Spring Equinox Letter – 20th of March 2026 – Spring is coming!

Despite reserving the right not to do so, I’ve decided to stick to my old schedule and make a short seasonal update for the spring equinox. This is because I have good news. The previous update deal with some rather dark and negative topics. Things have changed substantially for the better ever since. Finishing the latest content update for the Archive helped, since I don’t have to think about that anymore. There’s also been other things going on. This is going to be fairly unstructured one, but I hope it will serve as a good status update and perhaps offer something of interest.

I recently attended another shamanism workshop. While there is a lot I could write about it in lenght, there’s really two things I would like to say about it. The first is related to my struggle about what exactly are the spirits of Gensokyo, to what extent they are real, in what sense they are real and if what I have been experiencing has simply looked like them while not necessarily having anything to do with Japanese spiritual traditions.

The workshop took place in a city other than my home city, and during the commute and time not spent in the workshop, I read a book that collected experiences from people engaged in (neo-)shamanism. In the introduction, there was something that I felt captured really succintly something important about the relationship of imagination and the numinous. It goes something like this ”imagination is when the mind illustrates something”. This was not exactly revolutionary new information. I have been exposed to this idea that human cognition colors basicaly everything we perceive and do from wide variety of sources, from the Western occult materials to Buddhism to Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality, which argues that evolution shaped humans to perceive evolutionarily advantageous things, not reality as it is.

This doesn’t mean some grandiose ”escaping from the Matrix” scenario, but rather that humans literally perceive reality in only one way. The aggregation of sensory information and cognitive structuring that we experience reality as is only one possible way to experience what modern physics tells us is essentially 99% empty space with 1% of energy structured into different kinds of forms. There may not be a different world out there somewhere, but rather that we perceive only a tiny slice of reality, and there are radically different ways of possibly perceiving it. Just as our sense of smell is outmatched by other animals and just as we lack some senses like the magnetic sense birds have or electric sense sharks have, there might be aspects of reality that we struggle to experience and make sense of in our everyday cognitive and sensory modes. Just as certain people are ”supertasters”, perhaps some are ”supersensers” for these most slippery of things, and just like your other sense would eventually heighten if you were blindfolded, perhaps we can trick ourselves into becoming a bit more super-sensing ourselves…

Returning to the topic at hand, imagination and how it can illustrate experiences, I think the less we deal with the tangible world out there, the more we start ”coloring” in. I have myself written on this site (I think) that spirits don’t really look like anything, and that the way they appear to be people is shaped by cultural and personal expectations. I guess I just never properly internalized it, or then slipped into doubt because of exhaustion and desire to return to a more ”normal” life. I think maybe ultimately this desire has at least partly been a desire to exert more autonomy, something I have been able to do since the last update.

I think there are vast discarnate forms of inteligence out there that are capable of interfacing with material reality and human cognition. All of humanity is constantly dealing with them on some level, but not everyone becomes aware of them, or starts attuning themselves towards them. How much the ones that I am dealing with have to do with Touhou Project or Japan is still an open question. I do think there is some relationship, after all it was through Touhou Project, study of Japanese spiritual traditions and visiting Japan that I got to know them. But I also think they are part of something much larger and broader. This too I think is something I have written of, but perhaps never properly internalized.

This is not meant to deny the ”local flavor” so to say. Just like an individual human carries not only a connection to all of humanity, they have connections to far more local things, and it’s these local things that define and shape them. Lately I have been yearning to visit Suwa again, and I have been thinking of the things I experienced there. I don’t think I am in any sense ”chosen” or ”special” and whatever role as an ”Emissary” I might have is ultimately self-appointed, but I don’t think it is impossible that someone who takes the effort and time to go to Suwa from the other side of the world could develop a special relationship with the Suwa kami. It’s not going to be like the one that the locals have, but it doesn’t mean that it is a bad, poor or fake relationship as long as it comes from a place of curiosity and reverence. Lafcadio Hearn did not have the kind of relationship with Japan that a native Japanese would have had, but ultimately the locals have come to consider him a beloved part of history of Japan.

I’m of course not Hearn (and I’m sometimes scared shitless to think what the Japanese would think of these texts!), but I do think we share a quality of apreciating what some Japanese consider ”outdated” or even ”embarrassing” aspect of their country’s history and culture. I remember when in one of the museums I visited an older guide who spoke very good English said to me something like ”isn’t it kind of stupid how we Japanese worship old kings as gods”. I said to him that I didn’t think it’s stupid because before Christianity, Europeans arguably did the same thing. I didn’t want to debate finer points of polytheistic theology and it’s connection to material history, but I was a bit shocked by this attidute. I think it comes from much larger cultural trends and Japan’s complex relationship with the West.

