“In accordance with precedent”

There are worlds in which the New Year does not begin with champagne or with “resolutions.” In the world of discipline and ritual of the Kamakura-period samurai (13th century), our comfortable private time—where one can “let it go, because I’m having a worse day”—does not exist. There, time is something that must be kept in check, because upon it depends people’s peace, the order of power, and whether the world will not fall apart under the pressure of war, disease, famine, and the whims of politics. And that is precisely why the most arresting images of old Japan are not always to be found in poems—sometimes they sit in dry sentences written in ink by officials who could describe even a festival as a very concrete and detailed procedure.

In these diaries, a human being looks different from us, people of the 21st century. In "Kenji sannen ki" and "Einin sannen ki" there are no confessions and no “holiday atmosphere”—there is a chronological enumeration of actions, rituals, and ceremonies, and “as usual” and “in accordance with precedent” are not boring—they are confirmation. In "Kanchūki," in turn, Kyoto becomes visible: bows, salutations, processions, and alongside that, rare flashes of a court banquet, recorded with the same official sobriety, as if even joy had to have its proper place in the schedule. These notes can astonish precisely by what they omit: there are no emotions, no spontaneity, there is only “what was carried out?” Thanks to this, we suddenly understand the mentality of people who lived in a world where stability was not a natural state, but something one had to work on every day.

Today we will see why the first step of the year could be a visit to Tsurugaoka Hachimangū; what the spectacle of order looked like, in which “fifth and sixth rank” is not a trifle but the language of the world; who the onmyōji were and why a report about auspicious hours could circulate through offices like the most important decision; and why “first archery” could be at once training, divination, and an exorcism. Although we say that the 21st century is dynamic—let us admit it frankly—in our lives there is a great deal of stability: with a high degree of probability we assume that no one will kill us tomorrow; that we will have something to eat, somewhere to sleep; that no one will burn down our estate, our home, our workplace. In the time of the Kamakura shogunate there was far less certainty—so rituals gave people a certain sense that the future could somehow be “tamed.” Let us take a closer look!

Kamakura, Day 1 of Month 1, Kenji 3 (1277)

The shōgun’s (Prince Koreyasu’s) visit to Tsurugaoka Hachimangū

Sleet is falling and mixing with a gloomy wind from the bay, and Kamakura—before it becomes for us a “city of temples” from guidebooks—breathes like a military fortress: wet roofs of residences, dimmed fires, dark silhouettes of guards, and servants who, from dawn, move between the buildings. The “first day” is not a page from the calendar here, but the opening of the annual cycle, which must be performed—just like orders, councils, rituals. And that is exactly why someone sits down to record it: in the bakufu there exists a memory of power, and its language is diaries—brief, matter-of-fact, sometimes merciless in their abbreviations, because everything “obvious” can be closed in a single word: “as usual,” “according to precedent.”

In this record there is no psychology, no holiday mood—yet there is time inscribed like a seal. The day has its name from the cycle of sixty combinations of heaven and earth: the “Metal Rabbit” (辛卯), as if the year began with a password rather than a morning. And the morning—if one can speak here in our terms—also is not counted in minutes, but in the “hours” of animals (hour of the rat, ox, tiger): the shōgun, Prince Koreyasu, sets out for Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in the “hour of the snake,” which in deep winter is roughly between nine and eleven (by European reckoning). That is how time is measured in a world where the clock does not dictate the day; it is dictated by rhythm, names, order, and above all by what should happen at the proper time.

And then we see him not as a hero of legend, but as the point of gravity of the ceremony: he rides despite the “fatal” weather, because the New Year is here a public act of continuity. Mounted men of the “fifth and sixth rank” accompany him—a dry mention in samurai diaries that says more than a description: hierarchy mounts horses and becomes visible. The shrine itself is not a random choice. Tsurugaoka Hachimangū is the most important shrine-temple complex of Kamakura, derived from the mighty Iwashimizu Hachimangū near Kyoto—as if the capital, though distant, left its imprint here. The New Year visit is not a one-time whim; sources suggest it was an annual regularity throughout the centuries of Kamakura, noted especially when it suddenly did not take place because of, for example, war.

