LIFE UPDATE International

At eighteen, his afterlife began

YOHEI HAYAKAWA — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 06:01:36 GMT

Issue 002 — July 31, 2026

JOURNAL ── At eighteen, his afterlife began

Last month, in this magazine, I wrote about a calligrapher I had met in Taiwan. SOYAMAX (Naoyuki Soyama). Born in Niigata, Japan, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan. He writes with a brush. Put that way, it sounds like a story about technique. But his real work begins after that. When he meets someone for the first time, he writes their name on their business card and hands it back. Wherever a connection is being made, he sets his brush down there. Working that way, he walked the world — and today, in Taiwan, 80% of his clients are Taiwanese. When we said goodbye, he took a blank sheet of paper and wrote, in large brushstrokes, "Life Update." The name of this show — right there, as a piece of art. This week, I'm bringing you his voice.

At eighteen. Just two months into his first job, he was told he had late-stage cancer — malignant lymphoma, stage 4. "I thought it was over." In that hospital room, he picked up a brush. A bone marrow transplant changed his blood type; a stranger he has never met gave him back his life. Twenty-four years since. "I really do feel," he said quietly, "that I'm living a life after life." A few things to listen for. First. He does no sales, none at all. And yet, in Taiwan, 80% of his clients are Taiwanese. How does that happen? The key was a single thing: sitting down on the street to write. Second. To someone he's just met, he writes their name on the spot and hands it over, for free. "I've written at least ten thousand of them. If one in two thousand becomes a fan, that's enough." That story about a single sheet of paper has stayed with me ever since. Third. His feelings toward the bone marrow donor he has never been able to meet. And his son, born through sperm donation, and what "family" means to him. Protecting, and changing — the words of a man who carries both. "Don't endure it." "The courage to decline." And one single character: 縁 — connection. What does a person who once nearly died think about, as he picks up his brush today? Please, hear it in his own voice.

ApplePodcast │ AmazonMusic

▼ Guest — SOYAMAX (Naoyuki Soyama) Calligrapher and chef. Born in Niigata, Japan, in 1983. Two months after joining Tohoku Electric Power out of technical high school, he was diagnosed with stage 4 malignant lymphoma and hospitalized immediately. After a year of chemotherapy and total body irradiation, he received a bone marrow transplant and returned to work following a year of rehabilitation. In 2008 he left the company and moved to Okinawa, graduated from Okinawa Culinary School, and joined ANA InterContinental Manza Beach Resort as a Chinese cuisine chef. In 2011 he self-published a memoir of his illness; in 2012 he became manager of a ramen restaurant. A 2013 solo exhibition at the Shoko Kanazawa Museum marked his shift from cooking to calligraphy. He toured Japan with solo exhibitions and travelled to 25 countries with his brush. In 2020 he moved to Taiwan, founded a company, and became a father. He lives in Taiwan with his wife and son.

▶ SOYAMAX on Instagram

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On meeting people.

The way SOYAMAX sits on the street and hands someone a single sheet of paper — I, too, go to meet the person in front of me. What follows is where that "meeting" leads.

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▼ "What is the one thing you most want to get past right now?" LIFE UPDATE LOUNGE Vol.13 — Aug 27, Yokohama

That is the question for this month's gathering. Bring one thing you want to get past but can't. Leave your title and your role at the door, and spend two hours, in a small circle, with just that question. As you talk, an answer you never expected surfaces on its own: "Ah — so that's what I wanted to get past." You don't have to speak well. Just listening, you'll find that other people's "things they want to get past" quietly push you forward too. On the way home, you're a little lighter. That kind of evening. *Held in Japanese, in Yokohama. If you ever find yourself in Japan, the door is open..

▶ Details

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▼ I interview you — Personal Interview

A professional interviewer, for you alone, one on one, sixty minutes. After more than two thousand conversations, I'm certain of one thing: the answer is always inside the person. They just can't see it on their own. So I ask, and ask, and listen. It isn't about digging up the past. It's about finding, together, what's possible for you from here. When it's over, many people say: "It's my own life, and yet this is the first time I've been able to put it into words." "I can see what to do next." To have your own life truly listened to, once. That alone can change the direction you walk.

*Available in Japanese, and in English.

▶ Details

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▼ The Power of Meeting People (Shinchosha)

When you can meet the people you want to meet, your life starts to move. Shy, and once on the verge of being fired, I became someone who could meet two thousand people over twenty years. Yuzuru Hanyu, Banana Yoshimoto, Kevin Kelly — how did I come to meet the very people I'd assumed were out of reach? I wrote all of it down, as a method. Not talent, not connections. Follow the steps, and anyone can do it. A book where your "I want to meet them" becomes real, one person at a time. *Available in Japanese.

▶ Details

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Editor’s note

The "Life Update" that he wrote for me, in brush, is still here on my desk. I have never once thought about how much money an interview would make. I just go to meet the person in front of me, and carry what was born there to the people I have a connection with. It's probably the same thing SOYAMAX does when he hands someone a single sheet of paper on the street. The form is different, but underneath, it leads to the same place. He does no sales. He doesn't chase numbers. One in two thousand is enough, he laughs. Somehow, his way of living pushed quietly at my back.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Yohei Hayakawa

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▼ For new readers — a gift

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of WIRED × Yohei Hayakawa

▼ The mother edition

This magazine began in Japanese, and the Japanese edition is still where it lives — several thousand readers, every Friday, for years now. The content is the same in both. I simply couldn’t think of a good reason to keep them apart. Borders, nationalities, languages: sitting across from people for twenty years has slowly worn away my sense of where the lines are supposed to be. If you read Japanese, or know someone who does, the door is open there too.

▶ LIFE UPDATE (Japanese Edition)

Contact: inquiry@kiqtas.jp

Do I Go, Still Afraid?

YOHEI HAYAKAWA — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:00:17 GMT

Issue 001 — July 24, 2026

This is the first issue of LIFE UPDATE in English. The magazine has run in Japanese for years, with several thousand readers. From this week, it runs in both. Same interviews, same essays. I couldn’t think of a good reason to keep them apart.

Let me begin with the person I have waited more than ten years to meet.

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JOURNAL — Do I go, still afraid?

Alexandra Stréliski.

For those who don’t know her — she is a neoclassical composer and pianist, born in Quebec, of Polish Jewish descent.

