled.

    “Kojiro,” he is said to have remarked. “You have already lost. A man who intends to win does not throw away his scabbard.”

    Whether those words were spoken or not, what the accounts agree on is this: Kojiro attacked first. He attacked with the Tsubame-gaeshi — the technique he had devoted his life to perfecting. And Musashi, who had studied his opponent and had spent the journey calculating the geometry of that blade, stepped to the outside of the arc and struck a single blow to the temple.

    What should we make of this?

    The easy interpretation is that Kojiro was a tragic figure — gifted, yes, but undone by pride and anger. That Musashi’s psychological manipulation simply exposed a flaw that was always there.

    I think that reading is too comfortable.

    Kojiro’s vulnerability was not a character flaw separate from his greatness. It was inseparable from it. The same total commitment to the Tsubame-gaeshi that elevated him to the highest levels of swordsmanship also narrowed his field of vision. He had poured everything into one technique, one style, one domain. And when the situation changed — when the conditions of the duel were disrupted by delay, by provocation, by the unpredictable strategies of a man who famously had no fixed style — Kojiro had no reserve, no adaptability, no capacity to step back and reassess.

    His mastery became a kind of blindness.

    Anger Is the Transfer of Power

    But there is another dimension to Ganryūjima that I find more instructive for daily life.

    Kojiro lost his composure. That is the hinge on which the duel turned.

    It did not matter, in the end, whether the Tsubame-gaeshi was technically superior to what Musashi could bring against it. It did not matter that Kojiro had spent a lifetime forging that technique. The moment he let Musashi’s provocation — the lateness, the casual preparation of a weapon, the studied indifference — enter his emotional state and disturb it, the outcome was decided.

    This is not a small observation. It is, I think, one of the most practically useful lessons the samurai tradition has bequeathed us.

    Anger is a transfer of power. When another person’s behavior generates a strong emotional reaction in you, you have — in that moment — handed them the controls. You are no longer acting from your own center. You are reacting from theirs.

    Musashi understood this. His entire strategy at Ganryūjima was not about the sword at all. It was about dismantling Kojiro’s emotional equilibrium before the first blow was struck. By the time Kojiro drew, he was already fighting Musashi’s fight, not his own.

    I see this pattern everywhere in modern life. The colleague who sends an email that provokes you into an impulsive, poorly-considered reply. The negotiation in which one party knows how to make the other lose their composure. The social media comment — carefully calibrated — designed to make you respond in a way that undermines you. The meeting in which someone slightly more calculated than you baits you into revealing your hand.

    Kojiro is not a cautionary tale from another century. He is a portrait of something that happens in offices and group chats and family dinners every day.

    The question his defeat poses to us is not “how do I win?” It is quieter and more demanding than that: How do I remain, fully, in my own fight?

    The Warrior Who Chose Beauty

    And yet — and this is the reason Kojiro’s name survived — there is something in his story that transcends the defeat.

    Musashi won. Musashi was pragmatic, adaptive, unattached to any single style. He famously carried no philosophy of beauty into the duel. He carried only the intention to survive and prevail.

    Kojiro carried something else.

    He carried a vision of what the sword could be. Not an instrument of killing, but an instrument of expression — of the highest possible refinement of human movement and perception. The Tsubame-gaeshi was not simply a technique. It was an argument: that this is what a human being can become, if they devote themselves completely to one thing.

    In a world oriented entirely toward outcomes, Kojiro was oriented toward the thing itself.

    This distinction matters more now than perhaps it ever has. We live in an era of relentless optimization. Every activity is evaluated in terms of what it produces. Skills are cultivated not for their own intrinsic completeness but for their market value. Attention is allocated according to projected returns.

    Kojiro’s approach — devoting years to a technique not because it guaranteed victory, but because it was worth perfecting — seems almost incomprehensible in this context. And I think that is precisely why it endures in the Japanese imagination.

    There is something in us that knows the difference between a life aimed entirely at results and a life aimed, even partially, at quality of being. Kojiro embodied the second. Musashi embodied the first. And four centuries later, we remember both — but we feel something different about each of them.

    A Stone Inscription, a Swallow, and What Remains

    On Ganryūjima, there is a stone monument.

    Carved into it is a haiku, attributed to the moment of the duel:

    小次郎の 眉涼しけれ つばくらめ 
    Kojirō no / mayu suzushikere / tsubakurame

    In translation — and all translations of haiku are impoverishments — something like:

    “Kojiro’s brow — cool as a swallow in flight.”

