JP/EN

Encyclopedia of niime

About the Circle of Life, Earth, and Creation
〈part 2〉

2024 . 12 . 26

〈Continued from the part 1〉

Tamaki: I have been thinking recently that there is the universe and the Earth, which has air, water, plants, bugs, animals, and people. All things make the Earth, right?

— Yes.

Sakai: Everything.

Tamaki: Including good and bad things, we call it the Earth. Mr Koshikawa is the one in all the elements of the Earth. So Mr Koshikawa is the Earth.

— …???… you mean I am a part of the Earth, or…Am I the Earth itself?

Tamaki: That’s right!!

Sakai: Paradoxically, we exist as one of many things to link with the Earth. You can think it’s the Earth from Mr Koshikawa. Or it could be thought of as the Earth from me or ‘tamaki niime’.

Tamaki: … However, there’s no ‘from’ because Sakai, Koshikawa, and I are all on the Earth together. The brain automatically says I am Koshikawa, but it’s all together if he is with others. So if it’s seen from the Earth, it’s all the same. You are the Earth!!

Sakai: In other words…

Tamaki: Don’t make it change!

Sakai: No, no. For example, if Mr Koshikawa loses his name of Mr Koshikawa, who is he?

Tamaki: I think you distract from the point of the topic.

Sakai: No, not at all. It’s the same. If I am asked who I am, I am no one.

Tamaki: So you are the Earth!

Sakai: You may say you are mammalian as our human word, which doesn’t mean much.

— If you don’t have the concept of categorization …

Sakai: That’s right. What Tamaki means is that our existence means the Earth.

Tamaki: What do our brains tell us about who we are?

— They are trying to persuade us.

Tamaki: Right. Your brain just tells you that you are Koshikawa and different from others!

Sakai: It’s the same with Sakai as well.

Tamaki: It’s just like, ‘I am good air, or I am bad air in the same air’.

— When looking at the Earth from a cosmic or universal viewpoint, everything is the same, right?

Tamaki: Everything is together. It’s like your stomach wants to be in certain ways.

— You shouldn’t insist on yourself.

Tamaki: Yeah, because even hearts fit in your body harmoniously. But overall, individual opinions are allowed. Including loving or fighting each other, so everything is the Earth.

Sakai: What I think is that humans are stupid, which is zero, after all.

Tamaki: Yeah, that’s right.

Sakai: Even though it is zero, we are fighting to get 1 or 2.

Tamaki: From the point of view of the universe, everything is inevitable. As humans make progress or continue, we pass down our DNA, and we experience many things. Everyone lives life to the fullest in any generation.

Sakai: There’s no good or bad (in the view of the universe).

Tamaki: The universe is me, and I am the universe. I can’t ask you to understand it, or I am not going to ask you. I hope everyone will be aware of it someday. However, if you understand it, you can think everything is acceptable …, and you will become nothing to be afraid of.

—At that point, you can see it as God sees it.

Tamaki: I wonder if maybe. There are no bad or good people. There are differences in experiences and ways of feeling. You would accept other types of people in many different people, not dislike or prefer people.

— Hmmmm…

Tamaki: There’s me, Mr Koshikawa, and everyone on Earth. A new life is born, and someone dies, which is a ‘cycle of life’. When you see it as the scale of Earth, it’s necessary that someone is born and somebody dies with happy or sad feelings. Accepting that such events are needed on Earth could make you feel more peaceful.

Sakai: Changing the way of saying.

Tamaki: Please change it!


Sakai: Humans will die sooner or later, right? Death means zero, and we are living to head for zero.

Tamaki: 100 people out of 100 are doing it. But it’s not only for humans.

Sakai: 0 plus 0 is 0, right? But we are having an illusion that there is something more.

Tamaki: We think there’s meaning.

Sakai: That’s why we become emotional or cry and scream, but if we are aware of being zero, our lives are simply calm and full of meaning.

Tamaki: But it’s essential to have all emotions like joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness.

— It’s essential, but……

Tamaki: If you get too drawn into them, it’s not good. It’s important to balance all emotions, like joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, and feelings with the five senses. That’s how humans are I think they enrich our lives. If you ask if life with no troubles is rich, I don’t think so.

Sakai: For example, even if a long road looks squiggly and twisty, it’s just one line when you see it in the bird’s eye from far away.

Tamaki: If so, I think it would be all right to have people who explode emotions when they have extreme mood swings. If they hurt people because of it, it wouldn’t be good.

— It must be a viewpoint from God if you could see a human’s state with the bird’s eyes.

Tamaki: I think it’s important to have both viewpoints. I think it would make our lives fun and rich if we had both aspects to go back and forth to have humanity see the world with the bird’ eyes while we have emotions and feelings.

Sakai: As we must live, I would like to live peacefully. I like calmness. However, how much you get emotional, I think it is okay if you could say, “I love you”.

Tamaki: Yeah.

Sakai: How awfully you argue with someone if you could say that as a human, the war wouldn’t occur. Only peace exists from love, not from love and peace.

