Today, I do not think culture can be protected through human plans or ideas.
I also feel uncomfortable with the idea that culture must be preserved for the future.
I believe culture has not continued because someone decided to save it. It has continued because people lived in it, practiced it, and passed it on through their lives.
・Questioning the Idea of Making Culture More Accessible
I first began thinking about this when a tea ceremony teacher asked me, “How do you think we should protect this culture in the future?”
At that time, I believed it was important to make culture simpler, closer, and easier for anyone to experience.
I thought that making the entrance wider for younger people and visitors from overseas would help culture continue.
However, as I continued this work, I began to feel a contradiction.
The more I came to love culture, the more I was drawn to the parts that were not simple or easy to understand.
Rules shaped over a long period of time, complexity that cannot be understood immediately, space that is not fully explained, and a sense of time that feels different from modern daily life.
Making the entrance wider is important. However, making culture easier to understand is not the same as making culture itself simpler.
I felt that I needed to stop and think about this difference, so I stepped away from my work for a time and studied in the United States for one year.
While living there, I had the chance to learn about many things, including Japanese and other cultures, politics, economics, religion, philosophy, and art.
・Not From the Future to the Present, but From One Present to the Next
While I was in the United States, I came across the words of Yukio Mishima in a book.
At the time, I was thinking about what we should do now in order to leave culture for the future.
I first imagined the form I wanted culture to have in the future. Then I thought backward about what should be made simpler, how it should be presented, and how it should be preserved.
However, Mishima’s words changed the direction of time in my mind.
I understood his words to mean that culture is not protected by shaping the present for the future.
Instead, culture continues because people live fully in their own time.
One person lives in the present.
The next person receives something from that life and then lives in their own present.
From one present to the next.
Through this continuing movement, the future is created as a result.
This idea struck me deeply.
・Preserving Culture and Keeping It Alive
Until then, my idea of protecting culture had been similar to protecting a jewel in a museum.
Keeping it safe, preventing it from changing, making it easy for anyone to see, and preserving it for as long as possible.
Of course, this kind of preservation is necessary for historic buildings, artworks, and important records.
However, when culture is treated in the same way, its form may remain while its connection to people’s lives and feelings is lost.
Preserving culture and keeping culture alive are not the same.
For culture to remain alive, it needs a relationship with the people living in each time.
People receive it, live it through their own work and daily lives, and then pass something on to the next person.
There will be changes, and people will understand it in different ways.
However, this movement is what allows culture to live in the present, rather than remain only as a form from the past.
・The Package Called “Japanese Culture”
After I began thinking in this way, I also started to look differently at what is introduced overseas as “Japanese culture.”
Tea ceremony, Zen, kimono, bushido, and traditional crafts.
All of these are important parts of Japanese culture. However, many of them are now somewhat separate from the daily lives of most Japanese people.
Some traditions moved away from everyday life during Japan’s modernization. Later, they were preserved, explained, and shaped into forms that could be shown as “Japanese culture.”
This does not mean that they are false.
It is also true that explanation and structure are necessary when sharing culture with visitors from overseas.
However, making culture easier to understand is not the same as reducing it only to the parts that are easy to understand.
As a company that offers cultural experiences, we are not outside this risk.
・Our Work
Since encountering Mishima’s words, I have tried not to look at culture only from the outside or treat it as something to be preserved.
Instead, I try to receive it into myself.
To learn, to practice, to build relationships with people who still live with that culture, and to express what we receive through our own work.
Perhaps this is all we can do.
We do not believe that we can protect culture.
However, we can meet people who are living with culture today, and we can open their places and time to others.
Our tours are an extension of this idea.
Rather than simply looking at a finished image of “Japanese culture” from the outside, we hope guests can meet monks, tea teachers, craftspeople, and others who continue to live with these traditions today.
We hope the time we create can become a small part of the movement through which culture continues from one present to the next.
We would be happy to welcome you to one of our cultural experiences.
We would also be glad to learn about the cultures that have been passed down in your own countries and communities.
Thank you for reading.
Denei Co., Ltd.
Takuma Nakagawa