    眉涼しけれ — mayu suzushikere — “cool brow.” It is a classical expression of composed nobility. The kind of calm that is not the absence of feeling, but the mastery of it. The kind of serenity that, paradoxically, Kojiro did not fully attain in the moment of the duel itself.

    The haiku is not ironic. It is elegiac. It describes not what Kojiro was at the moment of his death, but what he had aimed to be — the ideal his entire life had been organized around.

    And that ideal — the cool brow, the swallow’s arc, the technique pursued for its own perfection — outlasted the defeat.

    This is not nothing. In a culture saturated with winner’s narratives, in a world where outcomes are the only currency, there is something quietly radical about the fact that the loser of Ganryūjima left behind a haiku about his composure, and that four hundred years later, we are still reading it.

    Your Tsubame-gaeshi

    I want to end with a question rather than a conclusion.

    In every field, there are people who practice their craft the way Musashi practiced the sword — strategically, adaptively, oriented always toward the result. They are effective. They often win. There is nothing wrong with what they do.

    And then there are people who approach their work the way Kojiro approached the Tsubame-gaeshi. Not because it guarantees success. Not because they have calculated the return. But because there is something in what they do that seems — to them, at least — worth bringing to its fullest possible expression.

    The architect who refines a detail that no client will ever notice. The teacher who reworks a lecture not because students complained, but because she knows it could be truer. The programmer who rewrites a function that already works, because the working version is ugly and the possibility of elegance is there, waiting.

    These people understand something that is difficult to teach and impossible to optimize.

    What is your Tsubame-gaeshi?

    Not the skill that earns you the most. Not the competency that looks best on a resume. But the one thing in your domain that you pursue — or could pursue — for its own completion. The thing you work on not because someone is watching, but because the gap between what it is and what it could be troubles you, quietly, like a splinter.

    I am not promising anything. I am not suggesting that perfecting it will bring you recognition, or income, or victory on the metaphorical Ganryūjima of your profession.

    Kojiro pursued his Tsubame-gaeshi for decades, and lost.

    But his brow, as the poet understood, was cool as a swallow in flight.

    And we are still talking about him.

    Read an article about Miyamoto Musashi’s victory over Sasaki Kojiro.

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

  • The Book of Five Rings — The Water Scroll: What Musashi Meant by Everyday Mind

    The Book of Five Rings — The Water Scroll: What Musashi Meant by Everyday Mind

    On Tuning Yourself — and Why “Calm Down” Is the Wrong Advice

    Photo by B Vi on Unsplash

    This is one of the articles in the series on Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings”.

    Miyamoto Musashi opens the Water Scroll with something that reads, at first glance, like a contradiction.

    He has just written a book of instruction. And now, at the beginning of its second chapter, he says this:

    「此書に書付たるを、我身にとつて、書付を見るとおもはず、習とおもはず、にせものにせずして、則、我心より見出したる利にして、常に其身に成て、能々工夫すべし。」

    Do not think of what is written here as something to be read. Do not think of it as something to be learned. Do not imitate it. Instead, find it yourself — from within your own mind — and make it part of your body, and think deeply about it always.

    A teaching that instructs you not to treat it as a teaching. A guide that tells you not to follow it.

    I’ve thought about this passage for years. And the more I sit with it, the more I think it is the most important thing Musashi wrote.

    The Book That Points Beyond Itself

    In Zen, there is a tradition of the kōan — a question or statement that cannot be resolved through ordinary logical thinking, designed to push the student past the limits of conceptual understanding into direct experience. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Not a riddle with an answer, but a device for breaking through the habit of looking for answers in the wrong place.

    Musashi was deeply formed by Zen. And I think this opening passage functions in the same way.

    He is not being modest. He is making a precise and demanding point: that what he is about to describe — the qualities of mind and body that make a warrior genuinely capable — cannot be acquired by reading about them. They can only be found. In your own experience, through your own practice, forged in your own body over time.

    The book is a finger pointing at the moon. Musashi is reminding you, before you get any further, not to stare at the finger.

    What Musashi Says About Everyday Mind

    What follows this opening is something that surprises many first-time readers of the Water Scroll. This is, after all, a manual on swordsmanship — on the techniques and tactics of actual combat. You might expect him to move immediately into specifics: posture, grip, footwork, the mechanics of the strike.