Tamaki: Why did I ask Mr Shirakawa to summarize ‘Cycle of Life’? I returned to think about how I wanted to live and run the company. Still, the main reason I want to set up the company is that I have had moments in the past when I felt no meaningfulness even though I lived with my will to make the Earth a good place in broad meaning and made activities with much effort, but my boss denied all and discarded.

— That was Ms Tamaki’s experience when she was young, right?

Tamaki: Yeah, well, not to the point of talking about the Earth. There are things in the world that you feel are very important, and you do it, but it is denied, and you can’t do it. They sometimes have restrictions. However, from the point of view of getting the Earth to be a better place, such barriers are very tiny problems. I need to consider how to move on to work on the projects while avoiding conflicts.

— What Ms Tamaki said now is connected with the talk on the first one of the ‘Encyclopedia of niime’.

Tamaki: Is that so?

“We only focus on the concept: Is our creation good for the Earth?“

These are Tamaki’s words in the first ‘Encyclopedia of niime’, the article ‘To the creation of global standards’.

There are problems of mass production and consumption, as well as the influence of Earth’s environment and life forms as they deliver their products worldwide, expanding their business.
Thinking of that, they finally found a new idea and got a new direction, and I asked them to talk about their thoughts to their heart’s content in the article of April 15th 2018.

Not only human beings, but they approach to think of all living forms on the Earth, like animals and plants. They not only worked on manufacturing, but they developed ‘niime village’.

Just like fixing pieces of a puzzle, or grasping unseen objects, it seems not to see the whole picture clearly, and it looks like there’s no content. Still, when you look back at the road that Ms Tamaki and Mr Sakai took, they seem to make a detour repeatedly, but I could really feel their approach is always unshakable.

As Sakai talked about it interestingly, the road of their work has been twisted with trials and errors, but when you see it in the big picture, you will know it is a straight line, which is the same concept Tamaki and Sakai have been taking.

— Because you are supposed to think of it from the view of the Earth.

Tamaki: Did I say it at first?

— Thinking of it in the Earth reference, you wouldn’t make a mistake. Because everything is on the Earth. You wouldn’t make a mistake as long as you choose to do good things for the Earth even though there are restrictions and entanglements, which is probably consistent with what Tamaki said: ‘yourself is the Earth’.

Sakai: Yeah.

Tamaki: But many people can’t express those views. Many people insist on tiny things. I want to move forward freely and quickly without being involved with little troubles.

Sakai: I really understand it.

Tamaki: I think we could have more fun.

Sakai: I want to use more of the five senses fully as we have to live.

Tamaki: I stopped taking many pictures with the phone this year because we tried to keep what we had there, but we wouldn’t be there at that point.

— Exactly. You are losing the experiences at those places.

Tamaki: Right. There’s no need to bother you about what to shoot from an objective perspective and how to convey it for instance, in the case of sending pictures on Instagram while you have experiences on your business trips, it’s good and efficient for the business side, however, if you focus on enjoying yourself at moments, ignore taking pictures, just enjoy at those moments because you lose your antenna of senses.

Sakai: First of all, you don’t have to summarize and organize all the random thoughts in your mind, but you are organizing and sending them, which actually doesn’t matter to you. I don’t think it’s fun if you believe it will make a good business.

Tamaki: …When you feel something, you get it with your senses, which is good for you.

Sakai: That’s right. It is not organized clearly.

Tamaki: It was your input that is a mess, but you will use it anyway. You feel something different even when you hold your smartphone to capture the moment. By not taking pictures, the experience becomes profound. If everyone chooses that way, they can use more of their five senses with experiences.

Sakai: It can improve the quality of your creations.

Tamaki: Surely, it does improve it.

— …Be honest to your five senses. Be doubtful of common sense in the world. I think the history of ‘tamaki niime’ is the story of adventures.

Tamaki: It’s not fun without adventures. I don’t think being at peace is the best. I am completely different from Sakai.

Sakai: So there are many types of calmness and peace.

Tamaki: We haven’t had deep talks recently. When we talk like this, we can organize our thoughts, which is important.

Sakai: We usually don’t take time to have such conversations.

Tamaki: No. We have had ‘Encyclopedia of niime’ more than 100 times because we can organize what we think, right?

Sakai: That probably is.

Tamaki: We could confirm what we think by verbalizing.

Sakai: We don’t have conversations with our staff like this.

Tamaki: No, we don’t. That’s why we started the ‘Encyclopedia of niime’ because we hope our staff read them, which we will keep in the history.

Sakai: Overall, this is our ‘ism’. It’s ‘ism’ and ‘zero’ as well.

Just like both sides of a coin, the thoughts of Tamaki and Sakai are against each other and transcend, and they release energy and head for the next new phase. They draw a large vector while repeatedly interacting, leaving each other, and doing it again. Listening to their lively conversations, I realized their dynamism again.

The next ‘Encyclopedia of niime’ is ‘niime Year In, Year Out 2024-2025’ as a regular event during the New Year holiday season.

Looking back at ‘tamaki niime’ in 2024 and predicting ‘tamaki niime’ in 2025, we will be back to having frank conversations between Ms Tamaki and Mr Sakai. Please look forward to the next ‘Encyclopedia of niime’ for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

Original Japanese text by Seiji Koshikawa.
English translation by Adam & Michiko Whipple.