Our View

Our “explanations” change.
Nature has been going on all along.

The sun rises, and sets.
The moon waxes, and wanes.
The seasons turn.
A seed sprouts, grows, bears fruit, withers, and leads on to the next life.
Countless microbes that the eye cannot see are there in the soil, in our food, and in our own bodies.
People eat, sleep, raise, make, live alongside someone, and hand something on to the next generation.

Our “explanations” change with the times.
But the nature we have been facing was there long before the word science was born.

People watched how it worked, without knowing its name.

Without knowing that microbes existed, people made fermented foods.
Without modern meteorology, they read the clouds and the wind, and the changes in plants and animals.
Without precise clocks, they knew the time from the height of the sun, from shadows, from the stars, from the phases of the moon.
Without knowing a plant’s compounds as chemical formulas, they ate each plant, used it, and turned to it for the body, out of long experience.

The beginning of farming goes back more than ten thousand years.¹ In pottery from a site in China about nine thousand years old, traces have been found of a drink fermented from rice, honey and fruit.² That this was the work of living microbes was shown only in the middle of the 19th century.³

Japan’s Jomon period, too, left pottery with a row of small holes around the mouth.
One theory holds that these were vessels for making sake, and when one was made in the same shape and tried, sake was in fact produced. It has been suggested that the holes may have been there to let out the gas that fermentation gives off.⁴

If that is so, then people knew from observation that the holes were needed, without knowing of microbes or having a word for fermentation.
(Another theory holds that they were drums.)

Things that let us feel that ability remain in many parts of the world.

Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, about 11,500 years ago.
People who did not yet have crops or livestock quarried huge stone pillars, moved them, carved them, and built large structures.⁵

In Greece about 2,100 years ago, the “Antikythera mechanism” was made: bronze gears fitted together to show the movements of the sun and moon and the cycles of the calendar.
Thirty gears have been found. What survives is about a third of the whole.⁶

All of that must have included not only success but failure, danger, and starting over.
That experience was passed to the next generation and has remained, changing to fit the land and the times.

Tradition is not something that has been preserved in its old form, unchanged.
It is also what has been chosen, changed, and handed down within the long relationship between people and nature.

Science keeps checking.

Test by experiment, publish the results, verify one another’s work.
A place for doing that took shape around the 17th century.⁷

What matters in science lies in the fact that it keeps checking.

With new observations and techniques, explanations that had been thought correct are often revised, and sometimes overturned.
The idea that “the continents are moving” was not accepted when it was put forward in 1912. It became the established view in the 1960s, once surveys of the sea floor had advanced.⁸
And yet that established view, too, may be overturned again some years from now.

Yesterday’s “correct” is not necessarily the same today.
I think that is not a weakness of science, but an essential quality of science itself: it keeps renewing its understanding by asking again.

And science has not, even now, finished explaining all of nature.
The ordinary matter that makes up the stars and our bodies is about 5% of the whole universe. What most of the rest is, is still not known.⁹

Where does human interpretation begin?

Japan, too, has a place that makes one think.

At the Kanayama Megaliths in Gero, Gifu Prefecture (a prefectural historic site, the Iwaya-Iwakage site), light comes in through a gap in the rocks around the summer and winter solstices.
This is something that can still be confirmed on the spot, every year.¹⁰

Whether the people of the Jomon period arranged it that way in order to read the movement of the sun —
archaeology has not yet confirmed that this is so.

But I cannot think it a coincidence that light enters the same place, at the same time, every year.

What has been confirmed, and what I feel to be so.
I write the two separately.

This is how TANE keeps them apart in writing.

Science has its own way of checking.
History has its own way of reading.
Folk tradition holds a land and a time, and the experience of its people.
Symbols hold the story of how people have looked at nature, and what meaning they have found there.

Rather than blending these into one, we look at each of them together with its background.

What is known.
What is not yet known.
What remains as a record.
What has been handed down as experience.
And what people have seen in it.

We do not think that all the wisdom earlier generations left was correct. Nor can something be called scientifically correct only because it has lasted a long time.

We also do not decide the value of a culture only by whether there is scientific proof.
And we do not take what has been told as tradition and turn it, as it is, into scientific fact or proof of a health benefit.
From there, we think for ourselves. What do I think? What do I feel?