Her 2018 album INSCAPE sold more than 180,000 copies in Canada alone and was certified double platinum. A solo piano instrumental record. It reached number one on the classical charts in more than twenty countries, and at the end of 2018 it was the number one classical album on Apple Music in the United States. The following year she swept the Félix Awards in Quebec, and in 2020 she won Canada’s JUNO Award for Instrumental Album of the Year.

Her music also lives inside films and television. Jean-Marc Vallée, the director of Dallas Buyers Club, found her work when she was still almost unknown. A piece from her debut album was played during the Academy Awards ceremony in 2014. Vallée went on to use her music again and again — in HBO’s Sharp Objects, in Big Little Lies.

Her third album, Néo-Romance (2023), won Female Artist of the Year and Artist of the Year – International Reach at the ADISQ awards. The tour ran until January 2025, playing to nearly 100,000 people in sold-out halls across Quebec and around the world. Her music has been streamed more than 300 million times.

She got there with a piano. Nothing else.

But that isn’t who she is, to me.

In 2018 I went to Iceland to write my first book. For ten days I ran through the wilderness and shut myself in a room to write. At some point, Apple Music — for no reason I can explain — began playing an album. It was INSCAPE.

Eight years have passed. Mornings, nights, and every time I was worn out, I have listened to it thousands of times. I don’t think I could have finished that book without her music. I got through the pandemic with it. I got through a great loss, and through despair, with it.

So I wanted to meet her. And I was also certain that I never would.

On the day, I was nervous from morning until night and got nothing done. Strangely, her music is what usually calms me down when I’m nervous — but that day, the more I listened, the more nervous I became. When I told her this, she laughed and said, “I know that feeling. But you don’t need to be nervous.”

We spoke for over an hour. How she protects her soul. AI. What the finest people have in common. What will matter in the years ahead. I want to write about all of it, but today I’ll stay with one thing.

What I most wanted to hear was how that album was born.

She began like this: she wrote it in her early-to-mid thirties, in the middle of a deep existential crisis. At the time she was an employee at a company making music for advertising and film. A salary, a boss, nine to five, writing music for commercials.

“It wasn’t that I hated the work. But after a while, it becomes soulless. Unless you have your own artistic project, unless you express yourself, it comes back later to hurt you.”

And then she burned out.

“Burnout isn’t simply working too much. It’s working too much in the wrong direction. Perfectionism, ambition, trying to be good for other people, forgetting yourself, grinding on.”

“It’s very physical. One symptom starts screaming at you. For me it was headaches, at the back of my head. I couldn’t work anymore. One day I went to the studio, sat down in front of the computer, and just cried. For no reason, at eleven in the morning. And then I walked out the back door.”

Here, I found myself telling her something. That twenty years ago, I too worked in advertising, and I too burned out.

“In a way, I’m really glad to hear that,” she said. Something quiet passed between two people who had walked the same road.

In the middle of all that, she began writing her own music.

“In that moment it became very clear. This is because I am not walking the path I’m meant to walk. I’m doing it for others, and not for myself.”

What came out of it was INSCAPE — inner landscapes.

If you had never burned out, I asked, would you be where you are now?

“Probably not. I needed that very, very big sign. The one that said: there is no other path for me but this one.”

Having heard all of that, I asked my last question. It was the one I had most wanted to ask.

You crossed over — from making music for others to making your own, from Montreal to Rotterdam. The truth is, I’m at my own turning point right now. I’m quietly letting go of an older way of living, and betting on my own voice. If you could say one thing to yourself, standing right at the edge, just before crossing — what would you say?

She answered:

“Follow the path. Your true self is on the other side.”

And then she went on.

“You know you’re on the path. You already know. So just follow it, and keep walking. That in itself is already a very big thing. Keep walking through the fear. What you find on the other side is — not so much your ‘true self,’ but a fuller self. More complete, more mature, more stable.”

“The transition is deeply uncomfortable, painful, frightening. But just keep walking. Blindly, if you have to.”

The person whose music carried me for eight years handed me, word for word, the thing I most needed to hear.

I also asked why her music reaches people so deeply. Her answer was this:

“Honestly, it isn’t really mine. I’ve never felt it belonged to me personally. Something much larger than me flows through me. The only thing I consciously chose was to share it. The real work is carrying it out into the world.”

The full interview will be published soon. How she protects her soul. The one question she wishes someone had asked her in her darkest time. And the message she left for everyone listening, anywhere in the world. Every part of it is something I can’t let go of.

I hope you’ll look forward to it.

And if you are standing at the edge of something right now, with your feet refusing to move — let me hand you her words exactly as she gave them to me.

Follow the path. Your true self is on the other side.

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On meeting people.

“Follow the path. Your true self is on the other side.” Eight years in the making, that sentence is still ringing inside me. I don’t think it was meant for me alone. What follows is where I share it with you.

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▼ “What is the one thing you most want to get past right now?”

LIFE UPDATE LOUNGE Vol. 13 — August 27, Yokohama

That happens to be the question for this month’s gathering. A coincidence — though after hearing her, it no longer feels like one.

One question, one evening, a small circle of people. Leave your title and your role at the door. Two hours of simply being yourself. You don’t have to speak well. Just listening is more than enough.

Held in Japanese, in Yokohama. If you ever find yourself in Japan, the door is open.

▶ Details

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▼ “You already know.” — Personal Interview

She said something else: “You know you’re on the path. You already know.”

After twenty years, that’s still the strangest part of this work. Everyone who is truly listened to says the same thing afterward: the answer was already inside me. There is nothing I can give you. I only ask.

Sixty minutes of the same conversation I’ve had with more than two thousand people — Yuzuru Hanyu, Banana Yoshimoto, Kevin Kelly — held for you alone. Available in Japanese, and in English.

▶ Details

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▼ The book I wrote during those ten days

Those ten days in Iceland, in today’s essay. What I was writing while INSCAPE played is a book called The Power of Meeting People, published by Shinchosha in 2025.

It looks like a manual for getting appointments. It isn’t. It’s about what happens to a life when you keep meeting people — the first-hand knowledge you can’t search for, and the personal textbook that slowly builds inside you. Written by someone who is still, to this day, not good at meeting people.

