An Anatomist Who Continued to See the World Through the Body
Yoro Takeshi (born 1937) is one of Japan’s leading anatomists and a thinker who has devoted his life to exploring the relationship between the body and the world. As a child, he spent hours catching insects, absorbed in watching their shapes and structures. Lying in the grass, observing how the texture of a beetle’s shell changed with the light or how its small legs moved in relation to the whole, quietly expanded his sense of the world. These early encounters with the fine details of nature nurtured an intuition for sensing the “workings behind form,” an intuition that later guided him toward the study of anatomy.
At the University of Tokyo, where he studied under Professor Junnosuke Nakai, Yoro spent many years examining how the human brain and body are connected, and how that connection shapes our perception of the world. Anatomy is a discipline that uncovers the order and relationships behind visible form, but for Yoro it was also a way to understand the world and his place within it.
Over time, his interests grew beyond academic boundaries, extending to quiet questions of how people relate to themselves, to others, and to the natural world. In an age saturated with information, where urban life dulls the senses, his call to “recover bodily awareness” emerged naturally from years of observing both bodies and the world.
His best-known book, Baka no Kabe (The Wall of Fools), has sold more than 4.5 million copies and vividly revealed the blind spots created by cognitive bias. People see only what they wish to see and hear only what they wish to hear—this metaphor became a widely shared starting point for reconsidering problems in education and society, gently prompting readers to notice the “walls” within themselves.
Yoro also repeatedly pointed out that modern thinking tends to reduce life to simple cause-and-effect chains—“if this, then that”—and relies too heavily on language and logic. When words come first, they confine reality to their own categories, narrowing the range of what we can understand.
These observations resonated strongly with long-standing issues in Japanese education, which has favored questions with fixed answers while neglecting the abilities to think and to feel. His critique sparked broad public debate among specialists, students, and parents alike.
Yoro’s distinctiveness lies in beginning with bodily experience when facing the world.
He starts from the concrete sensations the body receives and quietly reads the structures that lie beneath them—an order that never wavers.
To understand the world is not to divide it into parts but to sense it within connection. This conviction flows steadily beneath his lifelong inquiry.
There is a natural interchange between bodily experience and a structural gaze, and that movement forms the core of his thought.
This stance is deeply rooted in the craft of anatomy. It combines a gaze that can take things apart and discern their structure with a bodily sense of how the whole relates to the world. By holding both perspectives at once, Yoro has viewed the world both as something to be observed and something to be lived. In that dual perspective lies a quiet strength—a willingness to receive the many layers of life without oversimplifying them.
His ideas have offered insight to fields such as education, urban planning, environmental conservation, medicine, and social welfare. Viewing the modern era as a “brain-centered society,” Yoro warns that an excessive reliance on the intellect weakens intuition and sensory awareness, narrowing human relationships and reducing social flexibility. As knowledge and information increase, the realm of the senses grows thinner, and our ability to receive the world in its complexity fades. Connections with ourselves and with others shrink, and the richness of the world slips away.
In response, Yoro emphasizes that “the world is fundamentally something we perceive through the body,” and that recovering this simple yet profound truth will form the foundation of our future society.
His writings invite a quiet act. After reading, he suggests pausing, taking a deep breath, and noticing what one’s own body is sensing in that moment. Even a small shift in awareness may change how the world appears. Such gestures become a way of practicing his philosophy and rediscovering the natural ability to receive the world through the body.
The path of Yoro Takeshi bridges science and sensibility, offering a perspective that quietly reexamines the relationships between people and nature, cities and perception, knowledge and life. A way of thinking that begins from bodily experience provides a calm yet steady support in a rapidly changing world, handing us another way to look at—and live within—the world.