    Instead, he writes about heijōshin — everyday mind. Ordinary mind. The mind of someone going about their daily life without urgency or alarm.

    「兵法の道におゐて、心の持様ハ、常の心に替る事なかれ。常にも兵法のときにも、少も替らずして、心を廣く直にして、きつくひつぱらず、すこしもたるまず、心のかたよらぬやうに、心をまん中に置て、心を静にゆるがせて、其ゆるぎのせつなも、ゆるぎやまぬやうに、能々吟味すべし。」

    In the Way of strategy, the mind should not differ from the everyday mind. In both ordinary times and in combat, it should be exactly the same — broad and straight, neither pulled tight nor left slack, not leaning to one side, placed at the center, kept still yet moving, and even in its movement, never ceasing.

    Neither pulled tight nor left slack.

    Not the stillness of something frozen. Not the looseness of something unready. The stillness of something perfectly balanced — still yet moving — available for whatever is required.

    I want to stay with this image for a moment, because I think it is one of the most precise descriptions of functional composure I have ever encountered. And I also want to be honest about how long it took me to actually understand it.

    The Kendo Match I Kept Losing

    I practiced kendo for ten years, starting when I was six years old, at the dojo attached to the police station near my home in Kobe. By the time I was a teenager, I had developed enough technique to compete — and enough ego to be completely derailed by competition.

    There is a specific experience in kendo that non-practitioners find difficult to visualize. When two competitors strike simultaneously — both going for men, the strike to the head — the strikes often land within fractions of a second of each other. To a casual observer, they appear simultaneous. To the three judges on the floor, they are not. The difference of a few tenths of a second is visible to trained eyes.

    What is less well known is that the competitors themselves can feel it.

    When you are in a state of genuine heijōshin — when your mind is placed at the center, neither tight nor slack, moving without stopping — you can sense, at the moment of the mutual strike, whether your timing was ahead or behind. You feel the gap. And if you are behind, and if your mind is clear enough, you can adjust — shifting in the fraction of a second before the opponent’s shinai arrives, turning a mutual strike into a clean point.

    When you are gripping the outcome — when you need to win, when the score is close and the match is ending and every nerve is pulling toward the result — this perception disappears. Not because your technique has changed. Because your mind has changed. It has become tight. Pulled toward the future, toward the result, away from the present moment of the strike.

    And that tightness, that fraction of a second of mental latency, is the difference between winning and losing.

    I lost a great many matches this way as a teenager. I knew what I was doing wrong. I simply could not stop doing it.

    The Self-Help Books That Didn’t Help

    In my twenties, I read a great deal of what we now call self-development literature. I had been studying Zen and Buddhist philosophy since my university years in Kyoto, and I wanted to understand the relationship — where these Western frameworks overlapped with what I was finding in the classical texts, and where they diverged.

    At first, I found some of it genuinely interesting. The early readings were fresh. Ah, so that is how this tradition looks from outside. There were useful observations, clear writing, ideas worth sitting with.

    But over time, a feeling accumulated that I eventually found a word for: 修飾 — shūshoku. Decoration. Ornament. Something that makes a surface look richer than what lies beneath it.

    Self-development books, at their most characteristic, are books you can read and feel, temporarily, as though you have done something. The reading itself produces a sensation of progress. You close the cover feeling slightly improved.

    Bushido. The Book of Five Rings. These books produce the opposite sensation.

    You finish them and feel the distance. You feel how far the road is. How much has not yet been done. How many years of practice stand between where you are and what the text is describing.

    This is not a criticism of self-development literature in the ordinary sense. It is an observation about what the two traditions are actually trying to do.

    Self-development books, at their best, give you something to add. A framework. A technique. A habit. Something to install.

    Musashi is not giving you something to add. He is describing something you have to become. And that is a different project entirely — one that cannot be completed by reading, and that the reading itself can never substitute for.

    “Just Calm Down” — And Why It Made Things Worse

    When I was young and losing matches I should have won, the advice I received — from coaches, from older practitioners, from the books I was reading — was essentially a variation of the same thing: be calm, maintain equanimity, don’t let emotion affect your performance.

    Good advice. Useless as instruction.

    Because the attempt to be calm is itself a form of tension. I must be calm is a thought. Thoughts take up the same mental space that perception needs. And the harder I tried to achieve the state I’d been told to achieve, the further I moved from it.