It exists only in Japanese for now. An English edition is something I would like to make.
▶ Details

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Editor’s note — Ama-iro

About ten years ago, I met a teacher of mine, Hachiro Kitagawa, for the first time, at a podcast recording. He brought a gift with him that day: a bottle of ink called Iroshizuku, made by Pilot. I’ve never forgotten it.

The range of colours is a pleasure in itself, but the one I love is ama-iro — written with the characters for “the colour of the sky.” Warm, and at the same time exactly the blue I’ve always loved. I keep it in the Lamy fountain pen I bought myself, and I’ve used it ever since.

I can’t play the piano. But when I write with this pen, my hand seems to turn into an instrument. The paper and the pen become a keyboard, and my fingers start moving on their own. Perhaps this is what people mean when they say something comes down to them.

Stréliski said it too: “It isn’t really mine. Something much larger than me flows through me.”

It feels presumptuous to say so — but I think I understand, a little.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Yohei Hayakawa

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LIFE UPDATE — The Interview Magazine

Interviews with people from all walks of life, in Japan and around the world, by professional interviewer Yohei Hayakawa — twenty years, more than two thousand conversations. Subscribe and every interview arrives free, along with an essay each week.

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▼ For new readers — a gift

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of WIRED × Yohei Hayakawa

“Be the Only One” — full transcript

▼ The mother edition

▶ LIFE UPDATE (Japanese Edition)

Contact: inquiry@kiqtas.jp

Be the Only One

YOHEI HAYAKAWA — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:34:56 GMT

Kevin Kelly has spent his life at the intersection of technology and what it means to be human. In this conversation — built around his book Excellent Advice for Living — we talk about why it matters to be weird, how professionals recover from failure, why he has worn the same shirt for fifty years, and what kind of world he would like to live in a hundred years from now.

Recorded in 2024, and originally released in two parts.

Part One: The keyword is weird

From a city of fog

Yohei: Kevin, welcome to my show. It’s a great honour to meet you. I’ve been looking forward to this, and to the Japanese edition of your new book. Are you at home now?

Kevin: It’s a delight to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I am at home — in Pacifica, California, just near San Francisco, on the coast. It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon.

Yohei: What’s the climate like there today? It’s extremely hot in Japan, even in the morning.

Kevin: We’re famous for having fog. Pacifica, my hometown, is sometimes called Fog City. We normally have fog all day in the summertime, but today the fog has lifted and it’s beautiful right now. Tomorrow morning it will be foggy again. Fifteen, eighteen degrees.

Yohei: That’s cool. Do you like summer?

Kevin: I like autumn. I live in a place where there’s autumn year round. The whole year is like the fall — the same temperature, fifteen to eighteen degrees, every day, all year.

A book that was an accident

Yohei: Let’s talk about your latest book, Excellent Advice for Living. The Japanese edition’s cover is completely different from the original.

By the way — look at these sticky notes. This was the hardest preparation I have ever done in twenty years of interviewing. Honestly, every phrase in the book was so valuable that it took me more than ten hours to pick out which ones to ask you about.

So, first question. Why did you write a book that isn’t about technology, as you have in the past? You seem still healthy and young enough that this can’t be a will.

Kevin: Why didn’t I write more about technology — it’s a good question. I did not mean to write the book. The book is an accident.

I was writing little bits of advice for my children. They were tweets, online. I kept doing it, and they started to ricochet, to go viral. I kept doing it for a number of years and it kept going viral, spreading all over the internet.

After five years I said, well, I would like to have them all in one spot, so I could hand it to my children. It was a way to take something that was already online and put it together into one book, so I could hand it to somebody. That’s why it was made — to be handier than having it spread around the internet. I did not think of making the book at first. It only came after.

The moment a disaster becomes an adventure

Yohei: I was so inspired by this phrase — page 35 in the original, the 70th in the Japanese edition. A vacation plus a disaster equals an adventure. What is your most memorable adventure?

Kevin: My wife and I went to Yosemite National Park — this weekend, actually. We were walking in the morning to do a little walk around a lake called Mirror Lake, but we got onto the wrong trail and went up the trail to Vernal Falls, which was very strenuous, almost going vertical.

And we kept saying: this is not a mistake, this is an adventure. Disaster plus travel equals an adventure. It’s a different point of view. The same thing happens, but you look at it from a different lens and you can appreciate it.

If you think about it — all the stories that you tell about your travels, the best ones are all the ones where a disaster happens. You don’t tell the story where nothing happened. You went to Paris, the plane was on time, the hotel was good, the food was great. It’s a boring story.

But if you go to Paris and the plane is delayed ten hours and you have to take a taxi through the rain and you get soaking wet and your luggage is lost — that’s the story that you tell. So you almost pay extra for the disaster.

That’s what adventure is. An adventure is going into the mountains where you’re going to lose your luggage, and you’re not going to have enough to eat, and you’re going to just about fall off the bridge. You’re paying extra to do that.

Yohei: So when a disaster happens, you think — this is a cheap adventure.

Kevin: Exactly.

Yohei: I went to Yosemite more than twenty years ago. What’s it like now?

Kevin: The mountains are the same. What’s different is that you need a permit, so they’ve reduced the number of people. It’s actually nicer, because there aren’t as many people. You can be more alone. We walked on a trail for one day and only saw maybe five other people.

They regulate the number of people who can come in during the summertime, so it’s a much nicer experience. And you try not to drive your car around — they have a shuttle. The mountains are just as beautiful as ever, but they try to manage the people.

How professionals recover

Yohei: Page 21 in the original, the 40th in the Japanese edition: Professionals make as many mistakes as amateurs. They’ve just learned how to gracefully recover from their mistakes. Sometimes it’s very difficult to keep good vibes in life. What is the best recovery technique, or mindset, for you?

Kevin: We have the Olympics going on right now, and it’s very clear that in the Olympics people make mistakes. Professional athletes make mistakes. But they are professional because they tend not to let the mistakes rattle them or distract them. What they learn to do is, in some ways, expect the mistake — and they learn what to do if they make one. How to recover.

I’ll give you an example. I give talks to thousands of people. If you do it enough, you know that at some point the presentation won’t work. The electricity goes out, or the computer crashes, or something happens, and you have to accommodate that. You have to know what to do when that happens — make a joke about it, or keep talking and let someone else fix it.

So one thing is practice. When pilots are flying planes, they have a simulator and they practise all kinds of disasters. The engine goes out — what do you do? You run out of fuel — what do you do? They practise it, so that when it actually happens they’re very calm, because they’ve already done it. In a certain sense you want to rehearse the worst case.

