The Equation for Creating a New Culture

By deciding things with fixed notions—this should be done this way, this should be used like that—the range of imagination narrows, and from ideas that have merely mastered the established path, new culture is hard to come by.

Of course there are many precious cultures in this world that must be protected and passed on, but I love giving birth to new ideas that breathe in a way of life not seen before.

For that, imagining a story is indispensable.

For instance, when on a whim I arranged flowers in a pair of worn-out, tattered shoes and displayed them in the entryway, a friend who visited gave his opinion: “What is this? Flowers are meant to be arranged in a vase or a water basin.” That means, to him, it is a heretical, off-the-path idea, a work hard to accept. Here lies a great opportunity.

Now, here the story becomes the magic by which an off-the-path, sudden idea is reborn as a work bearing a sense of necessity. I tell him: “Once a flower takes root and blooms in a place, it must live out its whole life there. But maybe, like us humans, it wishes it could travel freely—to Hakata, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, Sapporo. So, as a fellow living thing, I tried putting shoes on the flower.”

“I see—I’d never even thought of that. But hearing you talk, somehow it puts me in a gentle mood. Maybe I’ll try it too”—and in this way it leaps like a spark from person to person, and five years on, entryways might be overflowing with flowers arranged in shoes.

My challenge begins from a story like “it would’ve been nice to have this kind of idea, this kind of living”—it is the sending-forth of a culture not yet seen.