And then comes a movement that overturns our image of a “festival”: the return—and a banquet. Not as spontaneous joy, but as an element of order, the closing of the ritual, the confirmation that the cycle has begun. The diary records it with the chill of official obviousness: the feast takes place “as usual,” “according to precedent” (如例). This phrase is not an embellishment but a mechanism: when you repeat it every year, the state learns how to endure. And here lies the key to the samurai relationship with time—the New Year is not the private emotion of an individual, but a moment in which power shows that it knows how to begin again without changing form.

Time in the Kamakura shogunate:

not “mysticism of the East,” but the mechanism of a state of practical “soldiers”

If we truly want to understand the Kamakura samurai through the prism of the New Year, we must throw out two reflexes of the contemporary reader. The first: that “old Japan” is above all poetry, mist, and symbol. The second: that “time” is something neutral, almost biological—it flows, it passes, and we simply feel it.

In the late 13th century, in the very middle of the Kamakura period, time is above all a tool for organizing the world and power: it is planned, negotiated, recorded, “performed” according to an established sequence, and sometimes—equally importantly—suspended and resumed like the work of an office after a holiday break. This is time as the infrastructure of governance.

And that is precisely why our most important protagonists here will be neither great battles nor romantic legends of honor, but… diaries. Kanbun records of officials, written in the dry, dense language of administration, not in order to “express oneself,” but to fix what had to be done, what was done, who was present, what was postponed and why. These diaries are a form of semi-official documentation of officials’ actions from the end of the 13th century: a microscope of everyday life which—paradoxically—gives insight into great politics, because it shows how that politics operated in the rhythm of days, deadlines, precedents, and rituals. And importantly: such sources tell us how it was really done, not how one “should do it” in ideal manuals of ceremonial. We will mainly (though not only) rely on the following extensive diaries of samurai officials from Kamakura:

 - "Kenji sannen ki"（建治三年記, “Record of the Third Year Kenji”) — Ōta Yasuari（太田康有, 1228–1290）; 1277 (Kenji 3); Kamakura (bakufu).

 - "Einin sannen ki"（永仁三年記, “Record of the Third Year Einin”) — Ōta Tokitsura（太田時連, 1269–1345）; 1295 (Einin 3); Kamakura (bakufu).

 - "Kanchūki"（勘仲記; also: 兼仲卿記 “Kanenaka-kyō ki”) — Hirohashi Kanenaka（広橋兼仲）; late 13th century (among others, preserved yearly records 1274, 1284, 1288; in the article we also use entries from 1277); Kyoto (imperial court).

At this point, it is worth imagining the mentality of a person who keeps such a diary. For us, the note “cancelled” means minor chaos; for him it can simply be another form of order. For us, “as usual” is boredom; for him it is an incantation of stability—a signal that the world works as it should work, that tradition has not been broken, that the state breathes with a rhythm it knows. What is more, in these texts one can see a particular optic: the authors as a rule describe events not through the prism of their religious meaning or emotional atmosphere, but through what concerned procedures, documents, responsible persons, sequences of actions. It is precisely this “administrative lens” that makes ritual into a practice of managing time.

And now the key step: the Kamakura period does not have one center. It has two. Kyoto and Kamakura are like two clocks of the same civilization, running according to similar principles but set to different aims. In Kyoto there functions the imperial court, the aristocracy (kuge), centuries of precedent, the “language of time” in which memory of former regents and rituals from centuries earlier can still be alive. In Kamakura a new power operates—the military government, the bakufu—which to a large extent adapts the institutions and practices of the court, but filters them through its own lens: militariness, judicature, administrative effectiveness, the dispersed geography of the provinces. The bakufu grows out of court models, and only later—at a distance from Kyoto—transforms them into its own distinct practices.

This tension between two centers is also important psychologically. Let us imagine the elites of the 13th century as people living in a world of three great political forces: the court in Kyoto, the warriors in Kamakura, and the powerful temples and shrines (jisha), which could influence state decisions and sometimes brutally “break” its rhythm with protest. This arrangement is not abstract: it truly organizes the calendar, because what one sphere does can force postponements and cancellations in the other. In the background there is also the older idea of state and bureaucracy—based on ritsuryō, developed from Nara and Heian, later transformed by private offices and the hegemony of regency lineages—that is why in Kyoto the timing of ceremonies can be almost as important as a political decision.