But it could be even small things. I’m a maker — I make furniture, I make art. You measure incorrectly and you cut the thing wrong, so you have to practise recovering from that. You come to expect that somewhere along the line you’re going to make a mistake, and rather than throw everything away, you recut that one board, or you modify it. There are tricks — recutting the board to make it the right size, or reusing it, or repairing it.

If you watch a professional you’ll see they have lots of tricks for recovering from mistakes. And you realise they make mistakes almost as often as I do — but when they make one, it doesn’t look terrible, because they have another little trick. A professional football player. A professional singer, when they hit the wrong note. A professional comedian, when they get the line wrong. They have a way to recover.

That recovery process is where experience helps. We watch what other people do to see how they recover. I think that’s one of the most powerful things a teacher can show a student — how to recover from mistakes. That’s what you really want to learn as a student, because you’re going to make a mistake.

The goal is to make new mistakes

Yohei: Compared to me, you might not make mistakes very often.

Kevin: That’s not true. Here’s why. I would not make as many mistakes if I was doing exactly the same things I did twenty-five years ago. But if you are a person who’s always getting younger — you try new things, you raise the bar, you keep doing things that you might fail at — then you’re going to keep making new mistakes.

That’s the goal. My goal in life is to make new mistakes. Not to make no mistakes, but to make mistakes because I’m trying something new that I haven’t done before. You want to get good at making new mistakes, and at recovering from them.

Yohei: So you live every day to make new mistakes. Have you made a new mistake today?

Kevin: I don’t know — it’s early morning.

Yohei: Definitely I have made a lot of mistakes in this conversation. English mistakes.

Kevin: You’re very kind. Your goal should be: make a new mistake today.

I think mistakes and failure are a sign of progress. They’re a sign of learning, a sign of advancement. You don’t want to eliminate mistakes or failure — you want to make them into a habit, where you keep them small. You want to make mistakes at a small level on a very frequent basis. Small failures.

The problem is, if you outlaw failure, then what happens is you get the failure all at once, in one huge failure — which you don’t want. You want to manage your failures to keep them regular and small.

A third of your life

Yohei: Page 194 in the original, the 490th in the Japanese edition: You’ll spend a third of your life in bed sleeping, and almost another third in your chair sitting. It’s worth investing in a great bed and a fantastic chair. Could you give us some specifics? My listeners love specifics — brand, model, where you found it.

Kevin: I’d be happy to, but I don’t remember. It’s been so long ago. I do know that names like Herman Miller — those kinds of brands are worth the money. The Herman Miller Aeron chair was very famous for a while.

In America we have a very good review site, now owned by The New York Times, called Wirecutter. They have the best consumer reviews of things like the best mattress, the best chair. They spend a lot of time researching. I use them all the time. So my recommendation is an indirect recommendation: go to Wirecutter. It’s unexpected what the best mattress is today, and the best chair.

I run two recommendation sites myself. Recomendo is a newsletter that recommends things every week. And Cool Tools recommends tools — every day, for twenty-one years. So I know a lot about recommendations, and I know that what Wirecutter does is very reliable. I know how much work it is.

You can make a mistake with a bed or the wrong chair, but because you spend so much time in it, if you make a mistake you just need to change and get a new one. You don’t have to live with it for all your life. The thing about beds and chairs is that often what’s good for one person is not good for you — so go to a store that has many chairs and find one that fits you best. You can make a mistake, but you can fix it very easily.

Yohei: How many years have you used your chair?

Kevin: Close to twenty years. The same chair.

Yohei: What about your bed?

Kevin: I made the bed myself. It’s beautiful. It has my initial and my wife’s initial. I made it when we were married, thirty-five years ago. The mattress is new and very firm, but the bed is something I made thirty-five years ago.

The oldest thing in the house

Yohei: In your home, what do you think is the oldest thing — perhaps older than you?

Kevin: The house is older than me. I have a few small things from my father. And I have some clothes from high school — my winter jacket, which I’ve been wearing since high school. And a winter scarf that I still have, that’s forty or fifty years old.

Yohei: Half a century. The same clothes.

Kevin: I love old clothes. I like wearing clothes until they get holes in them.

Fifteen identical shirts

Yohei: Do you buy any new clothes recently?

Kevin: My wife makes me buy new clothes. But these days, when I buy a new shirt, it’s all the same colour. I have fifteen shirts that are this colour. They look the same. I don’t have to think about what I wear — I put on the same uniform every day.

When I go give a talk, I have a blue shirt with a collar. I have ten of them, but they all look the same. My jacket is yellow — I have three yellow jackets.

Yohei: It’s like a uniform. I’m bothered by having to select clothes every morning, so I’m thinking about wanting new clothes as a uniform, like you.

Kevin: I don’t have to think about it. Also, I don’t wear anything that has a logo. My hat, my jacket — no logos. I don’t do advertising for other people. The clothing company didn’t pay me to advertise their brand, so I’m not going to wear it.

Why it matters to be weird

Yohei: Page 145 in the original, the 310th in the Japanese edition: Prescription for popular success — do something strange. Make a habit of your weirdness. Many of my listeners want to know: what are your unusual behaviours or habits?

Kevin: One thing is not wearing any logos. Other than that, wearing the same clothes. And a weird thing — I like to take pictures of things that nobody thinks are important. Lots of people collect things, but I collect things with pictures.

I have a collection of maybe all the different barks on a tree. Every time I see a new tree with a new bark, I take a picture. I have to take that picture. I have to stop — my wife has to stop — because I’m collecting bark pictures. I collect pictures of things like manhole covers in Japan. You know the manhole covers — they’re beautiful. Hotel carpets. I have to take a picture of the carpeting in a hotel. I take a picture of every bed in a hotel. They’re all different.

Yohei: That does sound like a slightly strange hobby.

Kevin: I think so too. Why would anybody do that? But in that weirdness will come something. The people I know who produce beautiful songs, or songwriters, or whoever is making art — there’s something weird about what they’re doing. They’re strange. They’re spending time making little marks on paper, they’re knitting something, they’re keeping a spreadsheet about this or that. It’s weird. Normal people don’t do that. But that’s what makes their art, or their entrepreneurship, or their science, so good — because they’re doing something that ordinary people would not do.

