The photographs above are not decorative. They capture a small bamen I encountered unexpectedly. They are snapshots of sparrows flying overhead—birds I rarely see anymore, most likely because its population is declining. One day I spotted a few sparrows perched on a lamp beside the blue building to the left. As I approached, they fled. But when I stopped and waited, something changed. The sparrows began moving freely between the lamp and the tree directly above me—tracing an aerial corridor I had never seen before.

It was only by looking upward that I found them.

In that moment, an unnoticed bamen came into view. What had seemed like empty space above the street revealed itself as an active corridor of life.

That shift in perspective—from a downward habit to an upward attention—is what shutai feels like in practice. It is not a theory imposed from above. It is a reorientation from within, through which new bamen become visible and the lifeworld reveals dimensions that had always been present but unseen.

A Sociology founded upon Pedagogical Anthropology

Pedagogical Anthropology (教育人間学), a field of educational thought in Japan, was developed by prewar scholars deeply influenced by the Kyoto School of philosophy. Within this tradition, the human being is not understood as a fixed subject but as one who becomes shutai by learning and making the intricate connections, patterns, and networks that shape reality. Pedagogical anthropology therefore treats education not merely as the transmission of knowledge, but as a formative process through which individuals cultivate the capacities required to participate creatively in historical life.

This perspective aligns closely with the framework of metabolic sociology, which understands social-ecological life as a dynamic process of ongoing transformation. As we learn from unexpected situations to enhance our understanding and deepen our engagement with multiple dimensions of reality— (what Roy Bhaskar describes as the MELD system of critical realism)—our perspectives will shift to see openings and paths (like the aerial corridor) where we only saw walls (or an empty sky) previously. In this sense, the development of shutai is synonymous to an ontological deepening of one’s mode of participation in reality.

Overcoming the Polarizing Tendency of Modernity

It is precisely this ontological deepening that proves most generative for confronting what may be modernity’s most enduring pathology: its polarizing tendency. The concept of shutai has been implicated in this confrontation since its formal introduction at the 1942 Kindai no Chōkoku (Overcoming Modernity) symposium, and has since undergone a sustained semantic metamorphosis—through the postwar shutai-sei debates, the student protest movements of the 1960s, and into contemporary education policy. Yet across these varied iterations, a common thread persists: shutai is not a given but an achievement of practice. To become shutai is to inhabit reality in its full dimensionality—not as a totality of oppositions to be resolved, but as a living whole to be engaged—and it is in this sense that shutai overcomes not modernity per se, but modernity’s polarizing tendency.

This argument carries implications well beyond Japan. The world today—fractured by military conflicts, economic warfare, and religious antagonisms—is symptomatic of a deeper failure to inhabit reality in its full complexity. The cultivation of shutai, then, is not a parochial concern but a genuinely global one, and the question of how human beings come to engage reality more fully, rather than retreat into the consolations of opposition and abstraction, is among the most urgent questions of our time.