攻殻機動隊 M.M.A. - Messed Mesh Ambitions_

HamasakiI tried doing a comparative viewing of director Mamoru Oshii’s two films, “Ghost in the Shell” (“GIS”) and “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence,” contrasting on the keyword “bodies.” The former deals with dualism of mind and body, in which Motoko Kusanagi is concerned by the mismatch between her body and soul. In essence, it takes place within the infinite regression of Cartesian doubt applied to our own memories and sensory stimuli. And after she submerges herself and meditates while wishing for an escape from this tenuous reality, she hears a voice of sorts. Clinging to the “evident truth” of the voice, Motoko takes action and is ultimately guided beyond our world, which is itself the main theme of the story.

In contrast, “GIS 2: Innocence” is the exact opposite. Its main question is not about escaping from our present circumstances; it asks how to make our way in the world while accepting our present circumstances. As such, Motoko does not make an appearance. The film’s focus is shifted toward Batou. The film’s main concerns are most clearly delineated in the showdown between Batou and Kim. Kim can’t stand being human and living as a human in an uncertain world while bound by the constraints of a physical body. At this point, Kim begins to communicate about three forms of being that are superior to humans: gods, animals, and dolls. However, we cannot become gods and cannot return to existence as animals without self-awareness. Kim chooses to be a doll on this point, but this is the ultimate desire of western rationalism and its rejection of the body—in other words, a manifestation of the necrophilic desire to own life itself, casting off living and the uncertainties of animate forms.

I would love to go into how Batou beats Kim after that point sometime later in the conversation, but it’s also quite clear from the conclusion of the film. In the end, Batou returns to reality for his dog and Togusa for his daughter. If “GIS” is a story of reaching the other side of the day-to-day world, then “GIS 2: Innocence” is about coming back to the day-to-day world—or in other words, the world of bodies. I feel like that’s the decisive difference between the tone of the two films.

YasudaI watched “GIS 2: Innocence” for the first time after getting asked about this project. I definitely recognized a major overlap between the concept of physicality in it and in Noh theater, which was fascinating.

To explain what physicality means in Noh—and it’s a bit contradictory to talk about physicality with words—first, in Noh, essentially everyone on stage is from various traditions to present the work. And our different styles mean we also have different scripts. And yet we don’t rehearse together. So why are we able to synchronize our breathing on stage? That’s thanks to “komi.” “Komi” is a term for a pause to “take a breath,” and it’s a technique we use to “draw a breath and then stomp” to the beat of the drummer on the bass drum. Then the drummer on the hand drum follows by drawing a breath and saying “yo,” then striking the drum. This “sound of drawing a breath” isn’t something you can hear from the audience seats, but all the performers sharing the stage with you can sense it, and it’s how the performance holds together. You could even say Noh theater rehearsals center on practicing how to read each other’s breathing.

In any scenario, physicality generally tends to be taken as something that happens within us. Francisco Varela authored a book called “The Embodied Mind,” and for this, our word “mind,” meaning heart, is a bit lacking. Instead, the word “spirit” and its etymological root in the Hebrew word “ruach (רוח)” or “breath/life” are closer to the intent here. Physicality in Noh is open to the outside world and is also a shared experience.

What’s more, Noh is initially expressed with the tension between the “shite” and “waki” actors; this interplay gets hazier as they speak, with the two eventually merging. We call this “kyowa” or mutual dialogue, but this is a unique concept in Japanese. For example, if Mr. A says, “That earthquake today…,” then Mr. B might continue with, “Sure was intense, wasn’t it?” They make a single sentence together; that’s what we call “kyowa.” The Noh shite and waki are initially opposed, but they eventually fall into “kyowa,” then the opposition ends, and eventually a chorus called the “jiutai” takes over when things build up even more. Then, suddenly, they might start singing about the scenery. Our surface-level awareness deepens, then expands even to the scenery once it reaches the realm of the collective. That’s the basic structure for Noh plays.

HamasakiThat story shows a process that occurs amid the <overlap /bodies> between the self and others. What I found intriguing was that, as you might expect, physicality forms the hub of the story in “GIS 2: Innocence.” For example, Batou noticed Kim’s schemes—specifically his brain hacking to make them hallucinate—which means that he read Kim’s “komi” there. Batou says something about “recognizing the signs,” but in essence, he was open to the outside world physically and was sensitive to the warning signs. After they beat Kim, Batou says, “Birds by flying high into the heavens, and fish by diving down into the sea,” as he leaves the castle. However, if we take this to mean that “Birds form a unit with the heavens through their bodies, and fish with the sea,” he almost seems to be saying that he needs to read the signs of his world through bodies formed at the <boundaries /overlaps> between two things—at the hubs and nodes that make up units of our world.

