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.

Bamen is neither an interpretive frame trapped inside the perceiver's mind nor an empirical event impartial to the observer — it is an interactive achievement. This is not only a phenomenological claim but a biological one. Neuroscientists Demis Hassabis and Eleanor A. Maguire (2007) identify scene construction — a process of memory retrieval and image reconstruction — as the cognitive mechanism through which the brain assembles coherent scenes from fragments of experience. Their findings give a neurological grounding to Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological account of memory as an active, constructive process rather than passive recall. What philosophy and neuroscience converge on, from different directions, is that the scene is made, not simply found.

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.

One of the key concepts coined by the founder of the Kyoto School, Nishida Kitarō, is jikaku — self-consciousness. What makes humans conscious of themselves as humans is a question that still vexes philosophers and scientists alike. Metabolic Sociology does not provide an answer, but instead guides our attention to metabolism, defined as "the sum of the chemical reactions that occur within living organisms" (Hine, R. S. ed., 2008, 402). At least among humans, changes in metabolism and more precisely oxidative stress can lead to, or triggered by, what philosopher Karl Jaspers calls limit situations, or "the moments, usually accompanied by experiences of dread, guilt or acute anxiety, in which the human mind confronts the restrictions and pathological narrowness of its existing forms, and allows itself to abandon the securities of its limitedness, and so to enter new realm of self-consciousness" (Thornhill and Miron, Summer 2024 Edition).

Metabolic Sociology therefore offers bamen as a heuristic to discover not just our own biochemical reactions and the limit situations that accompany changes in self-consciousness, but also their combined effects which render a previously unseen reality visible and legible. Used over time, bamen become pieces of the puzzle that help us form a meaningful image, a coherent narrative, and/or a working model of this emerging reality. By building this capacity, bamen allow us to see openings and paths (like the aerial corridor) that help us deepen our engagement with multiple dimensions of reality — what Roy Bhaskar describes as the MELD system of critical realism — where we previously saw only walls (or an empty sky). This, in turn, helps us become shutai capable of deepening our participation in reality and appreciation of life.

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 polarizing tendency is a transborder phenomenon, not confined to any single country or culture, as we can see from ongoing military conflicts, economic warfare, and diminishing biocultural diversity. Such conflicts are symptomatic of a deeper failure to inhabit reality in its full complexity, the very capacity whose absence forecloses the transmutation of conflicting energies into a self-organizing order. Overcoming, then, is not a one-way achievement: individual practice and macroscopic transformation of the socio-ecological system condition each other, each folding into the other as one continuous process.

Such a system is inherently unstable, constituted by ongoing flows of energy that the physical chemist Ilya Prigogine (1980) termed a "dissipative structure" — a spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos, sustained not by settling into equilibrium but by continuously processing the energy that moves through it. Shutai names the practice of dissipating energies in order to realign the social with the ecological. 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.