I do not make my living through speech or writing.
Nor have I ever made my living that way.
As for the achievements I have made for Japan, and the course of life through which I made them, they are as I have already written.
Since July 2010, I have continued to write The Turntable of Civilization without compensation.
Online, I am the one and only writer and philosopher of my kind in the world.
Today was a perfectly clear day.
In other words, it was an ideal day for photography.
I could not go out in the morning, because there was the WBC semifinal between the Dominican Republic and the United States.
By the afternoon, it was already close to three o’clock.
I had intended to go and photograph the peach grove at Osaka Castle for the first time in quite a while, but the instant I stepped outside and looked up at the sky, I changed my plan at the sheer magnificence of that blue.
This is what I want to photograph, I thought.
As close as it is, it already felt too late to head for Osaka Castle Park.
So I changed my plan at once, and decided instead to photograph the Umeda skyline and the sky in the light pouring from west to east.
If it was Umeda, I could still return home in time to watch Grand Sumo.
I decided immediately.
This work was born from that afternoon, that hour, that light, and that sky.
The music I chose for it was the second movement of Haydn’s The Clock.
Time flows equally for all human beings.
But those who can transform that time into a decision, and then into a work of art, are very few.
The sky over Umeda on this day taught precisely that.