When Kim actually dies, the quotation from Noh artist Zeami says, “From birth to death, we are puppets on a shelf. When our strings are cut, we fall from grace” appears on the screen. As you might guess, this also seems to be saying that the form of life (or ghost) moving basic “dolls” in the story also emerges from the physicality of the “overlap” between ghost and body.

Physical sensitivities are always open to the outside world on a Noh stage, and this even extends to the surrounding objects and environment. At the same time, part of what makes “GIS 2: Innocence” intriguing is the extension of objectivity and a sense of self to information society itself, or to the CG scenery of the film. This positioning of humanity in the middle of a relational network is also something we can see in Eastern thinking and its sensibilities.

HamasakiThe topic of “komi” that Yasuda brought up is also about reading an individual rhythm and building up a totality in the face of endless potential combinations that reshape the scene we’re in. However, to put it the other way around, it seems like it’s precisely faith drawn from our physical senses of the totality that lets us work toward being a good part of that same totality.

For example, as Tsuneari Fukuda wrote in “Ningen: Kono Geki-teki Naru Mono” (Human, This Dramatic Thing), freedom in the true sense is the capacity to occupy an appropriate position within a larger whole.” He also says that this is what awakens our sense of “inevitability” or, alternately, of “destiny,” but it’s really having our physical senses open to the outside world that supports our efforts to become part of the whole. We need to be extremely sensitive to read situations, adjust for them, and “harmonize” with them. This concept is something in common with Noh and could be a hidden subject of “GIS 2: Innocence.”

YasudaYou mentioned the key word “harmonize.” Let’s continue on that a bit. In the “Analects,” Confucius says, “Harmonize without agreeing” and “Keep company without joining.” “Harmonize” and “agree” correspond to “keep company” and “join,” respectively. The kanji for “keep company” is one part away from becoming part of the usual Japanese term for “harmonize,” when written alongside the word “harmonize” used in this quote. The kanji for “harmonize” used in “Analects” was originally the character for “chill,” the left half of which represents several bamboo flutes bound up into a single instrument. In other words, “harmonize” originally meant the formation of harmony out of multiple separate flutes played at once, and it’s really the exact opposite of the current concept of “doing the same thing as those around us,” like a caution against doing your own thing and disrupting the harmony. The idea of creating a single overall image by taking what comes as it is.

When we consider that kind of point, the sense of getting drowsy when watching “GIS 2: Innocence”—in other words, when things get confusing on all sorts of fronts—we fall into a half-awake state where our awareness shifts from subjective to passive, which really is extremely close to what happens during a Noh play. My mentor often got mad at me for “thinking with my head too much” when I was younger; it doesn’t go well when we try to apply subjective thinking to Noh. It really is critical to activate objective “senses (intuition),” just as founding Noh artist Zeami said.

The idea of heightening our senses through our living bodies toward the complexity of our environment seems to be directly opposed to the spirit of our information age and the coming age of AI. As concepts, the Internet and AI call for the organization of everything into the same structure for efficiency. If we consider that the power of life lies in its ability to finely adapt to the infinite nuances of specific differences and environmental changes, there is a concern that the new era might dull the inherent human sense of recognizing such complexity.
YasudaThere was a desire for more individuality in the early days of the Internet, too. But that all changes as it gets taken over by major companies.

HamasakiOn the point about individuality, I also found it interesting that the landscapes are different in “GIS” and “GIS 2: Innocence.” “GIS” literally depicts the “sea of information,” and in that concept, we don’t know how any two pieces of information are related. It’s an extremely parallel structure and has a very chaotic Asian sensibility. In contrast, “GIS 2: Innocence” depicts organic scenery. It’s still Asian, but enchantingly unified. It really does make you start to nod off, like he said. *laughter* There are two ways to conceptualize the internet: in one, you have a complex network that divides into complex branches, while in the other, you have a general net over everything. I think that the visuals show how the derivatives of the two contrasts.