That’s how you do things differently. That’s how you think differently. That’s how you come up with something new. Doing something that most ordinary people would not do — they find it boring, or tedious, but you enjoy it. You should really try and do more of that.

How to be weird

Yohei: Reading and understanding this phrase is very easy, but actually being a strange person is not so easy. It’s a strange question, but — what do we do if we would like to be a strange person?

Kevin: That should be the name of my next book. How to Be Weird.

Yohei: If so, please pay me a little.

Kevin: We can co-author it. We can write it together.

I think it’s natural that children are weird, and what happens is, as we get older, we get it pounded out of us. It gets removed. I think naturally we are all weird as kids.

So I don’t think the problem is how to be weird. How you become weird is by not letting other people tell you who you are. We are naturally weird — so it’s about recovering what you did as a child. It’s recovering what you would like to do. It’s recovering the kinds of things that make you happy, that put you at peace, that flow, where you’re not aware of time.

So how to be weird is: spend more time doing things you wish you never had to stop. I don’t know what that would be for you. There may be something in your life. Is it reading a novel? Is it playing with trains? Walking? There’s something in your life, and the more you can indulge it, the more you can practise it, the weirder you will get.

So what is it for you — what do you really like doing, and wish would never stop?

Yohei: For me it’s interviewing. After graduating from university, I was a staff writer at a newspaper company in Hiroshima. I started my career as a journalist. But unfortunately, at the time, I noticed that I didn’t like writing — even as a journalist. I liked questions.

Fortunately, after that, I came up with the idea that if I had my own podcast and YouTube programme about interviewing, I might have a good career. Not writing. Only interviewing. So my business started twenty years ago. At that time podcasting was not popular — and unfortunately, or fortunately, in Japan it’s still not so popular compared to the United States. But thanks to that, I’ve been able to run my own company.

Kevin: So you’ve lived a weird life too. I interview people myself — even a stranger sitting next to me at a party. Though my kids find it embarrassing, and think I’m strange for it.

My theory is that everybody sitting next to me — on a bus, on a train, in an airplane, at a dinner table — that person knows more about something than anybody else, and my job is to figure out what it is. There’s something you know much more about than me, and maybe more than anybody. I want to be able to find out what that is. So I’m going to interview them, to let them tell me what it is they know more about than anybody, so they can teach me at that moment.

That’s what I’m interviewing for when I’m sitting next to a stranger. I know you know something that you want to share with me, and I’m going to give you a chance to tell me — if I ask you the right questions.

Yohei: So in that sense, everyone is a teacher for you.

Kevin: Exactly. And I think that helps also when there are people you disagree with. I encounter people I don’t even really like, and maybe I disagree with them on some ideas — maybe they’re racist, maybe they’re sexist, maybe they’re mean. But I also believe that they probably know something that I don’t know. So I will try to learn from them.

What’s on the nightstand

Yohei: Page 91 in the original, the 191st in the Japanese edition: To be remarkable, read books about that. What books are on your nightstand?

Kevin: Right now I have some travel guidebooks. A book of poetry by Rumi — a twelfth-century Muslim poet, a great favourite. A history book about the invention of religion in the West. A science fiction book by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. And I just finished a book on AI, written this year.

I mostly read non-fiction. When I want to read fiction, I usually listen to it — in the car, or as an audiobook.

Yohei: Why is that easier?

Kevin: It’s easier for fiction. It’s like having your mom read you a story. You hear a story. It’s much harder for me to read fiction — maybe I’m not as patient. But if I’m listening to it, I find it very easy.

Yohei: For me it’s completely the opposite. On my nightstand I have fiction, because thanks to that it’s easy to sleep. Non-fiction is so interesting and inspiring that sometimes it’s too exciting and it’s very difficult to sleep. Do you have no problem with that?

Kevin: I have no problem sleeping. One of my superpowers is sleeping.

Yohei: What do you think is the key to super sleeping?

Kevin: Picking the right parents. It’s genetics. I have a superpower in sleeping because I inherited the genes. My wife has genes that make it very difficult for her to sleep. For me, I’m a robot. I have a switch. I lie down, I turn off the switch, I sleep. In the morning I get up and turn the switch back on. That’s it.

Yohei: How many hours do you sleep?

Kevin: About six and a half. I go to bed at 1:30 at night and get up at 7:30. And then at 1:30 in the afternoon I take a twenty-minute nap. So every 1:30 I sleep — either for six hours, or for twenty minutes.

Why he walks

Yohei: After getting up, what do you do?

Kevin: I do a walk. I walk for forty, forty-five minutes every morning. Even if it’s rainy or snowy. I’m a very good walker — I can walk many, many hours. This weekend I did thirty thousand steps a day.

I also do walk-and-talks. You may be interested in this. We’ve done some in Japan. I invite nine friends and we walk every day from one place to another, staying at a ryokan. We just have a day pack, and our luggage is forwarded. For one week we talk. In the evenings, at the meal, we have a conversation. So we walk for a week, and it’s a conversation. It’s called a walk-and-talk, and we have them all over the world — Japan, England, Thailand, China, Portugal.

The best way to have a conversation is when you’re walking with somebody, for hours and hours. Small talk, big talk. After a week of walking with somebody, you know them very well. You see how they deal with things. It’s a great way to get to know somebody.

Steve Jobs was famous for this. When people wanted to meet him, he’d say, “Come walk with me.” They don’t sit in a chair. Come, we’ll do a walk together for forty-five minutes and have a conversation. It’s a much better way to meet somebody.

Now, when people want to meet me — if you write and say, “I’m coming to San Francisco, can we meet?” — I say, okay, come at two o’clock and we’ll do a walk. Come walk with me on the hills. It’s the best way to meet somebody.

Yohei: Thanks to you, I’ve come up with an idea. I want to make a new kind of interview — walking interviews.

Kevin: That works. I have a friend who did that — that was his thing with his podcast. Walking interviews. It really does work. All you need is a little wireless microphone — the RØDE Wireless GO. The sound quality is genuinely good.

Yohei: For me, walking and running is like meditation. It’s a key to being isolated. But you’re the opposite, in a sense. What does walking mean to you?

Kevin: I think walking is interesting because it does two contradictory things. It empties your mind, and it gives you new ideas. It takes the old ideas away and makes it easier for new ones to come in.