One sees this most suggestively in the New Year rhythms of the court. In Kanenaka’s diary ("Kanchūki"), the New Year is not one ceremony, but a sequence of “salutations” (hairei 拝礼)—bows and acts of homage paid to successive figures of authority, which confirm relationships of subordination and etiquette. This is not private piety, but a public architecture of hierarchy. What is more, these salutations are planned as a sequence so that high-ranking courtiers can participate in all of them—and thus time is here literally arranged like a ladder of prestige.

And yet even this seemingly “eternal” mechanism has within it a breath of practicality. In the year Kenji 3 (1277), at the court in Kyoto everything is shifted by one day because of heavy, cold rain: in the record we read that “from dawn” it pours with “spring rain,” so there are no salutations to the regent and others—“apparently they will take place tomorrow.” Crucially, the diary does not express indignation, does not treat this as a scandal. This means that a certain margin of variability was permissible, and decisions could be made even on the day of the event. Ritual is important, but more important is that it be possible to perform it—delayed if need be, as long as it remains recognizable as “the same.”

And here we reach a beautiful paradox. In that same year when court salutations were shifted by rain, the New Year banquet on the “first day” took place as planned. And then, after the salutations, there appears still the “kugyōjin” (公卿陣, “a feast in the pavilion of the dignitaries”)—more musical, more drunken celebration, rarely described, but here clearly noted, as if to emphasize: the rhythm was preserved even if its elements were rearranged. In other words: it is not the calendar that is the tyrant here; the tyrant is the need to preserve form.

When we shift our gaze to Kamakura, the tone changes, but the logic remains similar. The bakufu has different priorities, and therefore a different “pulse of time.” From the preserved diaries of bakufu officials (this is in fact the only period from which such records have survived) emerges a world in which rhythm is set not so much by the dense network of court ceremonies as by the work cycle of institutions: council sessions (Hyōjōshū), judicial procedures, administrative decisions. We also see a more “office-like” map of the state: the Samuraidokoro for criminal matters, the Mandokoro and Monchūjo for law and economic interests, the Hikitsuke for land disputes—and above all of this, the rhythm of meetings and approvals that makes time into a tool of effectiveness.

It is precisely in such a world that the New Year gains a double meaning. On the one hand it is a “dense” moment, charged with rituals; on the other, the beginning of an administrative cycle that must be started. The court does it through ceremonies; the bakufu—through a demonstration of the order of power and through the fact that even celebration bears the mark of an institution. And we, looking through the prism of diaries, receive something invaluable: the possibility of seeing old Japan not as a legend, but as a system that experiences time in an almost tangible way—in a shift of one day due to rain, in the sequence of salutations, in the note “as usual,” in the tension between what is sacred and what must be efficiently conducted.

Ganjitsu in Kamakura:

the Hachiman shrine as the first stop of power

In Kamakura, the New Year began not with a private “resolution,” but with the movement of an institution. Most telling is the fact that the first act of the year deemed worth recording at all was the shōgun’s visit to Tsurugaoka Hachimangū—and in conditions that for an ordinary person would be the ideal excuse: sleet, dampness, cold, heavy ground.

In Ōta Yasu’ari’s diary it is recorded without emotion, like a box on a form: “1st Day. Sleet. Visit to the shrine. Hour of the snake. Together with mounted men of ranks 5 and 6. After the return, a banquet, according to procedure.” This very economy is the key: if something can be closed in a few words, it means it is an element known, repeatable, and obvious to the world of that time—something that should happen by definition. Something that for us modern people might therefore have less value. And for those living in 13th-century Kamakura—on the contrary. Repetition and predictability made it an event of greater importance, raised its rank.

What is more, we have here a strong argument that this was not a one-time “pious outing” of a particular ruler, but an annual regularity: a similar New Year visit is already noted by the "Azuma kagami" in 1181, and the shrine’s own records (Tsurugaoka shamu kiroku), which as a rule record primarily disruptions of the regular rhythm, mention the year 1327 precisely because the visit did not take place. In other words: what in the sources resounds as an “exception” paradoxically confirms that for centuries of Kamakura this was expected behavior. This is how institutional memory works: it need not describe the norm, because the norm is the “air” one breathes; it records only the moment when someone suddenly stops breathing.