Yasuda just mentioned how important intuition is for harmonization. Intuition is basically a quivering antenna tuned toward organic changes. And that reminds me of how the neurologist Viktor von Weizsäcker developed a definition of life as “inseparable” (coherent). In other words, subject and object are inseparable, always constituting a single (modal) unit while also organically forming a whole. Neither the self nor others are complete on their own; that inseparability is precisely what life is. I’ve heard Shirow Masamune was influenced by “Ghost in the Machine” by Arthur Koestler, but Koestler himself was influenced by Henri Bergson. And Bergson is yet another philosopher who sought to define life by its “inseparability from time.”

In terms of how they think, the presence of this awareness of the organic is probably the decisive difference with the sort of cost-and performance-first information society that the current FAANGs likely would prefer. Specifically because cost-performance ratios separate the future (objectives) from the present (methods) to find the shortest route to the future. But we can’t live like that. That traps us into accepting an inevitable fate the moment a sequence of events begins. And if we can’t somehow take back our senses, we end up as simple dolls just like Kim.

YasudaBack in the day, when they made games for the PlayStation, they had to make big technical spec manuals. The manuals were written in a structure centered on what the user might do, and if you think of them as the writers playing the game in their heads, the manuals were a sort of bird’s-eye view of things. They used a sort of western garden from a panoramic perspective. In contrast, maps of gardens like the Rikugien Garden in Komagome or others from the Edo era are not bird’s-eye views but handscrolls or walk-throughs.

If I had to pick one thing that didn’t sit right with me about AI at present, it would be that it’s “always moving forward.” Currently, AI moves forward through time uniformly, following an “if, then” grammar with a clear subordinate clause required by the “if” set from a top-down perspective by the human who made it. Whereas in Japanese, you can start the sentence “If it rains tomorrow, we’ll cancel our date” and immediately change it to “There’s no way it will rain tomorrow” if the other person looks upset at the words “tomorrow” and “rain” due to our sentence order. We can relate to time as backtracking and moving forward, or as stretching and contracting, rather than just proceeding in one direction. I’m very intrigued by the idea of a programming language where you can change that subordinate clause.

HamasakiHave you heard of Noriko H. Arai’s “Tokyo University Robot” research? It’s research to see whether an AI can pass the University of Tokyo entrance exams, but to spoil the conclusion, she arrives at the conclusion that it can’t. It can score decently well in subjects like math, history, and English, where logic and information matter to a degree, but it never rises above a weighted score of 50 in Japanese language fields, no matter what. And that’s because current AI only operates on three principles: logic, probability, and statistics. These are all ultimately in the past (static elements). In other words, ultimately, AI can’t create things for itself in order to achieve “harmonization” or connect the dots with new points, either.

Yasuda Like when point C becomes visible after you connect point A in the past with point B in the past.

HamasakiThe bird’s-eye view logic really is just as you said, Yasuda—a western garden view, where they never let you experience it as a handscroll. The bird’s-eye view is boring, and the walkthrough is full of surprises. It’s an organic physical experience, connecting the past, present, and future. It’s ever-changing, and the accumulation of changes in us is a way to restore our sense that we ourselves are irreplaceable.

I think that the way society reacts to new technologies and how they change it is one of the primary themes of the “Ghost in the Shell” series. In recent eras and going into the future, Japan has allowed for new technologies and associated social changes by cutting off the past. You could even call that the conventional approach in Japan these days. But naturally, we also have recurring expressions in our literature and arts of people who can’t let go of the past, pine for it, and fight to preserve it. How do you two feel about the interplay between those two elements?

HamasakiTo go off on my specialty a bit, first off, conservative thinking is a distinct thing from the right wing or traditionalism. According to Karl Mannheim, “traditionalism” is turning backward in the face of changes and new things. To put it another way, it’s a reflexive rejection of any change. And the right wing takes that in a more extreme, ideological way. So here, conserving means a philosophy of accepting the social changes of the modern era—unlike the right-wing or traditionalist—but warning against and resisting acceleration.

So for example, it’s like pragmatic philosophy from the 19th century onward, which sought to find a “new truth” even as it rejected the idea of “metaphysical truth.” William James called the truth derived with the least disturbance and the most continuity, which can be harmonized and has a good outlook, the “pragmatic truth,” which I think of as the principle of conservative thinking. But the future, progress, and advancement have always been valued in all things and in all eras, including the modern, post-war era of Japan. So it’s a given that the disturbance involved is quite major. We need to accept change and consider how to manage the disturbance it causes, but that’s not how things go. And that’s one of the central questions asked in “GIS 2: Innocence,” I would say.