If you’re worried about something, or thinking about something, it’s a good way to contemplate. There’s something about the way your legs are working and your heart is pumping — you have different ideas when you’re walking than when you’re sitting in a chair.

When I have a very difficult thing to write, I will walk. That helps me clarify my thinking. I have to walk. I can’t figure it out sitting down. There’s something about the way our bodies are built: when you’re walking, you can have better ideas, new ideas. The old ideas can go away. The stress goes away. There’s something about walking that’s very, very powerful with ideas.

Part Two: The keyword is imagination

The best investment he ever made

Yohei: This one is exclusive to the Japanese edition — the 463rd: Don’t hesitate to invest in yourself. Spend money on courses and training. That modest expenditure will soon produce immeasurable benefits. What is the best course or training you have received in your life, and how much was it?

Kevin: There are two things. I’m a college dropout — I didn’t finish college. But I went to work in a science lab with a friend of mine at the University of Georgia, and while I was there I took some courses that I paid for myself.

One of them was on the business of newspapers, and that later on was very, very valuable for starting WIRED. I don’t know how much I paid — I think it was about forty dollars for the credit.

Later I took another course I paid for myself, which was not offered by the university. It was called Dialog. I have to explain what Dialog was. This was before the internet. There was a service where you could search for the digital information found in libraries — scientific papers with titles, card catalogues, and sometimes the full article from something like Time magazine or a newspaper, digitised. Dialog was like the Google for that, before there was an internet.

But here was the thing. To search it was very expensive. It cost a dollar a minute — and this was 1980, so that was a lot more money than now. Let’s say it was five dollars a minute today. So doing a search was not free. You had to pay for every question you asked, and it was very slow in answering.

The Dialog course was to train you how to search. Because it was so expensive, you had to write out all your search questions, and the follow-up questions, beforehand. It was so expensive that you actually had to take a course to learn how to use Google, basically — if you can think of it that way.

So I paid for that course in about 1982, and it was very valuable to me. I was able to be online before the internet. So when the internet came along, I was already online. I had a head start in the online world, because I had paid for the course in Dialog.

The rule of seven

Yohei: Compared to that, it’s very easy to research everything now. But I have a little doubt — even if it’s easy to research everything, it’s not easy to research deeply. Please give us advice on how to research something and know it deeply.

Kevin: Here is the advice. It’s very simple. It’s called the rule of seven.

The rule of seven is that if you are willing to go seven rounds — seven times down — you will find your answer.

What that means is: you ask the first question, or the first person, and they say, I don’t know the answer. And you say to them, who would you recommend I talk to who might know? Where can I go? And they say, well, maybe try this. So you go and try that, but they don’t have the answer either, and you say, who do you suggest I talk to next, or who might know this, or where can I look? And they say, go here. And you come to the third one, and they don’t have the answer.

If you’re willing to go down to seven, you will have your answer every time.

And by the way, this also applies to AI. If you’re using ChatGPT and you don’t get the answer, keep asking — seven levels. You can say, that’s not the answer I wanted. I don’t believe that, can you give me proof? That’s too easy, what about this? This doesn’t make sense. You keep pressing it seven times and you’ll have a clear answer. If it says I don’t know, you say, well, try looking up the books, what does the old newspaper say?

Recently I wanted to know how many songs are written in a year worldwide. That’s the kind of question you can ask ChatGPT, but you’re not going to get the answer right away. You have to keep going down, more and more and more.

The failure that set him up

Yohei: How has failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?

Kevin: Failure comes in all kinds of ways. In some senses you could say I failed at college, because I dropped out after one year. And that set me up, because I decided to pursue my own education, my own path. And I went to Asia. I went to Japan, in 1972.

Yohei: I’ve heard you stayed at a home of your father’s friend.

Kevin: My father’s friend served in the army. He was one of the first American soldiers to land in Japan. It’s hard to remember now how much fear and hatred there was at that time between Japan and the US. It doesn’t even seem possible. We Americans mistreated Japanese citizens — it was just terrible. So when my father’s friend landed, they didn’t know if they were going to be shot, if they were going to be mobbed. They didn’t know what would happen.

But he fell in love with Japan and married a Japanese woman. He told me stories about Japan. America in the fifties and sixties, when I grew up, was very closed, very parochial, very narrow. So I had these stories about Japan — my father’s friend loved Japanese baseball — and he gave me the name of a friend to stay with in Japan.

That was like the best university in the world, because everything was very different from New Jersey where I grew up. And 1972 is not that far after the war — only twenty-five years. So things were still very traditional in many areas, and very different. Every day I learned something new. Every day I had my mind changed. Every day I saw something I didn’t understand, and that just made my appetite for learning accelerate. I was learning all the time.

And that’s because I dropped out. That’s because I had the failure of college.

A recent aha moment

Yohei: What about recent aha moments?

Kevin: Someone was asking, what’s a really great invention that we don’t normally think of as an invention? And my aha moment was — if you have Netflix or Amazon and you’re watching a series, they have something called skip the introduction. You hit the button. That’s one of the best inventions of all time. Skip intro.

Yohei: How many times a day do you use it?

Kevin: At least once a day. I watch a lot of YouTube — maybe two or three hours every day.

Yohei: That’s unexpected. What kind of programmes?

Kevin: Mostly people making things, because I love to make things. Sometimes a little travel. But mostly making things — and that comes back to watching professionals recover from their mistakes. I can see them make a mistake and recover from it. That’s where I get a lot of my knowledge about making things.

Part of what you also learn is what it’s possible to do. Today with YouTube you can learn how to do amazing things — things I could never do by myself. The other day, our hot tub has a motor that keeps the pumps going, and the bearing in the motor was making a sound. It’s called a bad bearing. Normally you would probably throw out the motor. But I knew you could change the bearing. I’d never done it, but I knew it could be done. So I watched YouTube on how to do it. You need a special tool, and YouTube tells you which tool to get. I went to Amazon, got the tool, took the bearing out myself, put the new bearing in — and it’s like brand new.

When I was growing up fifty years ago, it would have been impossible to learn how to do that, unless you had a brother or a father who was a machinist. Impossible. But now anybody — any kid anywhere in the world — can learn how to do that. It’s so powerful. You can learn how to do anything you want. Surgery. Become a butcher. Learn how to do an experiment. You can learn how to do anything on YouTube. I think young people today are learning more on YouTube than they are in school.

