Back in Japan

I am back in Japan. The clouds look different from those I see from the balcony of my Paris apartment. The sky also, if you notice the black lines in blue background. My frame of mind also changed since I arrived here. The logical thinking or the will to think logically apparently diminished. At least judged from many TV programs, it is rather difficult to see the independence or autonomy of our mind and thinking. Our culture has made us such an existence. It seems to me that our state of mind has not changed a bit for the last 40 or 50 years. As Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) clearly perceived it, our culture or our spiritual life has been gradually degraded after the World War II. Nobody listened to his inner voice and his final outcry. Since then, the situation here is getting worse, and few people realize the lack of our inner life, it seems. People, preoccupied with "here and now", look like floating in an ephemeral world.