There’s discourse all over the world about how the IT industry’s sudden development disrupted existing industries and devastated the middle class. Do you think you could draw a line between that discourse and the loss of identity associated with that shift, or the resulting call for connection with local values?

YasudaThat’s an intriguing concept—the least disturbance and the most continuity. I only got involved in Noh after becoming an adult, and I’m often surprised by how small disturbances are in the world of Noh. It was the same for the novel coronavirus fuss recently; we casually and actively work to accept changes. Noh has been around for 650 years as an art form, and it has been changing the entire time. If we think of “hard” and “fixed” as the roots for one of the Japanese words that make up the term “classical,” then tradition is the “communication” that we might expect it to be and calls for change on its own account. I first started using the internet in 1991, and not long after that, I remember having a big conversation about the internet with several people in the dressing room for a Noh play. Apparently, Soemon Konparu, an artist born in the Taisho era of Japan between 1912 and 1926, was making a computer program for taiko drumming.

HamasakiHaving firm footing gives us the space and flexibility for new things. In contrast, generations in high-growth eras—or, you could say, from Japan’s Zenkyoto generation—lack that kind of footing. It seems plausible to me that Mamoru Oshii ended up having to make sci-fi focused on the new for the opposite reason—precisely because he had been tossed around by new developments.

YasudaI’m currently 67, and I see things with entirely different eyes than I did at age 3, but I remain the same Noboru Yasuda. Broadly, that’s what “tradition” is. People around me often ask, “What needs to change next in the world of Noh theater?” But you can’t think about that kind of thing intellectually. Because it’s Noh theater if Noh actors perform it, and things that can change will do so naturally. Those that can’t remain unchanged.

HamasakiI like rakugo comedy, but it’s quite repetitive, isn’t it? It’s like a school class, repeating the same class each year. *laughter* But that repetition forms a broad foundation that lets us demonstrate sensitivity toward small differences. It’s really a cycle of “differences and repetition,” and inversely, we end up unable to spot fine distinctions due to a lack of foundation if we only pursue new things. We end up with all things experienced as discrete individuals, one by one. We can barely tell if what we’re looking at is really a new phenomenon or not. It’s precisely when we can keep “the least disturbance and the most continuity” that we can sense the newness of a thing.

HamasakiYasuda, you experienced the post-war high-growth era when GDP growth would reach 10% per year. Things from just five years before would vanish, and things we had never seen five years before would suddenly be everywhere. You found Noh by some miracle in an era when the world around us changed at such a dizzying pace. In comparison to that, it would seem easier for young people in this era—with relatively few changes—to get involved in traditional arts. How do you feel on that front?

YasudaI’ve heard that 99% of students say they don’t want to see any more when they’re brought to Noh plays for school events. But also, they say that almost all of the students will come away having enjoyed it when we hold Noh workshops for elementary school kids. I think one factor in that difference is the size and structure of the venues. It’s because the parts of Noh that feel good come from the overwhelming sense of physicality, not the story. They say that physicality includes the “ki” or living energy, of our bodies.

But Noh theaters seem to be deliberately built not to convey the physicality to the audience. That’s because Noh is an autonomous form of art. It’s not interesting or anything at all if you’re in the audience watching inattentively; by design, it only becomes interesting when you focus your awareness on the stage. But students on a school trip to a Noh play are there for a class, meaning they’re heteronomous. Meanwhile, workshops are held in places much less spacious than actual Noh theaters and are held in ways that make them autonomous instead of heteronomous. So people absorb the physicality fully.

HamasakiIt’s rarely effective to try to understand traditional arts with knowledge and intellect, but if you have the place and space (context) for it, then you can create the energy for people to slip into them immediately.

YasudaRight. And when I do workshops, one thing I think is critical is to avoid thinking, “I’m doing this because I want these kids to start coming to watch Noh theater.” I think it’s important to just do them, with the doing as its own goal. I don’t think about objectives or budgets in that context.

HamasakiFascinating. That’s similar to how I approach classes. The question is keeping myself fully fulfilled, and if I’m able to do that, then the students will make it to class, even if I don’t take attendance. *laughter* To quote Tsuneari Fukuda on the topic, “We must see that people do not live by bread alone. If we fail to do that, then we will also fail to find bread.” In other words, if we can show that we are strong enough physically not to be concerned with bread, then we will be given it, and our bodies will respond accordingly.

