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Move meSoma IslesSnackables

🌫️ Japan's Evaporated People

A 17-minute short film about the roughly 80,000 johatsu-sha — 'evaporated people' — who voluntarily disappear each year in Japan. A mix of interviews with the evaporated themselves ('I was sick of the world but didn't have the courage to die'), the people who care for them ('the lack of se

Grokkist Press

4 June 2023 · 1 minute

A 17-minute short film about the roughly 80,000 johatsu-sha — 'evaporated people' — who voluntarily disappear each year in Japan. A mix of interviews with the evaporated themselves ('I was sick of the world but didn't have the courage to die'), the people who care for them ('the lack of second chances in Japan makes people feel they have no option but to run away'), and a look inside the 'night-moving' companies that help them vanish. Pairs nicely with Oyama Shiro's memoir A Man with No Talents.

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Keep reading

Nearby on the shelf.

Surprise meWild Margin

🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedSoma Isles

🎨 Sculpting with Tree Sap and Time

A 15-minute documentary following Kyoto artist Mine Tanigawa as she creates sculptures from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for over 7,000 years. Less a 'making of' than a portrait of attention: raw tree sap transformed through layer upon layer of colour, polishing and curing, eac

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedEntangled Vale

👁️ Iris Murdoch and Love as a Way of Seeing

Matthew Crawford revisits Iris Murdoch as a philosopher pushing back against thin, hyper-rational models of human life. For Murdoch, morality isn't mainly abstract reasoning but attention — the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people and oneself more clearly. Her radical claim

Grokkist Press · 1 min