Another quality I think I share with Hearn is that we both probably experienced something that made both of us interested in the numinous side of Japan. Experiences are experiences, and it’s easy to get entangled in egocentric interpretations or seek confirmation for daydreams. I am honestly probably quilty of such to some extent. Micahel Dylan Foster speculates in his Book of Youkai that some Western fans of youkai might be yearning for a kind of imaginary version of Japan where mysterious creatures still roam, which is ultimately unrealistic and othering. I do admit, I went to Japan seeking for something which I perceived not really existing anymore here. Sceptics can chalk it to confirmation bias, but I did find something that was much more strongly present there than here. I had felt it, and have since felt it here too, but there was an order of magnitude difference between the experiences. I think that the Japanese really, truly do take better care of the numinous than Western people do. The challenging geography also likely contributes to this. Ultimately there is a quality to this world that people who are immersed in a particular environment start to take aspects of it as the normal, and what is normal tends go to unapreciated. For me and Hearn, the numinous Japan was not normal, and therefore perhaps more perceptible. That isn’t to say that there aren’t Japanese who aren’t as or much, much more perceptive than I am or he was. Rather it’s that it’s easy to start taking things as self-evident.

I remember a few weeks after I returned from Japan I was visiting a nature preserve area by the sea. There was something slightly hard to describe there, a kind of very large rock outcropping by the beach which had been worn by centuries and millenia of water and wind into almost like a small path into the sea itself, just barely staying above the water line. I decided to take a walk there. To my surprise I found a large rock on it, which had a small sort of crescent-shaped erosion pattern on top of it that had filled up with water. The top had become very flat and smooth, almost table-like. On it, someone had placed three rocks. I felt it there and then, the place had something the Japanese would call a kami in it. And I understood others had felt it too, and tried to perhaps unconsciously build a kind of shrine or at least a marker to it.

This is not the only place I have felt it here. Some places I felt it even before going to Japan, I observed people making kind of spontaneous altars, some of them likely very much intended to be such. Things like magpie feathers and rocks being piled up on a tree stump, circles of cut flowers, branches and rocks being left on a local park, occult graffiti in urban liminal spaces. But some I felt only after returning. I discovered that a very old willow near me has it, a small urban forest with a three-pronged tree in it has it, and a local larger forest has it as a whole, but especially a stream there. An enormous mushroom that sprouted on a tree in a local park had it, and I was upset when I discovered it had been hacked off.

The point I guess I am trying to make is that I do feel there is something very real to what I have experienced, always has been, but that it has been good for me to question it, and to scrutinize my motives, experiences and to what extent I have been motivated by romantic notions or (positive) othering of Japan. Experiences change people, make us more sensitive to certain kinds of things. Did the Suwa Daimyojin reach out to me across time and space and beckon me to come there? I don’t know. It’s not exactly against at least certain modern interpretations of Shinto, where it’s thought that kami exist beyond human notions of time and space, and that they can leave the places they dwell in it. Did I become raptured by the Suwa mythology and travel there to meet the kami? That most objectively happened. Everything beyond that is so personal, subjective, experiental. Did I meet something that I had felt before elsewhere? I feel like I did. But others might have different narratives. Maybe it’s like a bewildered and confused fan stumbling upon a celebrity, who then decides to give the fan the time of the day, even though their relationship perhaps isn’t exactly as the fan imagined. I don’t know.

But whatever it was that happened to me in Suwa on that night when I was seized by visions of golden mist and white snakes and ancient tree roots and – yes, Kanako-sama - it was life-changingly, life-affirmingly powerful. That night when I was seized by an overwhelming sense of recognizing something vast and ancient and it recognizing me and accepting me as the newest branch of a very old tree, overcome by the feeling that I had returned home and that ”home” would no longer be something physical but a thing I carry with me. Experiences are experiences, but they change us. I was forever changed there and then. The how we change is more important than why. So much in this world is just genuinely unknowable to humans, stuck as we are in our perspectives. I don’t know what happened, and that is okay. It does not change the value or impact of the experience, nor will it change how I approach Suwa when I hopefully get to visit again.

And of course, as memorable as what I went through at Suwa is still just a part of this all...

The second point I would like to make, and perhaps a bit more briefly, is that I recently experienced a spate of events that felt unquestionably ”supernatural” after a good while of nothing of the sort happening. I had a premonition come true over the course of roughly a week. Something that had appeared to me in a vision during a shamanic trance journey during autumn appeared in physical reality. Or rather, two out of the three raw materials necessary for building it, as for instructions on how to use it appeared.

The workshop had themes and symbolism that was extremely resonant with certain things in my relationship with Touhou. Particular colors, symbolism, ideas and two celestial objects dear to me through Touhou emerged organicaly over the weekend without me having any input. There were also some not so Touhou-related weird occurences. I think we experienced a kind of group telepathy experience, or at least I felt like one participant’s thoughts and ideas regarding a particular topic which I had not thought of leaked into me during a process of tapping into the ”collective field”.

During one of the talks I idly spun a thread of fabric that separated itself from materials we were working around a rattler I had with me. I found around an hour later that it wound itself off the rattler and into a figure eight pattern lying on a blanket. In the process it had moved itself roughly 30 centimeters where I had put the rattler down. Considering I was present on my spot the whole time (and that the thread was wound around a device intended to make noise), I very much doubt it was in any way or capacity possible or someone in the workshop to do a weird prank on me. After a long while, I experienced some things that I feel had a miraculous quality. I dislike being this vague, but going into more details would essentially dox me.

