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Writing
The complete archive, in both languages, newest first. Essays on language, culture, leadership and judgment — and on what survives the crossing between them.

What Min Jin Lee Had to Unlearn to Write Pachinko

When People Step inside – Teaching the People Who Keep the Economy Moving

What Makes a Pen Good for Me

The Work Behind the Work

When the Gods Stopped Speaking, Judgment Began

What Is Lost When Millions of Books Burn?

Why Did Japan Separate Literature from Logic?

A Great Story Is One Someone Will Defend

In the Age of Perfect AI Writing, Process Becomes the Product

A Writer May Soon Need to Keep Receipts for a Voice

What Survives Across Civilizations May Be True

Soichiro Honda Is Not History. He Is a Builder’s Method.

What Does It Mean to Trust a Human Being?

The Odyssey: The Oldest Story Was Never About Monsters, It’s About Us.

The World Still Moves from the Margins

Why Democracy Must Deliver, Not Just Preach

What Game Are You Playing?

When AI Learns from the Irreplaceable

The Samurai Who Refused to Become a Prisoner of His Own Ideas

Inherited Drafts

Japan’s Long Experiment in Domestic Depth

You Can Outsource the Job. But You Cannot Outsource the Learning.

The Lightness of Serious Literature

Management Did Not Originally Mean Making Money

If You Don’t Bring Forth What Is Within You, It Will Destroy You

Even Gods Needed Writers

The Future Belongs to Leaders Who Understand Human Nature

Taylor Swift Is a Mirrorball

“It’s Like Air” from Jay-Z interview

When Language Thins, Feeling Thins With It

Kenkō and the Unfinished Moon

Perhaps I Am Continuing What Soseki Began

Is AI the New God?

The 440-Year-Old Content Strategy That Still Works Today

I Never Stopped Being a Foreigner

Tolerance Begins in the Sauna

Nobody Asked You To Do This

How to Think Clearly When the World Is Falling Apart

善処(zensho) — Do What Can Be Done

Winning, losing, escaping, we are all rats all the way through.

How Nations Rise From Ruins

Two Traditions, One Wisdom — And the Gap Between Them

Japan’s Greatest Essays Were Written Out of Boredom

When the Limits Come Into Focus, Life Finally Becomes Readable

At the Queen’s Table

Who Rules Whom? Kenkō’s Answer to Power

When AI Writes Better Than We Do: What a 14th-Century Monk Taught Me About Thinking

Why Do We Keep Watching Stories of Loss?

When Sermons Meet Invoices: Why the Atlantic Alliance Is Dying (and What Replaces It)

Happiness Is Not What We Gain — It’s What the Brain Learns to Quiet

The Vatican Bank: God’s Money and the Men Who Played With Fire

Why are Japanese novels exploding in the UK and US right now? How Japan’s “Ice Age” Women Writers Became Global

What a Former MI6 Chief Taught Me About Leadership, Ethics, and Living in a Disorderly World

The Ghosts of John le Carré in the Age of AI Espionage

The Quiet Revolution of The Booker Prize winner of 2025, “Flesh”

When Work Teaches Us: Rethinking Growth in the Age of AI

Anora – a fractured fairy tale that promises fireworks, but delivers a flicker

Tokyo, the Invisible City of History — Where Samurai Whispers Still Echo Between Skyscrapers

Your Degree Won’t Save You. Here’s What Will.

Why McKinsey Won’t Teach You to Lead
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