On personalised feeds

Yohei: YouTube is amazing. On the other hand, I’m worried — the content we watch every day is personalised because of AI. In that sense I think it’s difficult to encounter genuinely new content. What do you think, and how do you deal with it?

Kevin: I like the recommendations YouTube makes. I find them very useful. And I don’t find it very difficult to try something new. All you do is search. Instead of searching on Google, try searching on YouTube. What if the Romans invented guns? How would you survive on Mars? You can ask any kind of question, and on YouTube you find interesting, different answers. And if you look at those recommendations, you can get down into a whole other area you’ve never thought of in your life.

The other day I was watching something about how they make movies — how they cast people for a movie — and all of a sudden I’m getting recommendations about casting. I wasn’t that interested, but now it’s a whole other world I didn’t know anything about.

So I don’t find it difficult to go and explore new things on YouTube. And I think it’s incredibly powerful. Whatever your interest is — how to become a better interviewer, how to ask better questions — they’ll tell you.

A listener’s question, on the working poor

Yohei: We received many messages from listeners. Let me introduce one, from a woman who is currently unemployed.

I have read WIRED magazine — I thought it was a curious magazine that made me laugh, cry, and surprised me. By the way, what do you think about the working poor? I have read about the working poor in the United States, Japan, South Korea and France. It struck me that the working poor are people who work full-time but end up with less than welfare, and that they are increasing in developed countries. In France everyone gets a rent allowance, so even the working poor can pay their rent, and it raises their living standards. In the other countries mentioned there’s no such support, and they have a hard time. What do you think?

Kevin: I think what that person is asking about is UBI — universal basic income. That means the government, or other people’s taxes, pay people a minimum amount for food and shelter, so they don’t have to worry about food and shelter.

It’s a very powerful idea that could be totally wrong, or could be totally right. I think the idea can only be determined by trying it many times. So we want to have many experiments, with different amounts and different conditions.

Right now they’ve done a few. There was one recently that was completed where they gave people a thousand US dollars for doing nothing, and another where they gave fifty dollars a month for doing nothing. What they discovered was that it didn’t really change very much. So it could be that it doesn’t work — or it could be that it’s not enough money. We don’t know.

What I would say is: thinking about this is not going to figure it out. You can’t figure this out by thinking about it. You can’t have a theory and decide from the theory whether this is good or bad. This is one of those questions we can only determine by actually running many experiments. It doesn’t matter what your ideology is — whether you’re a libertarian, conservative or liberal — you can’t tell whether this is a good idea. You actually have to try the experiment many times, in many ways, to get some data. And I don’t think one experiment is going to be enough.

Three lessons

Yohei: What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

Kevin: Maybe I’ll give you three.

The first — in the book I give this advice — when you are young, you should try to go to as many funerals as you can. Go to as many funerals and listen to what people say about the person who died. They’re not going to talk about the awards that person won. They’re not going to talk about how much money they made or didn’t make. They’re not going to talk about their achievements. They’re mostly going to talk about what kind of a person they were, and how they made other people feel.

So the first lesson is that the most important thing in life is not whether you are famous, but whether you’re kind.

The second lesson is that your purpose in life is to figure out your purpose in life. It’s like a paradox. Your purpose is to figure out your purpose. And you’re going to spend your whole life doing that. You won’t know — but your entire life is trying to figure out what your purpose is.

I’ll tell you: Jeff Bezos is trying to figure out what the purpose in his life is. I know that, because I’ve walked with Jeff. All the billionaires — Elon — they’re trying to figure out what their purpose in life is. That is the purpose in life.

The third thing is that you don’t want to try to be the best at things. You want to try to be the only. You want to be the only person doing that. You don’t want to be the best person doing it — that’s a very difficult thing to do. It’s a very high bar.

Most people don’t know what they’re good at. So you spend most of your life trying to figure out: what is it that I’m good at, that I can do that other people can’t? What are my special talents? Why am I here? And it will take most of your life to figure that out.

Your purpose in life is to be the best you that you can be. Your purpose in life is to be only you.

Yokohama, this year

Yohei: You’ve been to Japan several times before?

Kevin: Many times. I have in-laws in Japan. My daughter married a Japanese American, so I have a Japanese mother-in-law.

Yohei: I live in Yokohama.

Kevin: I was in Yokohama this year.

Yohei: Really? Please tell me about it.

Kevin: I’d never been to Yokohama before. It was very commercial, I guess is the word. One day I was walking along the waterfront area — they have a big long pier, and all the bricks, and walking along the high line was very nice, with a beautiful view of the harbour. And I went to Chinatown, of course — the Yokohama Chinatown is very famous. It seemed like a convenient place. The subway system was very convenient. That was my impression.

I still spent a lot of time in the rural parts of Japan — the Kii Peninsula, the Kii valleys, the Kansai area. And I’m sometimes worried about Japan, about the depopulation. It really concerns me, going through some towns with very few people.

Advice for Japan

Yohei: That’s related to my next question. When I think about Japan today and the world in the future, I feel it will become more and more important to live optimistically, as you do — as you preach in your book and in your life.

I feel that Japan is a nation of people who always think about risk, perhaps because Japan was originally a country of earthquakes and disasters. Of course thinking about risk is sometimes good. But recently I feel it has become too much, and has led to a passive atmosphere where we can’t paint a bright blueprint of the future.

If you were a consultant or a teacher, and Japan was your client, what advice would you give us?

Kevin: Oh boy. Very difficult question, because it’s a whole country, and there’s so much diversity among people in any country, even Japan.

I would say one thing, which has to be said very carefully. I think, for better and worse, you have to open up to immigration in a legitimate way. And my hope is that with the technology of language translation — where we could wear earbuds and have Japanese translated into perfect English, and my perfect English go into your ears as perfect Japanese — it would be possible to have people from all over the world come live in Japan and participate without a language barrier.

That might be able to revive Japan. If you had people from all over the world coming to work — young people especially, who love so many of the things that Japan does so well, the very livable cities — it’s hugely attractive to people who are willing to play by the rules and do the cultural things, but who could get over the language barrier. I think that would be incredibly powerful for Japan.

Yohei: Speaking of the language barrier — two days before our interview I tried the real-time translation system in Zoom, because of this interview. But it wasn’t good enough.

Kevin: Not now. But I tell you, in a couple of years it will be.