Why Hachiman specifically? Because in Kamakura politics is not separated from the sacred—it is the sacred organized by power. Tsurugaoka Hachimangū was not an arbitrary shrine in the landscape; it grew out of the prestige of Iwashimizu Hachimangū near Kyoto and became the most important shrine-temple complex in the very center of Kamakura. This genealogy is meaningful: on the one hand it roots Kamakura in the tradition flowing from the “old” world of the capital; on the other it gives the warriors their own local heart of ritual. Hachiman is a deity that long fused religious authority with the language of military protection; in a city that was at once the seat of a military government and a dense network of religious centers, such an anchor of legitimization was priceless.

One must also remember who the shōgun is in the second half of the 13th century. This is no longer the same type of ruler as Minamoto no Yoritomo. In the era of the “shōguns who were imperial princes” (in English-language scholarship: “Imperial Prince shoguns”), the role of the shōgun becomes largely symbolic, and real agency is held by the Hōjō clan through the office of regent (shikken) and the position of tokusō. All the more, the importance of rituals grows—rituals that remind the world, and the bakufu elites themselves, that the shōgun still stands “on stage” as a figure of order. The core of annual observances shaped still by the Minamoto over time “detaches” from family ties and begins to be attributed to the institution of the shōgun itself as a symbolic center. The New Year is therefore the perfect moment to activate this symbol and publicly show that the cycle begins in the proper place.

And now let us look at this “through the eyes of the court”—that is, through the prism of form, hierarchy, and stagecraft. In the note from 1277 we have a detail that is, in fact, a great piece of information: the shōgun is accompanied by mounted men of the “fifth and sixth rank.” For the contemporary reader this may sound like arbitrary numbering, but in that world rank is the language of visible order. It determines who stands closer, who rides in what sequence, who may “accompany” the body of power. And precisely such arranging of people in space is typical of court ceremonies: groups line up by status, and the most important person often appears at the end, when the whole scene is already ready—because their entrance is to mean “now the time of the ceremony begins.” The arrival of authority “opens” the event and grants it a particular power over time.

In this sense, Tsurugaoka Hachimangū is the “first stop” not because it happened to lie along the shōgun’s route, but because the New Year had to be begun from a place capable of binding into one three orders: the cosmic (time and its auspiciousness), the social (hierarchy), and the political (the legitimization of those who rule). And when the shōgun returns and a banquet takes place “as usual,” the words “as usual” close the whole like a seal: the world has been set in motion again, the year has received its first public rhythm, and Kamakura—this peculiar organism of city-army-ritual—can begin to function in a new cycle without loss of form.

Specialists in time:

Onmyōdō and the “office” of auspiciousness

In that Japan, time was not something that “simply arrives.” Time was like an official decision: it had to be checked, approved, and announced—and for this there served an entire practice of onmyōdō, dense with ritual and procedure, and people whom today it is easiest to call “specialists in the cosmic schedule.” They were not fairground fortune-tellers, but experts plugged into the administration, consulted on matters of real weight: from the dates of visits to shrines and the beginning of preparations of offerings, to personal disputes where a decision was taken only after divination performed by an onmyōji (more about them here: The Sorcerer at the Heian Emperor's Court: Abe no Seimei, Master of Onmyōdō).

Most interesting, however, is the very mechanics of this “office of auspiciousness,” because it shows how deeply power could turn metaphysics into procedure. In Hirohashi Kanenaka’s "Kanchūki" we watch a scene almost like from a nō theater, except its subject is not a spirit, but a document. Kanenaka goes to the office (the secretariat), where the onmyōji—named and of lineage: Kamo Arikane and Abe Arihiro—have already “taken their places,” as if a council session were beginning with the arranging of bodies in space. After their assessment, they hand him two scrolls of reports (kanmon) in a box, wrapped and sealed with a strip of paper; and he, before he goes further, puts away his shaku (a courtly, scepter-like symbol used for ceremonial), because from this moment begins the pure logic of transferring authority: the document must go to the regent.

