[The Priest's View] Overcoming the "Disconnection of Responsibility": The Shinto Concept of "Nakaima" as a Design for Forest Circularity
Updated by Kazuhiro Aoki on January 22, 2026, 9:09 PM JST
Kazuhiro AOKI
Representative Director, WSense Corporation / DELTA SENSE Production Committee
Representative Director, WSense Corporation / DELTA SENSE Production Committee Born in Aizuwakamatsu City, Fukushima Prefecture. From a family background of flower arrangement, tea ceremony, and Noh theater, he has been exposed to Japanese culture from an early age. His interest in wood began when he witnessed a shrine carpenter "sharpening a plane" and became aware of the depth of the craft. Currently, based on the knowledge he gained as a Shinto priest, he is promoting initiatives that lead to the public interest. He is a member of the Tokyo Junior Chamber of Commerce, holds a graduate degree and an MBA (Master of Business Administration), and has been a Boy Scout and a soccer player since he was 4 years old.DELTA SENSE Official HP WSense Corporation
Forests produce timber, and the economy revolves around them. However, from a Shinto perspective, the forest is first of all a “place,” a vessel for relationships, and a boundary where the invisible order resides. For example, when you step into the forest of a Shinto shrine, you feel a change in the air. It is not a mere change of mood, but a signal that "human convenience is not everything here.
Forest cycle discussions are often sucked into a dichotomy. To log or to protect? Profit or public good? City or mountain? Binaries are easy to understand. But when we start lumping the inherently complex forest into simple, easy-to-understand terms, we lose the depth of our understanding of the subject.
I thought that the two vocabularies of Shinto might be the “light” that would bring the forest cycle back to “manners” rather than "ideas". That is... Nakaima (god of wealth, music, eloquence, etc.) と As a god (as a goddess) It is.
However, there are some aspects of Shinto that we need to be careful about, and we would like you to understand them first.
First of all, when Shintoism is used as the basis for the forest cycle, it tends to be all about “emotion. Also, beautiful words mask the complexity of the field. Furthermore, Shinto is not a single doctrinal system, but a broad bundle of practices that includes local rituals and historical reorganization. Thus, ”Shinto is this way." and speak of it in monolithic terms, it quickly sounds wildly outlandish.
In other words, what we attempt in this paper is not to use theism as a justification for policies or institutions. It is to clarify how far it can be used as a design concept for decision-making and where it cannot be used.
The "middle now" is not simply the present. It refers to the sense of "now as the middle of time that extends from the past to the future.
There is no concept that fits better than this word for decision making about forests. This is because forests arrive with delayed results. It is also because the person who plants the trees and the person who harvests them are often not the same person, as it is necessary to estimate at least 30 to 50 years before the trees planted become a resource.
Therefore, I thought that the reason why forest cycles are difficult to continue is neither a lack of technology nor a lack of passion. The biggest reason is the problem created by the discrepancy between the time axis (forests take a long time to show results) and the subject axis (the person who plants and the person who logs are often not the same person). In other words, it may be due to the "division of responsibility.
Simply put, it is easy to fall into the trap of being “uninvolved” in the decision-making process in the "now.
Therefore, the current consumer accepts as “natural supply” the fruits of someone else's past care. As a result, the present earnings are not connected to the future care. Thus, the chain of past, present, and future is broken. When time is severed, forest care is seen as a cost, and value is seen only as a price. As a result, neglect is rationalized and overutilization is rationalized.
Also, the characteristic that the revenue from logging and the cost of reforestation (replanting) and care do not fall within the same fiscal year shows that forests have a "payback comes later" structure from the beginning. When this structure clashes with institutional, market, and human resource realities, the cycle is clogged.
Therefore, I dare to say critically that it is almost misguided to moralize in Gaia-theoretic terms that the cause of the forest cycle not turning is "low awareness" or "lack of respect for nature. The problem is not awareness, but a weak mechanism to absorb time differences.
In other words, if we want to establish a forest cycle, we need to stop calculating profit and loss closed only to "now" and move to time-connected decision making. Specifically, future care (reforestation, thinning, bearer training, etc.) should be factored in as a business cost from the beginning, rather than paid from the surplus after profits are generated. This is the practical way to view the situation in the middle and now.
However, there is a pitfall here. If too much emphasis is placed on the "altruistic aspect" of the middle and now, it is easy to lean toward a narrative of self-sacrifice, saying, "Let's be patient now for the sake of the future. The forestry field is already suffering. There is a shortage of forest leaders, the complexity of ownership, maintenance of work roads, animal damage, profitability, and a decline in the local population. To these, adding mentality on top of mentality will not help recovery.
For this reason, we believe that it is better to view the current situation not as a justification for “endurance” but as an incentive to create a mechanism to absorb the time difference (return rule, continuous funding, fostering of leaders, and design of contracts).
In summary, the argument for protecting forests cannot speak to the "cost of care" and the argument for using forests cannot fulfill the "responsibility for regeneration". Therefore, "Nakano" could be a design concept that connects the two on the axis of time. ＝To be continued (Kazuhiro Aoki, President, WSense Corporation / DELTA SENSE Production Committee)
