Let me begin by reflecting on the notion of "distance" within myself.
People's values are generally shaped by what they are familiar with and what they fear, in other words, by the interplay between certain aspects of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
I may have grown up in a rather unusual environment. While I became familiar with the Kurobe headwaters, where Kumonodaira is located, from a young age, my main living environment was in the bustling streets of Shinjuku, Tokyo. For me, both the wilderness and the city were forms of everyday life, yet at the same time, they each felt like different worlds.
My father, originally from Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, opened a mountain hut in the chaotic period following the end of World War II, largely due to his local connections. However, for him, who had aspired to study physics during the war, the closed-off rural society could never become a place of refuge. His curiosity about the possibilities of human society led him to look toward the cities and Europe, while his yearning for unknown adventures and beauty took him further into the deep mountains and remote valleys.
Thus, from the very beginning, my life has been shaped by the structure of moving between the mountains and the city. There is no doubt that this framework has greatly influenced my perspective. In other words, both the city and the mountains have become part of my everyday life. Neither are objects of admiration nor things to fear. They are both nostalgic places, yet also the unremarkable settings of my daily existence.
The environment I grew up in ultimately brought about a certain sense of alienation within me. What I felt as a child was that life in Tokyo made it difficult to feel grounded. Whether I wanted to or not, I could not conform to group behavior. On the other hand, the mountains were a world of travelers, a place where few stayed for long. And perhaps this was partly because I inherited my father's unconventional nature.
In both places, people came and went, and I did the same. In places of a different nature, among people of a different feature, there existed a different solitude and everyday life.
It is clear that organisms—whether innately or through experience—establish their sense of the world and behavioral traits as they adapt to their environment. No ecological research is required to know this. This is to say, humans are organisms who, in a certain sense, actively construct their living environment through the formation of communities. By sharing experiences within a specific environment as a collective, they cultivate common ways of feeling, patterns of behavior, social roles, language, and even the spatial arrangements in which they live. From this process emerge the styles we come to call values, culture, and religion. And through these, individuals with similar traits begin to recognize one another as belonging to the same kind.
Adaptation, then, is not merely a matter of fitting in—it is the forging of a mutual relationship. One cannot adapt simply because one decides to.
So then—I find myself wondering what living like I did in childhood really does to you, constantly shifting between environments. Moving back and forth between the city and the mountains—two worlds as different as desert and rainforest. I never fully adapted to either, nor did I ever fully belong to either community. What emerged was a perspective shaped by wavering.
The roles of subject and object, the ground and the figure, are in a constant state of change, continually changing places. It is precisely in this act of changing that adaptation takes place. What arises from this is a kind of "reflection" born from a certain distance. This "reflection" gives rise to a certain objectivity, and its structure sparks self-awareness. From there, the dialogue with the world begins. Of course, the child I once was did not look at the world with such a dry gaze, but at some point, I became unable to escape this state of reflection.
By the time I was in my mid-teens, the discomfort had built up so much that I abandoned all connections to any group and began wandering the streets. It was, in a way, an act of thinking about belonging, despite not having a place to belong. I will not write about everything that happened during that journey, but what I felt through it was that a sense of belonging is something you have to create for yourself. There is no objectively “ideal” place, environment, or culture, nor are there a fully realized humans; only occasionally, people, places, and moments appear at random, offering a brief sense of comfort.
Looking back now, I feel that this perspective somehow resonates with the state of our present era.
Right now, what lies before us is a world where our living environment is rapidly transforming due to systemization and information technology. At the same time, human activity is driving climate change and the depletion of natural resources, which is leading to growing conflict. Humanity, as a member of the ecosystem, is beginning to drift—aimlessly, unraveling. The constantly shifting landscape—where cause and effect, prosperity and self-destruction flip back and forth—feels like an extension of the scenes I once witnessed on the streets in my youth.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger uses the word "Entfernung" (distance) as the first step for his ontological inquiry in Being and Time. This word carries a symbolic significance that seems to encompass Heidegger’s complex thought. While there are several German terms for "distance," what makes "Entfernung" particularly distinctive is that it inherently includes the meaning of "removing distance" from the outset.
Heidegger points out that human recognition of things is never isolated but always part of a complex web of relationships, which he calls “the equipment contexture." To clarify, consider the example of a "pencil." A pencil is not just a tool for writing or drawing; it also involves who it is used to communicate with, what is being accomplished, and what skills or memories are required in the process. It also reminds us of the pencil's material, durability, maintenance, the paper it writes on, and even language itself. In other words, a pencil cannot be understood alone; it is always connected to a broader network. Simply thinking about a pencil connects us to the complexities of the world, and in turn, we are already historical beings within it.
Certainly, the word 'distance' cannot exist in isolation. In order to be aware of distance, we are always moving toward some kind of 'intention.' This intention might be the distance to travel on a map, the size of land needed to build a house, or the sense of distance toward accomplishing a task or project. In most cases, when we become aware of 'distance,' we are reflecting on something that is still on the way to being realized. To achieve the intention, we consider what is currently lacking, what means and challenges we face. We call upon all kinds of relationships to either 'bring closer' or 'remove' the possibilities and impossibilities.
In other words, the relationships of the world, including oneself, emerge through the concept of ‘distance.’ In that setting, the act of understanding one's current state and future potential works as a single, unified activity. Thus, what Heidegger refers to as 'the equipment contexture' is this infinite web of interdependent relations—where entities exist both 'for' and 'by means of' one another.
The interaction inherent in the concept of 'distance' can be found in many words, including 'nature.' Terms like 'peace,' 'rights,' 'freedom,' 'history,' 'diversity,' and 'nature' often lack concrete substance on their own, and, much like 'distance,' are merely reflections of our consciousness attempting to measure something—mere shadows of representation. The emergence of the concept of 'nature' in Europe, where environmental degradation and resource depletion were more prevalent, may also reflect a similar underlying structure.