    I remember sitting with this problem for a long time — not in a formal meditative sense, but as a persistent, unanswered question: What is heijōshin, actually? Is it just the absence of anxiety? A practiced suppression of reaction? Something you arrive at by trying hard enough to arrive at it?

    None of those answers felt right. And then, at some point — I cannot tell you exactly when, because it was not a single moment of insight but a gradual settling — I arrived at a different image.

    A guitar string.

    Not the silence before the string is plucked. Not the tension of a string pulled too tight. Not the limpness of a string left slack. The specific state of a string that has been tuned correctly — taut enough to vibrate cleanly, relaxed enough to move freely. The state that produces the right note when it is struck.

    This, I realized, was what Musashi meant. Not be calm. Not suppress your reactions. Not try harder to be still.

    Tune yourself.

    Tuning, Not Adding

    This reframing changed something for me in a way that the self-development books had not.

    Because tuning is not addition. You do not tune a guitar by putting more string on it. You do not tune a person by giving them more techniques, more frameworks, more things to remember and apply under pressure. Tuning is the removal of what is wrong — the tightening of what is too loose, the releasing of what is too tight — until the instrument is capable of producing what it was always capable of producing, if only it were properly calibrated.

    Heijōshin is not a state you achieve. It is the state that remains when you have stopped pulling too hard, stopped going slack, stopped leaning to one side. Musashi says: place the mind at the center. Not higher, not lower. Not pitched toward the future result, not dragging in the past exchange. At the center. Now.

    This cannot be done by adding something. It can only be done by removing the interference — the grip, the anxiety, the need for the outcome to be a particular thing — that prevents the natural state from expressing itself.

    Why the Daily Practice Is the Point

    And this is where the Water Scroll circles back to the Earth Scroll, to the nine principles, to the thousand days and the ten thousand days.

    Because you cannot tune an instrument in the middle of a performance. The tuning happens before. In the daily practice, in the repeated training, in the accumulated experience of striking and being struck, of losing and understanding why, of returning to the dojo the next day and beginning again.

    The daily practice is not preparation for the moment when heijōshin matters. The daily practice is how heijōshin is built. Slowly, through repetition, the nervous system learns what the centered state feels like — until it becomes the default, until it becomes the ground from which everything else operates, until the performance and the preparation are no longer different things.

    Musashi says: in both ordinary times and in combat, it should be exactly the same.

    Not: practice being calm so that you can be calm when it matters.

    Be the same person in both situations. Which requires, first, that you have built a person who is worth being consistently.

    In kendo, coaches say: don’t be attached to winning. I misunderstood this for years. I thought it meant: accept that you might lose. A kind of resigned equanimity.

    It does not mean that.

    It means: if you have trained properly, if you have done the daily work, if your ground is solid — the winning will take care of itself. Your job is not to grip the result. Your job is to be present, tuned, available. To place the mind at the center and let the body do what it has been trained to do.

    The attachment to winning is the thing that prevents winning. Not because wanting to win is wrong. But because the grip of wanting interferes with the clarity of perceiving — and perceiving, in the fraction of a second that everything is decided, is everything.

    What This Looks Like Away From the Dojo

    I am aware that most people reading this have never competed in kendo, and will never compete in kendo. So let me say what I think this translates to.

    Every situation that matters — every presentation, negotiation, difficult conversation, decision made under pressure, moment when your actual capability will either express itself or fail to — has the same structure as the mutual strike. The outcome depends on whether you are present or not. Whether your mind is at the center or pulled toward the result. Whether the string is tuned or pulled tight.

    And the state of the string at that moment is not determined in that moment. It is determined by everything that came before it. By whether you have been building the ground, doing the daily practice, paying attention to the small things, removing the conditions for failure.

    The self-development book cannot give you this. The framework, the technique, the morning routine — these are not useless, but they are not sufficient. They are things you add. What Musashi is describing is not a thing you add.

    It is what you become when you have been doing the right things, consistently, for long enough.

    修飾の書 — the books of decoration — promise to make you better. They are not lying, exactly. But they are describing a different project.

    Musashi’s project is older, slower, and harder to sell.

    Do not treat this as teaching. Do not imitate it. Find it yourself — from within your own mind — and make it part of your body.

    He told you at the beginning. He is still telling you now.

    Previous : The Book of Five Rings — The Earth Scroll: The Philosophy of Not Losing

    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.