And now the most interesting detail: Kanenaka places the box on a fuzue (文杖)—a wooden rod roughly a meter and a half long, with a notch at the end into which documents were inserted so that they could be handed to a dignitary without violating distance. This is not an ornament of etiquette, but the architecture of the world: hierarchy has distance, and distance has a tool.

Kanenaka approaches the central gallery, seeks his lord’s gaze through double doors, and then… goes on his knees up to the lintel beam, extends the rod with the box, and only then does the regent (Kanehira) take it from the tip, set it before himself, open it, and read. Kanenaka takes back the empty rod and withdraws backwards onto the veranda. Here the logic of power is visible: the document has its own path, the body has its own path, and “time”—approved by experts—passes into the hands of the one who decides.

What was actually in these reports? Not a “prophecy” in our naive sense, but concrete time windows, expressed doubly: both as a date in the lunisolar calendar and—as is interesting—as designated animal hours. An example from the same portion of "Kanchūki": for a visit to a shrine, two possible times during the day were indicated (the hour of the tiger and of the dragon), which shows that experts allowed variants; whereas the beginning of preparations of offerings (gold and silver) was assigned to the hour of the boar, that is, late evening (21:00–23:00). This is not “superstition”—it is a coordination system: the state receives a frame within which it can move, and at the same time does not lose face, because every decision fits into what is “auspicious.”

In this same world a document’s life does not end at the moment of “taking notice.” It circulates like blood through the political body: after the regent examines the decision and the attached report “on auspicious dates,” the packet passes in turn through the hands of successive dignitaries—a senior counselor, a middle counselor, a junior counselor—and when each has finished reading, everything returns to the regent, and only then, on a tray, does it again reach the official, who withdraws backwards. This is a circulation that both distributes responsibility and confirms hierarchy: each sees the same thing, but no one sees it “first.”

So if the New Year in Kamakura and Kyoto is the moment of “starting up” the annual cycle, then onmyōdō works like an invisible regulation of the clock: it sets when one may begin, when it is appropriate to postpone, and when—even despite a plan—it is better to desist, because “the day is inauspicious.” From our perspective this may sound a bit curious. But we live in a world where the most important things in our lives are predictable (with a high degree of probability we assume that no one will kill us tomorrow; that we will have something to eat, somewhere to sleep; that no one will burn down our estate, our home, our workplace). In the times of constant samurai wars there was far less certainty—so rituals gave people a certain sense that the future could somehow be “tamed.”

Omato-hajime:

archery as divination and exorcism

The New Year in Kamakura had in it something that for us sounds at once like sport, prayer, and politics—and all of it at once. It was called omato-hajime: literally “the beginning (hajime) of the great target (ō-mato).” The name itself is meaningful, because in the world of the samurai a “target” is not an abstraction. And in this case it is even literally material: a board, straw, a circle, a trace of paint—something that receives an arrow and immediately, without discussion, shows the truth about hand, breath, and concentration.

And if so, it is easy to understand why, in the first month of the year, the bakufu elite shot not only in order to “practice,” but to perform a ritual of purification and at the same time test the omen at the start of the whole cycle. In this gesture there is the logic of old Japan: evil is not only a “moral problem,” but something that can enter the year like a cold wind into bones—so it must be driven away by an act that is public, shared, visible, preferably one that joins military skill with sacred meaning.

Most striking is how large an undertaking it was. We are talking about “fifteen series” of shooting—and that is not a single symbolic release of an arrow. It is a repeated rhythm, requiring organization of people, place, order, supervision. When you imagine that each series is another approach, another drawing of the bow, another check whether the arrow “entered” as it should—you see not a small intimate rite, but an event in which body and time are set like elements of ceremony. In such a world the result is not merely a result. It is a sign: whether the year will be “clean,” or something hangs in the air; whether the hand is sure, or the spirit wavers; whether the community of warriors enters the new cycle with the right tension.