YasudaWhen we can’t accept bread as bread, humans stop being humans. People often talk about AI replacing humans, but I wonder if that’s not due to people pulling back from things more than it is from AI advancing into them. The other day, I was in a convenience store, and I asked if they had item A. And the clerk answered that they didn’t have A, but they had B. And that’s an amazing thing. You might think it’s a given that it went that way, but more and more clerks can’t answer that question lately.

HamasakiConvenience store clerks that act like AI can go past being humorous and over into creepy. *laughter* Speaking of, Bergson identified “creepy” as emerging from the humorous when it was accelerated, and the inverse of that as “grace.” He said that “grace” can be found in bodies with living processes underway, both materially and in memory.

For example, they sometimes use a super-steep staircase on the stage of Takarazuka plays. And normally, you’d have to focus on each step as you climbed a stairway that steep. But the actresses there descend the stage gracefully, looking straight ahead like it’s not even there—like it’s not a physical matter. In their bodies, they break down and blend matter and spirit. But people would laugh if they tripped on the stairs. And people would laugh because the moment she fell, her grace vanished, and her body returned to being just matter. The grace transforms into humor. But it’s still not so bad since it’s related to this interjection, saying, “You’re not a physical thing!” If she stays a physical being of matter without some interjection, then things eventually shift toward the creepy.

With that in mind, the fact that people seem to be getting creepier lately, which means becoming beings of physical matter alone, could be related to the absurd reality that we have no way to restore ourselves to a living state without an appropriate interruption.

I hate talking about myself, but for the record, I had always thought that I would die before becoming something as silly as an academic, but for some reason I find myself teaching university courses these days. *laughter* And that could be related to the fact that my own teachers were graceful when they stood at the lectern themselves. Bergson holds that grace is another name for freedom, and I was charmed by those bodies, wondering at their freedom.

Hamasaki, one of your main topics to engage with is the emptiness of modern society, or, in other words, dealing with the absence of god as an underpinning for the significance of life. And when you examine Silicon Valley, you can see an almost Christian structure to it, with a drive to reach some sort of ideal seen endlessly far off in the future, at the far end of all human progress. In contrast, the Noh theater that forms the foundation Yasuda mentions itself seeks to find the gods in the environment around us and spirituality in the movements of our bodies. What would you say about the differences between sensing spirituality in the movements of our bodies, including the manners of the setting, and the Christian sort of sensing the sacred in information and concepts, putting the body aside?
YasudaNoh performances typically don’t end even if someone dies on stage. We can’t tell if someone has passed on or not in the moment, so it might be better to call it collapsing. But the approach to the scene in such cases is set in advance, and we continue the performance to its end. Just the other day, a flutist died on the stage of a Noh performance. Apparently, it used to happen fairly often before the war, but it’s been rare since then.

HamasakiI had read about that in one of your books, Yasuda, but it happened again recently? I’m shocked. So does that mean that he passed away of old age during a performance?

YasudaFor example, I wouldn’t think to take a performance off just because I felt a bit off one day. No one around me will say I should take time off because of my age. If I put everything I have into it and collapsed on stage, it would probably end up being “an act of god.” But it still feels clearly off to me to put it in so many words. It’s not a straightforward thing like god; whether you call it god or something even larger, it sounds false in any case.

HamasakiI see what you mean about “acts of god.” When the philosopher Motoori Norinaga defined “gods of Japan,” he said, “awe-inspiring things called kami,” but that seems to mean fearsome things like “things we are unable to consciously know” and “oneself as unknown to us, ourselves” when we think about it now. That would mean that we are not able to be aware of ourselves as whole units, including ourselves and bodies. In essence, the energy (ghost) within us ultimately cannot be controlled. And I suspect that’s what we’ve always called “kami.”

The neurologist Bin Kimura once broke down the term “nature” into an overlap between “self-ergo style” and “body-ergo style.” A “personal style” is therefore the personality (passivity) we assign ourselves and the embodiment of that force (activity). In other words, the body exists at the juncture of passivity and activity by nature. This “nature” is what we have always called “god,” and this topic isn’t exclusive to the East at all. It seems to be a universal quandary, appearing in the works of Spinoza, Bergson, and Heidegger as well.

Yasuda“Seasonal words” or “kigo” in Japanese are representative of nature in classical works in Japan, and these terms assign the body a role in resonating with nature as part of the “juncture of passivity and activity” you just mentioned. I try to look inward as I read haiku along with shut-in audiences, and during one session, we had someone with a very rigid, complex backbone. They couldn’t really compose verses at all, initially, but after one point, they gained the ability. And when they did, they drew on their own past for it. They said that the five, seven, five structure let them come to grips with themselves. But they didn’t use seasonal kigo terms in their poetry. And even when I noted it, they couldn’t effectively integrate the terms.

