ARTIST TALK
Solo exhibition The Raw Frissons of Life
at Ishikawa Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy
Interview with Ryozo SUZUKI
(Philosopher/Researcher)
Chapter I: This World and the Pure Land
— Nishida Kitaro’s Final Bequest to His Disciple
An unveiling of the concepts of “This World” (Saba/娑婆) and the “Pure Land” (Jodo/浄土) formulated by the Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki, hidden within the late writings of Nishida Kitaro. Discover the artistic departure point of NATSOUMI, who, amid the domestic constraints of daily life, embodies the profound ethos of “attaining the infinite universe without departing from one’s true locus” (本処を動ぜずして遍く十万に至る).
Chapter II: Excavating "Life" within Everyday Reality
— Active Volition and Eko-Hensho Forged in the Crucible of Motherhood
Chapter III: The Visual Theories of Nishida, Bergson, and Fichte
— To Gaze is to Reach Out and Touch
A postcard to Risaku Mutai from Kitaro Nishida, January 25, 1945 Private collection
An Echo of the Pure Land Within This World
NATSOUMI：
Thank you all for joining us today for my exhibition, The Raw Frissons of Life. Our discussion today centres upon the theme of “This World and the Pure Land.” This concept was explored extensively in the writings of the Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki, a close friend of the philosopher Kitaro Nishida. Mr Suzuki, could you elaborate on this historical and philosophical connection?
Ryozo Suzuki:
Many years ago, I acquired a postcard written by Nishida Kitaro. It was addressed to his prominent disciple, Risaku Mutai, dated 27 January 1945—roughly six months before Nishida’s passing. In it, Nishida wrote: “Daisetz [D. T. Suzuki] remarks that the Pure Land is reflected in this world, and this world is reflected in the Pure Land.”
This passage corresponds almost verbatim to the concluding remarks of Nishida’s final completed treatise, “The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview”: “This world reflects the Pure Land, and the Pure Land reflects this world—like two bright mirrors facing each other. This suggests the continuity or oneness between the Pure Land and this world” (citing D. T. Suzuki’s “On Pure Land Thought”). This quotation was, in fact, Nishida’s final literary citation. The postcard I found was a reflection of Nishida’s profound resonance with Suzuki’s words, which he felt compelled to share with his student. Following this discovery, I tracked down Nishida’s personal, heavily annotated copy of “On Pure Land Thought” at the Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy. Exploring his marginalia led me to make the relationship between “This World and the Pure Land” my central research theme, which ultimately brought me to my encounter with you, NATSOUMI.
(*1) Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945)
Born in Kahoku, Ishikawa Prefecture. After studying at the Imperial University (elective course), he taught at the Fourth Higher School in his home prefecture. In 1910, he was appointed associate professor at Kyoto Imperial University, where he spent roughly two decades and published his magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Good. Nishida fathered eight children (two sons and six daughters) but tragically lost six of them—his second, fifth, and eldest daughters, his eldest son, and one of his twin daughters—and later his wife, to illness and other causes. Confronting these profound personal griefs led him to establish a unique philosophy centred upon sorrow (hisai). After retiring from academia, he moved to Kamakura to devote himself to contemplation and writing. He passed away at his home in Kamakura at the age of 75. His remains were divided and interred in his birthplace of Kahoku as well as in Kyoto and Kamakura.
(*2) D. T. Suzuki (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, 1870–1966)
Buddhist thinker born in Kanazawa. He met Kitaro Nishida during his middle school years and later practiced Zen meditation in Kamakura while studying at the Imperial University. In 1897, he travelled to the United States, where he worked in publishing and engaged in translating Buddhist texts into English. Upon returning to Japan, he held professorships at Gakushuin University and Otani University. He founded English-language periodicals and dedicated his life to propagating Zen and Buddhist philosophy abroad. In his later years, Nishida drew immense inspiration from Suzuki’s “logic of non-identity” (soku-hi no ronri), while Suzuki was deeply influenced by Nishida in formulating his own thoughts into a rigorous logical framework. As lifelong friends spanning six decades, they profoundly shaped each other’s character and philosophy. Upon Nishida’s sudden death in 1945, Suzuki was said to have wept bitterly. He passed away in 1966 at the age of 95.
