Tada Tomio — The Silent Giant
Tada Tomio had been drawn to Noh since his student days.[1]
For Tada, who would later become an immunologist, Noh was not an interest he discovered late in life. He had lived with it since he was young, and his involvement eventually became deep enough that he began writing new Noh plays himself.
A Noh stage is almost empty. Four pillars stand around it, a pine tree is painted at the back, and a bridgeway extends toward the stage.
Then someone crosses that bridge and appears.
The dead and people from the distant past appear on the stage and speak of what happened to them. Through chant and movement, the past they speak of takes shape before us in the present.
Tada called such figures who appear in the Noh theater “those people” (ano hitotachi).[2] Gods and spirits, figures from old stories, defeated warriors, women consumed by resentment, mothers who have lost their children. They cross the bridgeway, tell what happened to them, dance, and eventually depart again.
Such “people” from elsewhere and from the past appear on the Noh stage.
In the Noh play Saigyōzakura, the spirit of an old cherry tree appears before the poet Saigyō in human form. Writing about the play, Tada observed that the old cherry-tree spirit, the beautiful young man who briefly appears, and even Saigyō, who is watching them, can all “enter into the same person.” The old cherry-tree spirit can call out to itself, asking itself to remain, and nothing about this need seem strange. Perhaps, Tada wrote, what is being called back is not the cherry-tree spirit at all, but “passing time itself.”[3]
In another Noh play, Nue, the same shite—the principal performer in Noh—plays both Minamoto no Yorimasa, who kills the Nue, and the Nue that is killed.[4] Within a single performer’s body, the position shifts from the one who kills to the one who is killed.
The audience, too, takes part in what appears on the stage. The expression carved into a Noh mask does not change. Yet a slight raising or lowering of the performer’s face can make the mask appear joyful or sorrowful. Tada wrote that this expression is something “the audience themselves create.”[2]
A trained body, forms of movement, a mask, chant, chorus, musicians, an empty stage, and the audience watching it. When all of these are present, “that person” appears.
Tada wrote that in such a theater there flows “a strange time in which reality and emptiness intermingle.”[2]
Tada had lived with this world since his youth. Then he encountered immunology.
Immunology seemed to offer a very different kind of clarity.
The immune system recognizes what has entered the body and eliminates it. Behind this was the distinction between “self” and “non-self”: what belongs to oneself and what does not. As a mechanism for protecting life, it seemed straightforward.
But actual living phenomena do not always fit neatly within that distinction.
Cancer cells originate from one’s own cells. Yet antigens arising through mutations can become targets of immune recognition. A fetus carries genetic information different from that of its mother, yet it is not normally rejected like transplanted foreign tissue. The intestine contains enormous populations of microorganisms that are genetically not “self,” yet we do not survive by eliminating them all.[5]
The immune system can recognize something without attacking it. It can suppress a response. It can also coexist with what is different.
What does the immune system accept, what does it respond to, what does it eliminate, and what does it live with? Tada looked at this whole pattern of responses as a “pattern of behavior,” and from there tried to understand what “self” means to the immune system.[6]
What is the self?
It sounds like a philosophical question. For Tada, however, it was also a biological one.
Tada studied not only mechanisms that promote immune responses, but also mechanisms that suppress them. In 1971, he proposed that some T cells could act to suppress immune responses. This idea would later become associated with what were called “suppressor T cells.”[7]
The hypothesis attracted considerable attention, but contradictions later emerged in the mechanisms originally proposed, and this line of research declined sharply. The suppressive regulation of immune responses itself remained an important biological phenomenon. Later research identified regulatory T cells and many other mechanisms through which immune responses are controlled.[7]
Looking at molecules alone does not reveal what it means to be alive.
We can examine in great detail how proteins, DNA, and other molecules involved in living systems work. But studying each molecule individually does not tell us how “being alive” emerges from them.
How, then, does “being alive” emerge from molecules?
Tada did not understand life as a machine assembled according to a finished blueprint. Diverse elements emerge from what was initially undifferentiated. They are selected according to the conditions in which they find themselves, interact with one another, and in the process the system itself takes shape. Nor is there a predetermined goal toward which this process is directed.
Tada used the term “supersystem” for this.[8]
But he did not present it as a completed theory. Tada himself wrote that the basic principles of the supersystem remained unknown and had not yet been analyzed. The idea had done no more than “pose a question for analysis.”[8]
The supersystem was not an answer. Tada left the still-unexplained workings of life as a question for science.
And Tada also wrote Noh.
His new Noh play Mumyō no I, first presented in 1991, dealt with brain death and organ transplantation.[9] Medicine may define brain death. But is defining brain death the same as being able to accept it as the death of a human being? Tada placed that question on the Noh stage.
Ten years later, in 2001, Tada suffered a stroke.[10] He was left with severe paralysis on the right side of his body and great difficulty speaking.
The body of the man who had spent his life studying living systems had itself undergone a profound change.
What Tada experienced afterward was not simply the restoration of his former self. As rehabilitation continued, he began to feel that something different was coming into being within him. He called it a “new person.”[11]
He wrote with his left hand instead of his right. He did not return to the body he had once had. From a changed body and what remained within it, a different life had begun.
Tada came to call this “new person” a “giant.”[11] The giant was still slow and cumbersome, unable to move as he wished. Words did not come easily. Yet within that giant lay possibilities whose form was still unknown.