Until one day we had incredibly heavy rains, and then it turned sunny as though it had never poured down on us. Then the next day, they composed a wonderful verse using seasonal terms and began smiling again for the first time in decades (they asked me not to, so I can’t share their poetry, though). From what they said, writing poetry with seasonal terms lets them ascribe part of their difficult past to nature. But the rain brought that back into them, which was quite difficult for them. But when the rain cleared up afterward, their hearts were also left clear, they said. It felt like an example of where a “self-ergo style” created from past experience had shifted into a “body-ergo style” and then was enacted by nature itself.

HamasakiThat’s fascinating. I always hated the rule that haiku must contain seasonal terms, back when I was in school, but when I learned of poets like Basho, it all seemed like a device intended to produce experiences like the one Yasuda just mentioned. For example, I inevitably read my own feelings into the last two lines of seven syllables in a tanka, meaning my self-awareness never fades out during them. Even just the five-seven-five syllable lines of a haiku still leave room for “you” to creep in. It’s only when you incorporate seasonal terms into a haiku that they overcome my self-awareness and cultivate an energy that I can ascribe to nature.

For the record, this is also the traditional sense of things in Japan. According to artist and philosopher Junzo Karaki, the Japanese sense of beauty arises from “elegant taste” (a homophone for “like”), which refers ultimately to “the person’s” tastes. This evolves toward “serendipity” as a more totally isolated form with Yoshida Kenko, but this begins to approach nihilism. This raises the question of who introduced brightness to Japanese arts, which would be the 13th-century Buddhist priest and artist Dogen. Dogen said in his work “Shobogenzo” that “To know oneself is to forget oneself. Forgetting oneself is to give proof of the order of the world (nature).” This shows his appreciation for our connection with nature. If we think of Noh artist Zeami as the one who conveyed this appreciation for performing arts, then Basho would be the person who brought it to literature. In fact, it overlaps with the process of opening ourselves physically to nature as individuals.

YasudaYou’re right. You first understand Basho when you come to understand Noh theater, and you’ll come to understand Noh if you can understand Basho.

Noh theater deals with subject matter like hatred, murder, and vengeful ghosts, but it also has the clear power to put people in an enlightened state of mind. That got me interested in how Noh is handled in subcultures recently. For example, the blockbuster film “Suzume” by Makoto Shinkai also incorporates elements of Noh stories. The same goes for Natsume Soseki in the realm of literature. It makes me wonder if maybe we turn to Noh as a reference, or develop a need for it, when Japan is about to experience a major change or has experienced one, as a way of facing the resentment and pain we feel from losing something massive. We can find a sort of cleansing function in it, for changes across society as a whole. Does that seem plausible to you?
YasudaThat goes for both Basho and Jun Eto. There are definite periods where Noh has an upsurge.

HamasakiIn “Critique of Judgment,” Kant said this about beauty. “When a person finds a flower beautiful, it is an extremely subjective sensation, yet no person thinks that only he would find it beautiful.” He called that inconsistent, but if I had to say, I think that Kant started from the wrong point. In other words, even though it is individually subjective, he calls this inconsistent because we all feel the same sensation. However, it would be natural for people coming out of the same current in a river to feel the same sensation upon returning to the river, by way of beauty. *laughter*

Tsuneari Fukuda also wrote in “What Is Art?” that “art is the cleansing of self-awareness.” And I feel that it really might be that “beauty” is the thing that, once fixed in our self-awareness, becomes its cleansing function. In other words, it’s what brings us back to the current of the river, or home (completeness). That’s precisely why artistic experiences energize us.

YasudaI feel like language is involved, whether people really are losing that sort of collective sensitivity now or if it’s something they’re seeking out. For example, the word “sad” in modern Japanese has its own meaning and also relates to our individual pasts. But in archaic phrasing, the word related to our sense of beauty as a type of “cute.” When they see a baby, lots of people react by calling him or her cute. “Cute” is a collective term in Japanese.

It could be that language loses its collective meaning with the passage of time and tends to evolve in a more individualistic direction. Like the Hawaiian term “ʻūlāleo,” which refers to a spiritual voice for connecting with those who have passed on. Lots of people can hear this voice. There are a lot of languages, like Hawaiian, which lack their own writing systems and retain their collective aspects in the modern era. They’re reminders of potential ways of thinking.

