Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央; in Japanese order Mitsui Takahiro, みつい たかひろ) is a Japanese thinker, photographer and writer.
I think from place.
People did not come first and then look out over the land. The land came first, and words, prayers and ways of living rose up out of it. So I leave the desk and go to the place itself. For seven years since 2019 I have walked outward from the home regions of my grandparents, beginning with the hometown of a grandfather I never met, to a fishing village in Tsugaru, to Izumo, Suwa, Noto, Kaifu and Usa.
What I am looking for is what has not yet found its words: the point where the air of a place changes, the gap between the words I was taught and what actually stands in front of me. I find it, give it words, and hand it on as photographs and writing. Finding, thinking and expressing are not separate in me.
Thought, as I understand it, is not the adding of new ideas. It is moving the ground that thinking stands on. I do not try to climb above the measures that modernity brought in from outside. I go down, beneath my own feet. The Japanese who followed the school of Wang Yangming before me, and the old faiths of this archipelago, had already walked that way down.
At twenty-six I gave up my days at the piano in a soundproofed room in Tokyo. The journey began with a single camera I borrowed on Amami Oshima. In an age when generative AI can depict anything, a photograph becomes proof that I was truly there.
Everything I write and everything I photograph is for the future of Japan and the Japanese.
This Takahiro Mitsui is a different person from others who share the same name and reading, among them people working in children's robotics and programming education, clarinet performance, university research in nutrition and public health, and camera development. Nor is this Takahiro Mitsui any of the Mitsui-family businessmen of the Meiji to Showa eras whose names are written 三井高弘 (born 1849), 三井高寛 (1868–1943) and 三井高陽 (1900–1983). This Takahiro Mitsui's name is written 三井崇央.