The Person Behind the Work
Childhood Fascination with Insects
From an early age, Takeshi Yoro was a boy absorbed in catching insects. Among them, the weevil fascinated him most―its curious shapes and intricate structures captured his imagination. For him, collecting and observing insects was never a mere pastime, but a way to satisfy a pure curiosity about the mechanisms of life. That passion continues today: he still collects insects and keeps an immense number of specimens at home. This experience drew him toward anatomy, a discipline that seeks to understand function and meaning through structure. It matched his childhood intuition perfectly. Now based in Kamakura, Yoro often retreats to his villa in Hakone, the “Yoro Sanso,” where he devotes himself to preparing insect specimens. The place was chosen on his wife’s suggestion, to which he simply replied, “That sounds good.” Within its walls rest over a hundred specimen boxes, containing some fifty thousand insects. Losing himself in this quiet work, he reveals both his love for nature and his steady spirit of inquiry.
Turning Toward Anatomy
Later, Yoro entered the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tokyo. He admits that this choice was made less from his own strong will than from parental expectation. Yet as he studied, his interest gradually shifted away from clinical medicine and the treatment of disease. What drew him was not the act of healing patients, but the human body itself―the structures that make us who we are.
What fascinated him most was the order hidden beneath symptoms: the skeleton, muscles, and nerves, and the way they connect to form a living whole. To heal was important, but to know was essential. His true quest lay in understanding the human being through its structure. In time, he distanced himself from clinical practice and chose the path of anatomy. Anatomy, after all, is the study that seeks to grasp life’s meaning by exploring structure and function. For Yoro, it was no accident. His years of insect collecting and observation had prepared him for this path. Days in the anatomy laboratory became hours of quiet encounter with the mystery of human existence. Instead of meeting patients, he met the body itself, tracing the universal patterns within it. What began as parental expectation led him, almost inevitably, to the field of study most suited to his nature: anatomy.
The Lesson of Black Ink
One memory from second grade remained vivid throughout Yoro’s life. One day, his teacher instructed the children: “Paint over these parts of your textbook with black ink.” This was no whim. In postwar Japan, under the orders of the occupying forces, schools were told to erase militaristic passages from prewar and wartime textbooks. And so, lines that had been taught as “truth” only yesterday were, by the next day, something to be blotted out.
For a child, this sudden reversal was a quiet shock. Through it, Yoro realized that “common sense” and “truth” are never absolute; they are fragile, shifting with the tide of society. He began to wonder: if knowledge can so easily be overturned, is what we call truth truly reliable? That moment became the seed of a lifelong stance: to question what is given, and to think without being confined by fixed frames. The black ink on the page became, for him, the silent ink of doubt―shaping his later philosophy and his attitude as a scientist.
Switching the Mind Through Games
Yoro also has a curious method for restoring balance when his concentration falters. Between writing sessions, or when the comings and goings of others disturb his rhythm, he turns to video games. By picking up a controller, he says, the circuits in his brain shift entirely, and stray thoughts simply fade. Often, time passes without him noticing.
“Writing and gaming use different parts of the brain,” he remarks with calm humor. “That’s why it restores balance.” For him, gaming is not merely leisure but a kind of rehabilitation―a way of switching modes when the intellect grows tired. At times, he admits with a wry smile, he plays too long. Yet this very tendency to become absorbed is part of his nature. As with insect collecting and specimen making, immersion leads him to forget time. This unexpected yet natural form of “mental rest” reflects both the cool inquiry of the scientist and the playfulness he has never abandoned.
A Quiet Stance on Pleasure―His Tobacco Reflections
Yoro has long been open about being a smoker. In interviews, cigarette in hand, he often remarks, “I don’t like to discuss pleasures too seriously.” His words carry a quiet conviction: that pleasures should be enjoyed lightly, not bound by correctness or reason.
He adds with characteristic directness: “I don’t care about brands. As long as I can smoke, it’s fine. Pleasures should remain light.” His attitude respects freedom while guarding against the weight of over-valuation. To him, tobacco is simply a habit―kept in balance by refusing to burden it with too much meaning.
This plainspoken style reveals his unadorned honesty. By treating smoking not as a moral issue but as a small human indulgence, he hints at something deeper: the wisdom of leaving space, of not constraining life with rigid rules. What might seem an ordinary habit, in his words, becomes a fragment of insight into how lightly we might carry our lives. His reflections on tobacco embody both the rational clarity of the scientist and the gentle humor of one who knows how to savor existence.
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