HamasakiThis is commonly misunderstood even now, but Tsuneari Fukuda advocated similarly about Japanese kana orthography. Utilitarianism and modern rationalism formed the backdrop to Japanese script reform, but it was itself precisely the ideology that would cut off the collective (organic) nature of the language. That was the specific thing he resisted, but people in that era and onward have mocked and derided it as a “conservative reaction.”

Yasuda Like I was saying earlier, everyone on stage for a Noh play comes from a different style. We’re all separate individuals. And precisely because we’re all separate individuals, we have the ability to harmonize. For example, we wouldn’t go together as a group if we had to perform in another region. We’d each catch our own train separately. You might say it’s collective, but it’s not a group or “totalitarian.”

“Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” introduces the titular concept of stand-alone complexes.
HamasakiOn the topic of totalitarianism, the writer D. H. Lawrence resisted the movement toward totalitarianism from the first to the second world wars with “wholeness.” I think it’s vital to clearly distinguish between individual independence while still mediated by the whole and group formation due to a lack of independence, so to use the terminology of Koestler’s “The Ghost in the Machine,” it would be “holon.” Without awareness of that distinction, the more you push individualism, the more prone it is to group formation.

YasudaThe root for “holon” also means “health.”

We may be losing the group sensitivities that you practice in Noh in our modern urban lives. I think that if you follow collectivism back to the hunter-gatherer era, people had to have sensitivities to “signs” in the environment due to the tension and coordination involved between autonomous individuals and the group and where their awareness would’ve been directed. That’s something AI struggles with. I worry how long humanity can just let itself be carried along with the course of nature, society, and the world with those capacities dulled. And that makes me think of the episode about having ADHD and focusing on watching Noh theater.

YasudaI get a lot of chances to do workshops and rehearsals with school students with developmental issues, and they’re able to sit and focus on the rehearsal for a couple of hours. But when they’re at school, their parents are always getting calls from the school because they can’t sit still. And that makes me wonder if there isn’t a problem with the school system itself instead. It also makes me think that we need to re-evaluate the potential of our “rehearsals.” Zeami, the artist who established Noh as an art, used the “keiko” or “training,” too, but the modern versions of it that I’ve called rehearsals began in the Edo era (1603-1868) and have changed with the times. That’s why I’ve been working with Dominique Chen, Seiko Ito, and others like them to encourage people to re-evaluate rehearsals and things practiced with them.

We touched on Varela’s “The Embodied Mind” a bit earlier, and he also has books on mindfulness. But the way mindfulness is currently practiced in the world, doesn’t it seem a bit insincere or false? Yasuo Tanaka, the translator of the book, rendered that as “Samadhi.” It’s a great translation. Being fully immersed in a current endeavor while also observing ourselves that way—that’s what Samadhi is.

Hamasaki“Being immersed yet observing” is actually a balanced state for humans, by nature. We’re currently immersed in this interview, but we’re also considering our positions relative to each other as it goes on. *laughter* This is what Fukuda calls “dancing while alert,” and it’s a baseline state for actors. Just the dancing is a sort of madness in Noh, and we need to carefully assess how it will look to an audience. Which is where “Samadhi” comes in.

YasudaVarela also considers the risk that the self might not be there anymore once we’re in a position to observe ourselves. He sought an answer to the question in Buddhism and arrived at Samadhi.

HamasakiSo for example, Dogen also emphasizes “samu,” or manual labor, in training, but that’s all Samadhi as well, isn’t it? Focusing on tasks like cleaning, laundry, or kitchen work is a way to learn how to “dance while alert.” Repetition is the key there. That’s because our awareness of our objective fades over the course of repetition. People are anxious because they’re captives of their objectives (futures), and their anxieties make them vulnerable to worldly desires. So in these instances, you’re focusing on “here and now” thoroughly, removing the external “objective.” And in practice, there’s no way a major objective (goal) will get tied up in a repeated task like cleaning, laundry, or kitchen work; it’s fairer to say the task is the objective.

YasudaWhen I go for overseas performances and talks, I end up having to take all sorts of luggage and costumes. Sometimes I forget things. Once, I remember suggesting making a checklist to my mentor, and he said, “No way.” According to him, checklists are a form of automation. Basically, repetition and automation are different things. The act of laying out your attire may be a “repetition,” but once you try to manage it with a checklist, it becomes “automation.” I struggled to understand that at first.