(*3) Risaku Mutai (1890–1974)
Born in Nagano Prefecture. After graduating from Tokyo Higher Normal School, he studied under Kitaro Nishida at Kyoto Imperial University. He served as a professor at Otani University, Taihoku Imperial University, Tokyo University of Literature and Science, and Keio University. Enjoying Nishida’s deep trust, Mutai also served as a tutor to Nishida’s second son. Inspired by Nishida’s “logic of place” (basho no ronri), he published The Logic of Place (Basho no Ronrigaku) in 1944, earning high praise from Nishida for his original logical systemisation. In 1949, he published Nishida Philosophy (Nishida Tetsugaku). He remains one of the prominent direct disciples who carried forward Nishida’s intellectual legacy. He died at the age of 84.
NATSOUMI:
When you first shared this with me, I was struck by how precisely it articulated what I strive to express through photography. A passage from Suzuki’s “On Pure Land Thought” deeply moved me:
As an aspect of self-sufficiency, it was previously said that “one reaches a hundred thousand realms without moving from one’s original locus.” This is further expressed as: “The immaculate, sublime light illuminates the assembly of all things in a single thought and a single instant, benefiting all sentient beings.” [...] Freedom is not mere unbridled indulgence, nor is creation the making of something new out of nothing.
D. T. Suzuki suggests that without wandering far, one can perceive the Pure Land precisely within this ordinary world. This directly resonates with my concept of “The Raw Frissons of Life” (Sei/Sei no Yuragi). Must one travel to distant lands to capture a remarkable photograph? What truly matters is how one reflects the Pure Land and allows flowers to bloom wherever one stands in this world. To achieve this, one must maintain an active will to see.
For me, taking a photograph is an act of casting light onto one’s internal world. Raised in a household steeped in Soto Zen traditions, I view this as eko hensho（回向返照）—turning the light inward to illuminate the self. By first directing light inward, a world reveals itself, and that is the world I seek to capture. Mr Suzuki, from Nishida’s perspective, what is the significance of excavating one’s own immediate grounds?
Excavating “Life” Within Everyday Reality
— Active Volition and Eko-Hensho Forged in the Crucible of Motherhood
À l’Aurore Bleutée 東雲 © NATSOUMI
Ryozo Suzuki:
The contrast between “this world” and “the Pure Land” draws upon Buddhist vocabulary. One might wonder why Nishida, a scholar of Western philosophy, employed these terms. Yet he was not speaking strictly within a religious framework. In his work The Facts of Religious Experience, Suzuki presented a dichotomy: the Infinite (metaphysical realms, God, Buddha, the unformed) and the Finite (our sensory experience of this world).
In Western philosophical traditions, the dualism between the infinite and the finite, or God and humanity, has many iterations. Here, the Pure Land belongs to the Infinite, and this world belongs to the Finite. Nishida overlaid Buddhist terminology onto Western metaphysics to query: How does the Pure Land manifest within this world? From his youth, Nishida critiqued the Western separation between “the self” and “the world.”
In An Inquiry into the Good, he wrote:
From early on, I held the view that reality must be experience as it is; the so-called material world is merely something deduced from it.
Regarding your question about digging deep into oneself, Nishida noted:
Only when one acts in accordance with the deepest motivation granted to them does one feel truly active and free.
Freedom, in his view, is achieved when we act not out of superficial desires—such as mindlessly checking a smartphone—but in alignment with the profound, intrinsic will that operates within us. He believed that at this subterranean depth, the individual self-connects to the Infinite.
NATSOUMI:
When I created this series, my daughter was attending nursery school, and I was unable to travel far. My photographic field was strictly confined to where I could walk with my child. Yet this physical constraint proved to be a blessing. Working with limited equipment and a constrained radius galvanised a deeper, more intentional volition. When working on editorial commissions in France, projects came with publisher budgets and predefined briefs. This personal work, however, had neither budget nor brief. Precisely because I was following an internal imperative, the sense of fulfilment was incomparable. Mr Suzuki, within the philosophical canon, is there a formal connection between the act of “seeing” and human identity?
