Food, daily life, skin.
All one piece.

I was not doing this kind of thing from the start.

It began with my own poor health, and with having children. What matters in living? I started to think about it more deeply than before.

It was the same with my children’s education. The age they will live in will be completely different from mine. Of that much I was certain.

AI is developing at an accelerating pace. Technology is moving in a way that does not compare with five years ago.

There was the agricultural revolution. There was the industrial revolution. A wave larger than those has already arrived.

In a single day, how many words and pictures pass in front of our eyes?

The amount of information a person today takes in over one day equals a year’s worth in the Edo period, or a whole lifetime for someone in the Heian period. Some people say so. What was counted, and how, I could not find out.

Even so, I understand very well the feeling of wanting to say it.

Open the screen in your palm, and the lives of strangers, events in distant countries, products you have no memory of buying, all come streaming past. Even what your eyes did not stop on piles up somewhere, by the amount that went by.

The numbers keep growing too. The data flowing through Japan’s internet is still increasing by more than ten percent every year.

If you want to know something, AI hands you an answer more easily than anything else.

Convenience moves forward at a speed that leaves no time even to have a question.

I think that force will go on changing the way the world has worked until now, and its values as well.

I do not see any of this as an enemy.

Then what can I do, as a parent, so that they can live?

I looked into whatever I could lay my hands on.

When I heard STEM was good, I taught myself programming. When I heard that studying money or business was good, I bought piles of books and studied, and went to hear from people who knew those fields well.

I do not think any of it was wasted.

But something still did not sit right.

So I went back to the basics.

Daily life. Living. Caring for your own body and mind. These were exactly the things our age has let go of doing for itself.

There are things a person cannot do without, I think.

Nature, and the things that give colour to daily life.

Inside nature there are mysterious forces and patterns.

Bees build their comb in hexagons, without fail. Count the rows of seeds in a sunflower and the spirals come to 34 and 55. In a pine cone it is 5 and 8, or 8 and 13. More than nine in ten of the plants that form spirals are said to fall somewhere in this sequence.

The branching of a tree, and the branching of the blood vessels and airways inside the body, have very similar shapes.

The calendar is like that too. In an age with no means of communication at all, people in countries far apart knew the summer and winter solstices in the same way.

Newgrange in Ireland is built so that only on the morning of the winter solstice does light reach the inner chamber through a small window above the entrance. Stonehenge in England has its axis pointing toward sunrise at the summer solstice and sunset at the winter solstice. They were built about a thousand years apart, by different people.

Japan has one too. The great torii at Uji Bridge, at the Inner Shrine of Ise Jingu. For about a month on either side of the winter solstice, at around half past seven in the morning, the sun rises through the middle of the gate.

On the morning of the winter solstice, the light comes straight.

People watched the sky, watched the moon, read the seasons, felt them, and celebrated or feared.

For some of those things, science caught up later.

And even now, with everything this far along, there are things we cannot make. We cannot make a single seed out of nothing.

The world is a mass of wonders, full of mystery. We are inside its gifts. The sun, the rain. Among more things than can be counted, we are kept alive.

That wonder, and how remarkable the people before us were: I want to pass these on to my children.

Precisely because answers come easily, precisely because things are convenient ── the ability to bring something into being with your own hands.

The discoveries and wisdom that all kinds of people have made, generation after generation, have blood running through them. Even where science has not fully proved them, they have been handed down without a break.

There are ideas in them, and respect, and love.

Put into words it sounds simple, but I think it is a great gift.

What if someone’s chance discovery, thousands of years ago, is still here in our daily lives? What if it lasted, and was handed down?

When I think of it that way, I feel as if I have leapt across time, and I am very happy.

Is that only me?

It does not have to be everything. Start from where you can.

I thought this was what I needed most, and what I could leave to my children. Knowledge that has been handed down, and wisdom, and deep understanding. I wanted, from the heart, not to let it stop with me but to pass it to them.

Written out this far, it may look like a tidy story.

It is not.

I am not a “natural living” person, nor a naturalist.

I went through all kinds of steps, worried, and was hurt. I was told I was strange. I was told I was overdoing it, overthinking it. I fought with my family.

Even so I kept searching, and here I am.

I do not mean to say I am walking ahead, either.

I am still on the road myself, and there are times I struggle. I think “this must be the answer”, and the next day I find something else and wonder whether I was wrong.

But that is fine.

There is no need to hunt for the right answer. It is enough to look for what matters to you.

What I write about comes, broadly, to three things.

I did not divide them because I wanted to. I mean that there are three doors in.

Skin is a mirror of daily life

I have looked at skin for a long time. I have done counseling, made cosmetics to suit each person, and seen a great many skins.

Even now, I cannot say “this is the right answer for everyone.” If anything, the longer I work with it, the more I feel that skin is not that simple.

Age. What you eat. Sleep. The season. The land you live on. The state of your heart. The everyday.

Skin quietly reflects all sorts of things about a person.

So I do not think about skin by looking at cosmetics alone. When I try to solve it in one place and get stuck, I look next door.

I do not think this applies only to skin.

Food is receiving life and passing it on

Miso, koji, umeboshi, sourdough ── I invented none of them.

Someone whose name I do not even know spent a long time making, eating, working things out, and handing them to the next person. I am one more who received them.

So I do not want it to stop with me.

Nor do I think that doing it exactly as it was done long ago is what passing it on means. I make it easier to do, or change it a little, to fit the life I live now.

What I want to keep is the “why” that sits behind it.

Why this ingredient? Why this season? Why has this method lasted?

Daily life is made of small choices

The tools you use in the kitchen. The dishes you touch every day. What you wear. Where you live. Touching the garden and the soil. How you keep company with the seasons.

Each of them is, at a glance, a small thing.

But daily life is made of those small choices.

Rather than making one big decision once, choosing the small things again for yourself probably does more. Because they repeat, every day.

I write in three parts. But inside the person writing, this is one thing.

From here on, I think the story is not only mine.

At some point, I noticed.

We seem to be choosing for ourselves, but things have soaked into us from the surroundings we grew up in and elsewhere, and we go through our days with no room to think about our own ideas or what we like, without even noticing that this is so.

I was like that too.

Something that happened to come by in a commercial. What everyone was doing. What someone recommended as good. What was in fashion. What has generally been said to have value.

Those were the things I was choosing. If I had been asked why that one, I probably could not have answered.

This is not a bad thing.

If we decided everything ourselves, the day would never end. Because things have soaked in, we can move without thinking.

But not having noticed, and choosing after having noticed, are different.

Once you have noticed, you may carry on as you were. You may stop. You may change.

Only then does it become a choice.

What I have become able to do myself, I try doing as a family. I try doing it with my children.

After a few times the children know the process too, and make it their own. They remember even things I never meant to teach.

When I feel what I was able to pass on, alive in that home and in those children ── I am truly glad.

This is not only about children. When I pass something to anyone, I think it is the same.

And this is something I came to think only much later.

It does not have to be something that person can use straight away.

Nothing has to change on the day they hear it. They do not have to try it. They may forget it.

Someday, in that person’s own time.

To have them remember: “Oh ── I can make this myself.”

That, I think, is the moment the TANE has sprouted.

In that person’s own time, at a good moment, prompted by something, somewhere ── if it ever puts out a shoot, how glad I would be.