The book in which Tada wrote about this experience was titled The Silent Giant.[11]
Notes
[1] Tada Tomio discusses his long engagement with Noh in several of his writings, including Biruma no Tori no Ki and Nō no Naka no Nō Butai. Noh was an important part of his intellectual and artistic life alongside his work in immunology. His later writings and biographical accounts also document his extensive involvement in Noh and his writing of new Noh plays. 新潮社
[2] Tada Tomio, “Nō o Miru” (“Watching Noh”). In this essay, Tada describes the figures who emerge onto the Noh stage as ano hitotachi (“those people”). He also writes of the expression of a Noh mask as something created by the audience, and of the Noh theater as a space in which “reality and emptiness intermingle.”
[3] Tada Tomio, Nō no Naka no Nō Butai (Shinchōsha, 2001). Writing about the Noh play Saigyōzakura, Tada describes the old cherry-tree spirit, the beautiful young man, and Saigyō as entering “the same person,” and suggests that what is being called back may be “passing time itself.”
[4] Tada Tomio, Seimei no Imiron (Shinchōsha, 1997). In discussing the Noh play Nue, Tada draws attention to the fact that the same shite performs both Minamoto no Yorimasa, who kills the Nue, and the Nue that is killed. The book also contains a chapter titled “The Self That Is Seen and the Self That Sees.” The original edition was published by Shinchōsha in 1997. CiNii
[5] Cancer, pregnancy, and the intestinal microbiota involve different immunological mechanisms. For current perspectives, see Daniel S. Chen and Ira Mellman, “Elements of Cancer Immunity and the Cancer–Immune Set Point,” Nature 541, 321–330 (2017); Gil Mor, Paulomi Aldo, and Ayesha B. Alvero, “The Unique Immunological and Microbial Aspects of Pregnancy,” Nature Reviews Immunology 17, 469–482 (2017); and Kenya Honda and Kiyoshi Takeda, “Regulatory Mechanisms of Immune Responses to Intestinal Bacteria,” Mucosal Immunology 2, 187–196 (2009). Nature
[6] Tada Tomio, “Fajī na Jiko — Kōi toshite no Seitai” (“The Fuzzy Self — The Living Organism as Action”), in Biruma no Tori no Ki. Tada describes the immunological self not as a fixed entity but in terms of the totality of its “patterns of behavior” (kōdō yōshiki) toward the non-self.
[7] Tada presented the idea that T cells could actively suppress immune responses at the First International Congress of Immunology in 1971. This line of research later became associated with “suppressor T cells.” The original model was subsequently challenged and declined as a research framework, while later work established multiple mechanisms of active immune regulation, including regulatory T cells. The modern regulatory T-cell concept should not simply be equated with the suppressor T cells originally proposed in the 1970s. See the Japanese Society for Immunology’s account of Tada’s research. JSI Men Eki
[8] Tada Tomio, Bios: Ikiteiru to wa Dōiu Koto ka. In his discussion of the “supersystem,” Tada describes a system that generates diverse elements and even diverse algorithms, selecting among them while organizing itself. He stresses that its basic principle remained unknown and unanalyzed, and that the concept had only posed a question for future analysis. Tada later developed the idea of the supersystem further in Seimei no Imiron, whose final chapters deal explicitly with ambiguity and the human being as a supersystem. CiNii
[9] Tada Tomio, “Nōshi to Gendaijin no Shiseikan — Watashi ga Shinsaku Nō Mumyō no I o Kaita Riyū” (“Brain Death and the Contemporary View of Life and Death — Why I Wrote the New Noh Play Mumyō no I”), Journal of the Japan Medical Association, vol. 105, no. 7 (1991). Tada’s Mumyō no I addressed brain death and organ transplantation; in the same year he also lectured on “The Self of the Brain and the Self of the Body: What I Considered in the Noh Play Mumyō no I.” 生存
[10] Tada Tomio, Kamoku naru Kyojin (Shūeisha, 2007). Tada suffered a stroke in 2001, leaving him with severe right-side paralysis and a major speech impairment. 集英社 ― SHUEISHA ―
[11] Tada Tomio, Kamoku naru Kyojin (Shūeisha, 2007). During rehabilitation, Tada came to describe something emerging within himself as a “new person” (atarashii hito) and later as a “giant” (kyojin). The original 2007 edition describes this “new person” and gives the collection its title, Kamoku naru Kyojin.
Editor’s Note:
In 1991, I attended the premiere of Mumyō no I (The Well of Ignorance), a new Noh play written by Tada Tomio and performed at the National Noh Theatre in Tokyo. The work directly addressed the modern issues of “brain death” and “organ transplantation” within the context of advanced medicine, quietly raising ethical and ontological questions through the traditional form of Noh. Tada was not only a leading immunologist but also an exceptional writer who published many highly regarded essays in both literary and scientific circles, as well as a playwright who created several new Noh works. After the premiere of Mumyō no I, I had the opportunity to meet him in person. He was, like his prose―calm, restrained, and marked by a quiet clarity of mind that left a lasting impression. At present, Tada’s works exist only in Japanese and have not been translated into other languages. When an English edition of Men’eki no Imiron (The Semantics of Immunity) was once considered, the publisher consulted an overseas reviewer, who replied: “If a new philosophy of immunity were ever to arise, it would not come from Japan.” As a result, the project was never realized (Source: Tada Tomio no Cosmology (Tada Tomio’s Cosmology).Given the originality of his ideas and the universality of his thought, a full translation and international introduction of his work are still deeply awaited.
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