Ryozo Suzuki:
Indeed. For Nishida, this culminates in the unity or identity manifested at the religious dimension. Contemplating reality from this stance transforms this world into the Pure Land. However, as with your photograph of the folding screen (À l’Aurore Bleutée), such moments in this world are ephemeral. Suzuki himself remarked that a brief glimpse into the Pure Land is enough before returning to daily life; dwelling there continuously would be overwhelming. Yet in his final essay, Nishida left a compelling testament: “The state must be that which reflects the Pure Land in this world.”
Regarding vision, Henri Bergson formulated a distinct theory of perception, which Nishida referenced in his early essay “The Essence of Beauty.” Going further back to Aristotle, who stated that “all human beings by nature desire to see,” philosophy has long debated how vision differs from other senses. Drawing from Bergson, Nishida argued that the eye and the hand are intimately linked. The eye does not merely register the external world like a passive mirror; it actively shapes it. Vision operates with will.
As Nishida observed:
The ordinary visual world is carved out by our eyes; it is, so to speak, a sculpture carved or a picture painted not by hands, but by the power of the eyes themselves.
And then his disciple, the aesthetician Juzo Ueda, expanded on this:
A painter painted a single flower .... It is “a” thing seen. But a thing seen is fundamentally the “thing that ought to be seen,” for it exists bearing the deep intention of vision. One painter failed to see what ought to be seen; another painter saw it, and through the act of painting, truly saw it.
NATSOUMI:
That distinction is crucial—the vision manifests only for the artist who possesses the intentionality to see. In photography, too, it is this conscious volition that releases the shutter. Fichte also addressed this act of seeing, did he not?
Ryozo Suzuki:
Indeed. In The Vocation of Man (1803), Fichte wrote: “That which you gaze upon outside yourself is always yourself.” Gazing is not a passive sensation; it engages the human will as directly as reaching out to touch something.
(*4) Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
French philosopher. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure and teaching at secondary schools, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France in 1900. He is celebrated for his concepts of élan vital (“vital impetus”) and durée pure (“pure duration”), which articulates the essential nature of time. His thought profoundly connects with Nishida Kitaro’s concept of “pure experience” (junsuikyo-ken) and exercised a foundational influence on the formation of Nishida’s philosophy.
(*5) Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
Ancient Greek philosopher and pupil of Plato. Whereas Plato posited ideas as transcendent realities, Aristotle understood them as forms immanent within physical reality. He founded the Lyceum in Athens, becoming the progenitor of the Peripatetic school. Author of The Organon (a logical collection), Physics, History of Animals, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Poetics, he established the most comprehensive system of knowledge in antiquity.
(*6) Juzo Ueda (1886–1973)
Aesthetician and scholar of art history. After attending the Third Higher School, he graduated from the Department of Aesthetics and Art History at Kyoto Imperial University, studying under Koson Fukada. He developed an aesthetic philosophy strongly shaped by Nishida’s thought as well as that of Conrad Fiedler, whom Nishida had introduced to Japan. His principal works include Philosophy of Art (Geijutsu Tetsugaku, 1924), Visual Structure (Shikaku Kozo, 1941), and The Spirit of Japanese Beauty (Nihon no Bi no Seishin, 1944). He also devoted great effort to editing The Philosophical Research (Tetsugaku Kenkyu), the official journal of the Kyoto Philosophical Society.
(*7) Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)
German philosopher and leading representative of German Idealism. Professor and inaugural rector at the University of Berlin. Devoted to Kant, he published his debut work, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), anonymously upon Kant’s recommendation. He systematically derived Kantian philosophy from the single absolute unifying principle of the Self (Ich), developing Kant’s framework by positioning the practical self as the foundation for the theoretical self. He posited that all existence is nothing other than Tathandlung (“deed-action”)—the process through which the pure absolute self unfolds through the non-self (Nicht-Ich) set up by itself. His philosophy, which placed primary value on this deed-action itself, is also termed “ethical idealism.” Under the Napoleonic occupation of Berlin in 1807–1808, he delivered a famous series of lectures titled Addresses to the German Nation, advocating national revival. Major works include Foundations of the Science of Knowledge (1794) and The Vocation of Man (1800).
NATSOUMI:
To begin with, in the world of a tiny infant, there is no distinction between oneself and one’s mother. When my daughter was just a few months old, I remember watching her engage in “hand regard”—raising her own hands towards the sky and staring at them in quiet wonderment.