A clue to this is provided by the research of Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary anthropologist and psychologist, on the relationship between community and language.
What he mentions there is that the real reason for the development of language was the increasing distance between people and between humans and their environment during the process of forming human communities. He also points out that language developed as a way to 'bring closer' relationships with others we can't physically touch.
Language exists to communicate events or information to others. As the relationship with others becomes more distant, it becomes increasingly difficult to 'explain' or 'bring closer,' and the more difficult it becomes, the more words are generated.
Let me explain what this means. Humans (and other primates) have improved their ability to defend against external threats and gained advantages in survival through social living. The first practice that became established to maintain these groups was grooming, or physical contact. By touching one another, trust is built. However, as time passes, conflicts arise between different groups, and in order to compete, the group size must increase. As the group grows larger, however, stress on its members also increases, and maintaining cohesion through grooming alone becomes more difficult. This creates the need for the evolution of new means to maintain group unity.
Primates can maintain cohesion through grooming only in groups of about fifty individuals. Beyond that, cultural activities like music, dancing, feasts, stories, and rituals emerge. These cultural practices serve as ways to promote group cohesion by engaging multiple individuals simultaneously.
When humans engage in physical touch, endorphins are released, generating feelings of happiness and connection. Similarly, sharing music, dance, and stories also triggers endorphin release. In other words, culture and language serve as ways to strengthen bonds with those we cannot physically touch. However, the development of language leads to humanity’s greatest dilemma.
While increasing group size helps to gain advantages in survival, the larger the group, the greater the stress, and language becomes necessary to maintain cohesion. But as language strengthens, it sparks competition between even larger groups, causing the group size to expand further. This cycle continues, and eventually, negotiations alone can no longer sustain cohesion. As a result, the concept of an absolute ruler or a normative religious figure, like a 'god,' emerges. Dunbar argues that because the boundaries of one's group are unclear, a common god becomes necessary. This god, draped in grand narratives and cultural forms, ensures the solidarity of the community. In other words, god ≒ language descends as a reflection of ‘distance.'
As time progresses, with technology exerting a greater influence on people's lives than religion (driven by technological innovations and rapid population growth), groups can no longer remain within the scale that stories alone can govern.
The source of norms shifts from gods to technical languages—such as laws, science, technology, information spaces, and economic systems—that are universally applicable. This shift gives rise to new dimensions of anxiety and risk, leading to a spiral of ‘solutions.’
As the scale and abstraction of group units expand—from nations to global economies, to cyberspace—physical connections to places and bodies, as well as a sense of personal involvement, are lost. As a result, people are no longer able to share cultures that are grounded in common experiences.
The scene at Starbucks vividly illustrates how our society functions today: people gather in the same space but exchange no words, instead gazing into their smartphone screens. Each person, using devices and cloud services provided by Big Tech, engages in work, chatting, or shopping with others who are not physically present.
As people rely more on large-scale, abstract systems, physical connections to places and personal experiences fade—along with the conversations once had on street corners, the local shops, and the memories they used to hold. To alleviate this anxiety, new forms of justice, authority, rationality, hope, and entertainment are continually introduced in an endless cycle of updates and replacements.
Robin Dunbar’s theory of community sheds light on a fundamental paradox in today’s society: the very forces driving social progress also contribute to its disintegration.
Though it may seem unrelated, the environmental crisis is an inevitable outcome of this escalation.
Somehow, humanity has strayed from the state of living in harmony with the environment. The endless cycle of competition leads to ever-expanding scales, sustained by resources, manpower, technological innovations, efficiency, and a constant back-and-forth between anxiety and solutions. The ideal of 'knowing enough' is no longer valid. The environment worsens, yet humanity cannot step down from the competition. Overconsumption devastates the land, and by invading other territories, conflicts arise anew. Even if society were temporarily stable, the process of people helping each other and enriching their lives would still require an ever-increasing amount of resources. Once words like 'environment' and 'embodiment' start to surface more frequently, it’s already a sign that the distance between us and the environment, or between us and our own bodies, has become a glaring, almost inescapable discomfort.
Since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, the global population has increased by a factor of ten. This is a phenomenon that goes beyond right and wrong, and humanity has proven unable to control this overwhelming prosperity. Even if we long for a simpler world today, would we really want to go back to the 18th century, when the average life expectancy was only in the 30s? Probably not.
The industrial and economic systems have grown far beyond the capacity of our human understanding. There is no language system that can control them.
As AI attempts to take the reins of society on behalf of people, what kind of beings will we become as we move forward?
Right now, 'nature' is descending upon us like a grand narrative.
As anxiety in human society grows, 'nature' begins to emerge as a symbol of possibilities beyond our current reality. The sense of distance from our own bodies, the closeness of others, and the excitement of the unknown—all of these have slowly faded. The feeling of a loss of “distance' is deeply embedded in the word 'nature.'"
We cannot control the world—not through AI, not through nations, not even through the primeval forest. And yet, with nothing but our own bodies, we have always stepped into the unknown, forming bonds along the way. All we can do is cherish every moment and everything we encounter in each passing era.
The Kumonodaira Mountain Hut AIR is a project for us to reconnect with the world through our bodies. It aims to continuously question what it means to live alongside our surrounding environment and people. These questions are shared through diverse art forms and experiential language. At the same time, because the "distance" between us and the world can never truly disappear, it allows us to reaffirm the meaning of travel. This nomadic experience might be one of the most appealing aspects of the project.
Jiro Ito, Kumonodaira Mountain Hut