When I go to China, I give talks — that’s my business. Until last year they had simultaneous translators, humans. Two of them work in pairs, translating in real time into Chinese, taking turns every ten or twenty minutes. But in the last year they now use AI. It’s called iFlytek. They use AI to translate my talks in real time — only as subtitles, not spoken.

Yohei: Was it good?

Kevin: It’s pretty good. It’s ninety-six per cent. So I think in two years we will have a system that would translate in real time from English to Japanese and back.

Yohei: In that sense, it’s difficult to keep motivated to study English.

Kevin: That may be true. But imagine the millions of people who will be able to participate in the global economy. Millions of people in Japan who are so skilled — except in English. Now they have a chance to work for a global company. I think that’s going to be so powerful.

What AI will not do

Yohei: Do you think there is anything humans can do that AI cannot do, forever? If so, what?

Kevin: First of all, forever is too long a term. Who knows about forever. But I would say in your lifetime there are lots of things it won’t do.

One of the things we’re nowhere near: our minds work on twenty-five watts. Very little energy. The AIs are so energy-hungry. To make a robot that can think and do what we do and move — we’re a quarter horsepower. There’s no robot that can do anything with a quarter horsepower. What I’m saying is that our bodies and minds are so energy efficient that we’re not within a million times of that.

So having a computer that’s as smart as the smartest human, that could run as fast as a human, will not happen in your lifetime. Having this mobility, being able to do something new that has never been done before and use your hands to do it — we’re nowhere near being able to do that. That’s going to be very, very hard. Not because of silicon, but because of energy. Because of the amount of energy you need to put into the AI. A question that you can answer with just a couple of calories requires megawatts of energy for them. Even if you reduce it by a million, that’s still not enough.

In a weird way, this combination — of a portable mind inside a portable body — is going to be very, very difficult to do. Maybe there will be AI in the cloud that is much smarter than humans, but it’s not going to be very mobile. And there could be robots that are very mobile, but they’re not going to be very smart. The two of them together — a smart mobile — that’s called a body. That’s so hard. We have no idea how to do that. No idea.

The greatest gadget

Yohei: When it comes to Kevin Kelly, I would say the god of gadgets. Actually I have this — it’s very difficult to get in Japan.

Kevin: I just want to say — that book you held up, the Whole Earth Catalog. My first job was working at the Whole Earth Catalog. It had access to tools, and a lot of reviews of tools inside. That was around 1979. One of the tools it reviewed was a personal computer, which was basically a calculator.

The most amazing tool that I would like in the afterlife is this. This is the magic. This is the best camera I’ve ever owned — and I’ve owned cameras for fifty years. I’ve made professional photography books. This is the best computer I’ve ever had. This is a miracle. It’s incredible miracle technology. It’s a recorder. It’s a video camera. It’s amazing. If I had one of these fifty years ago, it would have been worth a hundred million dollars. I think we don’t appreciate how amazing it is.

Yohei: If you’d had an iPhone in your twenties, do you think your life would have been completely changed?

Kevin: In terms of photography, yes. As I said, this phone is the best camera ever. I carried five hundred rolls of film. I could never see the image. It wouldn’t work in the dark — I needed a lot of light. It would change photography one hundred per cent. That’s what I did when I was younger. That’s all I was thinking about — photography. That would be completely changed.

And GPS — knowing where I was, not being lost all the time. I was travelling in Asia and there was no telephone to my parents, there was no messaging, there was nothing. Once a month they would get a letter from me. And I would have no idea — they could not send me a letter. Of course it would change my life.

People don’t realise the incredible gifts we have right now. I try to explain to my kids how different the world was when you didn’t have the internet, when you couldn’t ask a question. People ask questions all day long. Fifty years ago you could not ask those questions. Nobody could answer them. Imagine that world — where you have questions and there are no answers. No one is going to give you any answer. That’s what I grew up in. This is an answer machine, where I can ask anything and get the answer immediately. That’s just amazing.

A hundred years from now

Yohei: Lastly, do you have any projects you’re working on?

Kevin: I’m working on a project called the Hundred-Year Desirable Future. These are scenarios about a hundred years from now — with AI, the mirror world, genetic engineering and surveillance — that I would want to live in.

It’s a picture of the world with all the technology and all the changes, but it’s a world I want to live in. A friendly world. A world that I desire. So it’s trying to describe that world in detail. What does the military look like? What about religions? What about food? What is that world in a hundred years?

It’s not a prediction. I’m not saying it has to work that way. I’m saying I would like it to work this way.

The reason I’m making it is that I think it’s impossible for us to make a desirable future without first imagining it. I want to help people imagine a future they want to live in — because I don’t think we can make a future we like unless we can imagine it first.

Yohei: Where can listeners connect with you and learn more about your work?

Kevin: My website is my initials — kk.org. And on social platforms like Twitter and Instagram I’m kevin2kelly — Kevin, the number two, Kelly. I try to share whatever I make.

Yohei: Thank you, Kevin, for your time today. It was a great pleasure talking with you.

Kevin: My pleasure too. Keep aiming to be the only one — and please, don’t forget to be weird. I wish you great success.

Watch or listen

This conversation was originally released in two parts.

▶ Part One — “The keyword is weird”

▶ Part Two — “The keyword is imagination”

Also on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music.

About Kevin Kelly

Writer and thinker on technology. Born in Pennsylvania in 1952. After travelling through Asia in his twenties, he became an editor of the Whole Earth Review in 1984, and in 1993 he co-founded WIRED, where he served as founding executive editor. He has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others. His books include What Technology Wants, The Inevitable, and Cool Tools. His latest is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. He lives in Pacifica, California.

kk.org

About Yohei Hayakawa

Professional interviewer. Born in Yokohama in 1980. After working as a newspaper reporter, he founded Kiqtas Inc. in 2008. Over twenty years he has interviewed more than two thousand people across every field and border — from figures such as Yuzuru Hanyu, Banana Yoshimoto and Kenzo Takada, to people whose names no one knows. Since 2013 he has run Memories of War, a project carrying the voices of those who lived through the war out into the world. His book on the craft of meeting people was published by Shinchosha in 2025.

yohei-hayakawa.com

Recorded in 2024. Lightly edited for clarity.

If you enjoyed this, everything else here is free too — every interview as a podcast, and an essay each week.

▶ LIFE UPDATE (Japanese Edition)