Ryozo Suzuki:
And then their arms grow heavy, and they end up bumping themselves on the head, don’t they? (laughs)
NATSOUMI:
Indeed! As a physical entity, I am finite and bound to a specific place. To photograph is a profound descent into darkness—a confrontation with a raw iteration of the self, stripped back to nothing but the unmediated gaze. For me, taking a photo with a smartphone and looking through a camera’s viewfinder to capture an image are entirely different acts. Looking through the viewfinder feels like descending deep into oneself. Furthermore, when shooting on film, there is the darkroom process, where I dissolve into the darkness once more to bring the work into existence. There, I am forced to confront my unvarnished self as a pure gaze. Only at that moment do I feel I have finally “done what ought to be done.”
Ryozo Suzuki:
Do you truly feel that way?
NATSOUMI:
Yes! It is only when that print is completed that I feel the world within me and the world outside fall into precise focus. Furthermore, by exhibiting the photographs I have taken, the focus within my mind becomes even more refined.
Ryozo Suzuki:
So it is only when you print it as a finished work that you feel, “I’ve done it!”?
NATSOUMI:
Precisely. Only after making a print can I truly savour that sense of accomplishment. For this exhibition, I completed the two works on display using handcrafted Echizen Washi paper. There are photographs that come into being precisely because of the presence of others.
(Left: Métamorphose / Right: Craquelures — Handcrafted Echizen Washi by Iwano Heizaburo Paper © NATSOUMI)
I believe there are two distinct paradigms in photography. One delves deeply into one’s inner self to cast light upon it, and another functions purely as communication or a substitute for language—such as social media imagery. Beyond functional communication, however, photography can embody deep relationality. The Raw Frissons of Life emerged from the quiet daily routine of raising my child after her birth in 2014. It represents a fusion of metaphysics and mundane domestic life.
Nishida once wrote: “I am neither a psychologist nor a sociologist; I wish to be an inquirer into Life.”
Inspired by his philosophy, I abandoned calculated premeditation to surrender to contingency. An optical reflex camera requires a balance between internal perception and external reality before the shutter is released. My piece Métamorphose—capturing a cicada shedding its shell—was the very first photograph my daughter managed to focus and capture using a DSLR camera. As she gazed at the cicada undergoing its metamorphosis, she was, in essence, capturing her own transformation. That photograph serves as proof of her emerging identity and a testament to our silent dialogue.
Ryozo Suzuki:
Fascinatingly, in his early writings, Nishida wrote the word “reflect” using the kanji 写 (to photograph) rather than 映 (to project/reflect). In his original phrasing, it would read: “This world photographs the Pure Land, and the Pure Land photographs this world.”
NATSOUMI:
How poetic that he used the very character for photography. I shall continue my endeavour to photograph the Pure Land from within this world. Thank you so much for today.
Ryozo SUZUKI (b. 1975–)
Graduated from Sophia University and Tohoku University; completed doctoral coursework at the Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University. PhD in Literature. Specialises in modern German and Japanese philosophy. Currently a senior researcher at the Ishikawa Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy.
Co-authored Publications:
Neo-Kantian Philosophy and the Modern Era (2025), An Introduction to Hegel’s Lecture Notes (2016), among others.
Selected Academic Papers:
“Report on Newly Discovered Archival Material: On the Presentation Copy of D. T. Suzuki’s ‘On Pure Land Thought’ and Annotations by Kitaro Nishida” (2026), “Transcendence into the ‘Bottom’ and ‘I and Thou’” (2023).
Source Attributions for Notes
Notes (*1), (*2), (*3), (*4), and (*6) were summarised by NATSOUMI from the “Biographical Notes and Index” (edited by Masakatsu Fujita) in The Complete Works of Kitaro Nishida, Vol. 22.
Notes (*5) and (*7) are adapted with minor revisions from Encyclopædia Mypedia (2008 edition, Hitachi Systems & Services).
Special Thanks to / Sponsored by: Iwano Heizaburo Paper Mill Co., Ltd.
In Cooperation with: Ishikawa Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy
Supported by: The Hokkoku Shimbun Newspaper Co., Ltd.