This reflective essay argues that true kachōfūgetsu—the Japanese sensibility of harmony with nature—never existed in Western or Sinic civilizations. Drawing on over a decade of photographing birds and seasons in Kyoto, the author contrasts genuine natural aesthetics with the worlds of false moralism, false Marxism, and calculated deception.

March 11, 2017

Especially in the winter-barren season, I photograph wild birds in Kyoto.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that wherever I go, wild birds appear before me.
A friend calls me a man who summons birds.
Needless to say, wild birds live in a world entirely untouched by false moralism or false Marxism.
What I now declare to the world is truly a revelation worthy of a Nobel Prize.
For the past ten years, I have continued to photograph kachōfūgetsu in Kyoto as if it were my own garden.
I have lived within the world of kachōfūgetsu.
Why is that?
It is because kachōfūgetsu stands in stern and absolute opposition to the worlds of false moralism, false Marxism, bottomless evil, and plausible lies.
The reason the West is a gathering of barbarians, and the Sinic sphere a world filled with bottomless evil and plausible lies, is that these societies have lived solely for the pursuit of money and for living with cunning malice.
A country where true kachōfūgetsu never existed.
To put it harshly, they possessed the ruthlessness to make money by any means necessary, but they never possessed a culture of kachōfūgetsu.