It is also worth noting something that breaks our image of an “iron” ceremonial: dates could be flexible. Even if a code or custom suggested a specific day, practice could shift it—and that shift did not destroy the meaning of the ritual, so long as it could be defended as “proper” under the circumstances. This flexibility is not evidence of chaos; on the contrary, it is evidence of a mature system. Kamakura was not a museum of rituals, but an organism: it had to take into account the weather, the health of the most important people, political tensions, and also that which in that world was as real as rain—the auspiciousness of the day and hour. The ritual was to be performed not “whenever we manage,” but in a way that would not violate the cosmic-social order. Sometimes, therefore, postponement was precisely a way of saving order rather than breaking it.

The New Year as a long run-up

It is easiest to make a mistake by thinking of the New Year in terms of our “three days off.” In Kamakura the “beginning” was stretched out, as if the year did not begin with a single click, but with a long, controlled start-up. The first days had their density—visits, banquets, rituals confirming hierarchy—but then this New Year tone did not vanish. It dispersed across the whole first month, sometimes reaching into the second. And this makes sense if we remember what the state of the samurai was: a network of obligations, dependencies, and decisions in which a “good beginning” is not a matter of mood, but of security. One had to secure the basic auspiciousness of the year in layers: by prayer, ritual, a gesture of power, and in parallel—by the work of the office.

At this point it is worth seeing how tightly two seemingly contradictory worlds were joined. For us, prayer and bureaucracy stand on opposite sides—one is intimate, the other cold. For them, prayer had the form of bureaucracy, and bureaucracy carried within it the logic of prayer. Decisions about dates passed through the hands of experts on the calendar and auspiciousness. Reports circulated among dignitaries. Performers were appointed, order established, precedent invoked. Even “purification” had its people, its schedule, its responsibility. Ritual was therefore something the state did—exactly as it did councils, judgments, and audiences.

And that is precisely why omato-hajime fits perfectly: it is sacred, because it is to drive away evil and open the year; it is military, because the bow and the target are the core of samurai skill (yes—the bow is the main attribute of the samurai, contrary to what pop culture sometimes tells); and it is official, because it must be organized, approved, and performed in the proper sequence. In the New Year light of Kamakura one can clearly see that “time” was something to be managed—and managing time did not consist in counting minutes, but in making sure everything began properly, in the proper form, under the proper seal. Then the year could set off—not as a private hope, but as a public order that no one should disturb.

Traces of Ritual Today

When we assemble these scenes into a whole, the image of the Kamakura samurai becomes surprisingly sober. There is no romantic fatalism here that “submits to fate” in the name of a beautiful defeat. There is something entirely different: the practice of keeping the world in check through harsh discipline and ritual. The calendar is not decoration, but a tool; ritual is not an addition, but the way to make that tool work; precedent is not a museum, but an operating manual for order. A visit to the shrine, a banquet, reports on auspicious days, first archery—all of it forms one logic: “the beginning” must be public, correctly performed, and recognizable to all, because only then can the year start like a mechanism in which every cog knows its place.

If one looks for psychology here, it is the psychology of people living in a world of uncertainty, but not fleeing into abstraction. They tame the future with form. Instead of telling themselves, “it will be fine,” they prefer to carry out a sequence of actions that makes “fine” into a social fact: someone chooses the proper hour, someone prepares offerings, someone rides in procession, someone presents a document on a “rod,” someone shoots series after series at a target. Celebration is shared, but it has boundaries; it is joyful, but controlled; it is human, but inscribed in hierarchy. And that is why the phrase “as usual” returns so often in these bureaucratic diaries: not as boredom, but as an incantation of continuity. In a world where a single political decision can change the fate of entire families and communities, “as usual” can be the safest answer to fear.

Let us also look at today’s Japan, where time is already measured by an atomic watch—yet many gestures still sound familiar. The New Year there is still the “performance of a beginning”: visits to shrines, the order of the first days, polite formulas, carefully planned meetings, sending New Year greetings, attentiveness to the “proper order” of things. At work there still exists a deep sensitivity to the rhythm of procedures and to the fact that form is a way of maintaining calm within the collective—even if no one calls it cosmology anymore. From Kamakura, then, there remains a certain reflex: time is not only what happens, but something that is organized. And perhaps that is why, in a country so modern, so many “beginnings” still have a public, repeatable, ceremonial character—as if, in the background, a simple, hard sentence from centuries ago were whispering: begin correctly, and the rest of the year will unfold the way you want.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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