I mentioned before that I’m 67 now, and when I talk with people who have been at it longer than me, they say that it gets harder to get the lines out once you’re over 70. But you can’t give up on that; if you keep pushing, the lines will come. Supposedly, it’s because our memory circuits change, but it’s something to look forward to.

Of course, we live in a world where jobs have targets, and those can be used to measure success. At the same time, people are also coming to see meritocracy as problematic lately. The lives and dignity of people not seen as having merit weren’t respected. I feel like from the conversation so far, there’s a chance that interpreting humans as recurring physical presences and granting dignity to the “here and now” could lead the way to a vision that shows a sort of caring society that affirms people and all living things fairly.

HamasakiYasuda was talking about memory earlier, and I feel like that also ties into the “vision that shows a sort of society that affirms fairly.” I saw something surprising on TV, where they played music that was popular in her youth for an old lady in her 90s. She normally couldn’t remember anything about her 20s, but suddenly began speaking about the time the music came from. It reminds me of how Bergson said that even if it seems lost, memory is just sealed away along utilitarian lines and is still there in reality. Bergson gives the example of people whose lives flash before their eyes on death, where the conceptual seal is broken the moment the concepts of a purpose for life and utility go out the window. The memories just flow forth without that seal. And there’s no difference in capacities, there.

YasudaThe line “memories linger in the body, and the past remains unchanged” comes up commonly in the central recurring yokyoku chorus of Noh plays. In Japanese, “memory” is written as literally “thoughts” that “get out.” Our memories are normally sealed under a lid, but when we see pine trees, sing, or dance, the lid slips and the memories get out. And they’re something that would “linger in the body.”

Hamasaki talked about how Zeami’s “From birth to death, we are puppets on a shelf. When our strings are cut, we fall from grace” is relevant within “GIS 2: Innocence.” That’s a quote from “A Mirror Held to the Flower,” in the chapter “Unity of All Abilities.” It’s about “single-mindedly unifying all abilities,” so it’s not about the heart but rather about “technique.” As you’d expect, it’s all based on physicality.

This is a digression, but for the record, the kanji for the phrase on the walls of Kim’s hideout is written “We joyously fall” instead of “Our strings are cut and we fall.” It’s only at this one point in the movie. It could be meant to convey that it’s not that we fall because our “threads (our hearts)” are cut, but that this gives us “joy.”

HamasakiI think it really is true that “it’s not about the heart but rather about ‘technique.'” My first book was titled “The <Form> of Tsuneari Fukuda’s Thinking,” and I was really determined to convey that “Thinking” there meant technique and form. Because the word is “form,” after all. And we all read how other people feel by way of that “form.” And regardless of that fact, modern people are obsessed with the internal, like feelings or brains, in recent years. We try to bring everything back to invisible factors.

To begin with, Descartes’ “Me, which I cannot doubt, because I doubt” is not actually a visible entity. Wittgenstein rebelled against this by asserting that it made everything a linguistic game and trying to interpret the world and humanity based on the flow of “form.” On that point, I think there is actually a major overlap between the modernist thinking of the 20th century, which worked to overcome modern delusions, and the development of Japanese thinking.

For example, you’ve mentioned seeing thinking given “form” in manners, right? For example, we all make sure to attend funerals and do the proper things to show our sadness. In essence, there’s a model. We try to read what other people feel according to their forms. We have a mechanism to stop our endless skepticism about “are they really sad?” for a time and interpret the manners and models we see.

HamasakiBut manners also mustn’t fall into empty formality. We doubt the other person the moment the formality starts to look empty. Models have the ability to stop endless regressions in our awareness, precisely because they’re what living really is. And they can also produce confidence and certainty. Phrasing and spoken manners work the same way. When we think of formal speech as a rule, it feels like a restriction on our freedom, but when we think of it as a model way of determining position around other people, it becomes a tool for the sake of our freedom. In essence, the <words /model> let us harmonize organically even as we maintain the distance we want from others. And bodies and forms seem to be wrapped up in it.

YasudaModels are vital to Noh as well. In Stanislavski’s system for drama, actors recall past emotions while acting. But in Noh, we take on the roles of ghosts and spirits, and no one has ever been one of those to recall it. But when you follow the models we learn to play a ghost, you eventually start to feel like you understand how a ghost would feel, even without having experienced it. Audiences pick that up, too, and you start to feel it internally. And in the end, it’s your spirit and feelings that shift to fit the model.