Visionaries

We usually think of the self as something that exists within us. First there is “me.” Then there are other people, and relationships form between us. But is that really how it happens? The patients psychiatrist Kimura Bin encountered could talk with others, act, and understand what was happening around them. Yet something they had always taken for granted had begun to waver: the sense that their own actions and experiences were truly “mine.” And when they tried to describe what was happening, they spoke not only about what was inside themselves, but about the aida—the “between”—between themselves and others. Why should the “I” begin to waver when the aida wavers? Starting from the words of his patients, Kimura continued to pursue this question. Where, then, is the “I” we so rarely think to question born?

What does it mean to see one thing? A cedar stands beside an old pilgrimage route in Kumano. It seems to be a single tree. Yet its presence carries traces of what came before—the people who passed through the place, the life growing around it, and events that might have unfolded otherwise. Minakata Kumagusu spent his life moving across boundaries: between natural history and folklore, living things and human history, past causes and present encounters. He called part of this inquiry his “study of koto.” When the cedars of Tsugizakura Ōji were threatened with being cut down, Kumagusu tried to preserve them. But saving a cedar, he argued, meant looking beyond the tree itself. Following Kumagusu’s thought and his encounter with these cedars, this essay asks a simple question: When we look at one thing, how much are we actually looking at?

In 1935, Imanishi Kinji repeatedly entered Kyoto’s Kamo River to study mayfly nymphs. The river never remained the same: currents shifted, riverbeds changed, algae grew, seasons passed, and the creatures living there changed with them. Yet through repeated observation, Imanishi began to notice something within this complexity. Different mayfly species were not simply scattered at random. Their exact distributions changed, but a certain way of separating appeared again and again. He would later understand this as sumiwake. Imanishi was studying

A pencil lies on a table. You look at it and know immediately what it is. You do not first see colors and shapes and then work out that they make a pencil. From the beginning, it appears to you as a pencil. Hiromatsu Wataru began with ordinary experiences like this and asked what makes them possible. The answer cannot be found in the object alone. We did not invent the word “pencil.” We learned what a pencil is and how to use it. Long before we ever thought about such things, we were already living in a world where a pencil meant something. And once Hiromatsu began questioning what makes a pencil a pencil, another question followed: What makes “me” the person who sees it?

Watsuji Tetsurō begins with something we rarely question: the idea that first there is an individual, and then that individual enters into relationships. Looking at the Japanese word ningen, the idea of aidagara, and later the relationship between human life and fūdo, he makes this familiar order increasingly difficult to take for granted. Yet Watsuji does not simply replace the individual with the group. His philosophy keeps returning to the tension between separation and connection, independence and belonging. Following that tension leaves us with a question rather than a simple answer: Would we still be the same “I” if we were separated from our relations with others?

Dōgen’s Zen begins with a simple but profound question: why do we keep reaching for more—more knowledge, more certainty, more meaning, even more wisdom? Rather than telling us to stop, he turns the question inward: who is it that seeks? Through practice, self-forgetting, and a careful questioning of language, the seemingly solid boundary between self and world begins to loosen. To turn inward, for Dōgen, is not to withdraw from the world, but to encounter it more deeply.

Zeami, deeply involved in the formation of Noh, lived in a time when recognition and survival depended on forces beyond his control. After experiencing how performance could be shaped, valued, and fixed, he put into words a view of beauty grounded in concealment—one that does not rely on making everything fully visible or complete.

Tada Tomio (1934–2010) was a pioneering Japanese immunologist who brought the nation’s medical science to a global level, and at the same time a poet, essayist, and playwright of Noh—a true giant of knowledge. He reinterpreted the phenomenon of immunity through the lens of the relationship between self and other, moving beyond the traditional Western mechanistic view. For Tada, immunity was not mere defense, but a “language within the body” that mediates between self and other.

Kawai Hayao (1928–2007) was a Japanese psychologist who bridged East and West through a gentle exploration of the human heart. Trained in Jungian psychology, he introduced sandplay therapy to Japan and taught the art of silence—seeing without judging, listening without rushing to understand. In his idea of the “hollow center,” he revealed how Japanese culture finds harmony through emptiness rather than fixed truth. For Kawai, stories, myths, and quiet dialogue were paths to healing. His legacy reminds us that true understanding is born not from analysis, but from presence, patience, and the space between words.

Kato Shuichi （1919–2008）was a Japanese thinker who discovered in his country’s culture a strength within ambiguity—the quiet power to embrace others without erasing differences. Bridging science and art, East and West, he revealed how restraint and subtlety could become forms of wisdom, turning uncertainty into a way of understanding humanity itself.