the qualia journal

Right now I am in Hakodate. I gave a lecture at the Future University Hakodate. The night fell. I was at a Sushi restaurant with my friends....

As a kid I used to collect and study butterflies quite seriously. My butterfly mania was quite famous in the neighborhood and school. One da...

When I strolled in Cambridge U.K. for the first time back in 1993, I was fascinated by the ancient ambience of the academic city. As I appro...

My mother originated from the southern island of Kyushu. I was about five when my parents took me to the hot spring city of Beppu , a few ...

I don't know how it is, but I can breathe easily when there are rooms for extreme people. Extremity is an art, and requires a certain le...

Now I have kept this journal for one month in a row, starting from the 6th of June entry "A double sin" . There were two entries ...

The paintings by El Greco (1541-1614) always struck me as very original, ever since I glanced upon one in an art museum. Giorgio Giulio Clov...

I was talking with my best chum Yoshi Tamori. Yoshi is a mathematical genius. He likes to talk about iterations and infinities. One of Yos...

I did not understand the philosophy of the hibutsu (secret Buddha) until I chanced upon one a few years ago. To treat a Buddha statue as a h...

When I was 15, I learned about the Game of Life invented by John Horton Conway. The idea immediately fascinated me. I used to calculate g...

Albert Einstein famously said that "imagination is more important than knowledge". If I may add a humble something to the words of...

I travel quite often on the Shinkansen . It is quite efficient, and is an indispensable infrastructure for the contemporary life of Japan. T...

Soseki Natsume , in his beautiful collection of essays "Inside My Glass Doors", recalls a woman who visited him at his domicile to...

Everybody has a right to live, pursue happiness, and enjoy the small things in life. Of course, when the chips are down, and we are at the m...

There was a poignant obstinacy in Albert Einstein's effort to come up with an unified field theory in his later years. Einstein's re...

So I have been reading "Anne of Windy Willows" in the toilet. Classics have many hidden truths that you discover when you re-read...

Many interesting problems can be stated in 10 seconds, like "what's the relationship between the brain and mind?" or "do ...

When I was seven, I thought I discovered how to create a stone. It was during the summer holidays. I was playing with mud near house, mixing...

In the favorite novel of my youth "Anne of Windy Willows" (aka "Anne of Windy Poplars", but I somehow prefer the Willow...

Whenever I encounter an interesting person I try to strike up a conversation. The other day I was running in the park forest. I chanced upon...