It was quite magical and it made me wonder about the nature of time and to what extent the ”future” can leak into the ”past”, and what it means. I don’t have answers, I just feel like our ideas about linear time and quality of space probably aren’t right. I already had really powerful experiences related to time in the autumn, and I’ve previously had weird things involving physical objects happen in the past. In many ways the workshop felt like the endpoint of a loop that had been going on for a while, perhaps since the first workshop I attended. This all opens up the weird possibility that the powerful impact of the workshop leaked into the past and past me recognized similar symbols and objects of importance in Touhou, which led to me becoming interested in Japanese spiritual traditions, animisms, shamanism...and now that loop has closed. It’s a crazy thought, but I no longer can say it is an impossible thought.

Even more miraculous to me was that how little anxiety I had, both over the strange events, as well as interacting with other people. Even more miraculous is that lack of social anxiety feels more meaningful than lack of schizoing out over material reality acting weird. I feel like I am 100%, ok well, maybe 95% over the ”proof-seeking” phase after this. We live in a really strange world and that’s OK. I don’t know how things ”really” work and that’s OK. Even if things are weird, I think if you try to be positive and pro-social and take difficult and weird experiences as learning opportunities, everything will be ultimately OK.

When it comes to more mundane freakouts, at some point of my life I would have said that anxiety, particularly in social situations, is the defining quality of my personality and how I interact with the world. Maybe it is just an effect of growing up, but this was such a tremendous change to observe. It’s not like I hadn’t noticed changes in my personality in the recent years, but maybe something in the workshop just gave me the space of possibility for noticing it properly. I don’t think it’s necessarily a ”magical” change, simply growing up and having life experience of course has contributed to it. But I do think that the most recent leg of my journey, the one that includes maintaining this site, going to Japan, being some sort of a community organizer, I feel like it substantially accelerated this process in many ways.

The last point I want to make here I guess is that it’s this aspect of change in your in relation to others that in my opinion is what really matters. It’s really easy to get swept up in kind of solipsistic ”personal development” when it comes to spirituality. We are on an extremely fundamental level relational beings, our lives ultimately get their shape and meaning from our interactions with others. I think at it’s finest this all makes these relational aspects more visible, and breaks down the kind of prisons we like to construct for ourselves and others. I don’t really believe in some hippie vision of eternal love and harmony. This all attunes you towards nature too, and it’s full of competition, conflicting interests, paratisim, predation and death. But what I believe is that you can become more aware, insightful, considerate, emphatic and flexible. That you can advance when you need to advance, retreat when you need to retreat, be active when you need to be active, rest when you need to rest, talk when you need to talk and be quiet when you need to be quiet. That you don’t have to take up so much space when it isn’t your turn, but when it is your turn, you can fill up to the maximal extent possible.

I don’t know if there is some kind of one true system of morality to follow, or one right way to live, but I don’t think these kind of things should empower anyone to become a thief, murderer or molester. I felt during the workshop so intimately that all of my existence, probably all of our existence, is tied with cycles of violence that in some sense pit ourselves against ourselves, turning us into more and more fearful, resentful, bitter and sickly the more we embrace them. There are raw survival qualities that are sometimes needed, and the kind of animus that drives people to conquer can be a powerful motivating force. But I strongly feel that in excess these qualities become ”hellish” and start entrapping people. Even predatory animals don’t spend all their time hunting, yet so many of us are asked to do our version of ”hunting” all the time. I guess this is what I would really want people to do, to escape ”hell”, whatever that means. It feels like to some extent I have been able to partially do it, maybe 10-15%, and even that is revolutionary. It feels like leaving a really shitty PvP server and entering the creative mode. I however also think my means of helping people are fairly limited, both now and in the future. But who knows, maybe someone will be inspired by these texts to take a shot at existing their version of a really shitty PvP server.

This has been mostly a collection of incomplete thoughts. What I have been going through will take time to process. But things are very much looking up, I have much more energy, certain things that were causing tension, friction and waste of energy exited my life, I feel like I have to struggle with myself and the external world less, and that things have become more clarified. And what is unclear, I can live with the lack of clarity.

During the first journey of the workshop I experienced a kind of greatest hits compilation of the shamanic journey process I took for a month before the lunar new year. I can’t remember if I wrote about it in the previous entry or not, so here’s a recap. I spent a month doing a trance journey and eating vegetarian foods before the lunar new year. During that time I experienced some powerful journeys, some which were complete duds, and some repeating themes, like being repeatedly eaten by Tengu and being shown a tree sappling. During one of the last journeys of that process I saw out of all possible things Lily White. She repeated ”spring is coming” over and over again. Among other things, I relived this encounter with her during that first journey of the workshop, but it was more and more intense. Her voice grew into a powerful chorus, accompanied by other fairies. It was only later that I learned there were two people in the group who had some kind of relationship with fairies and that they constantly saw them in their journeys, in and outside of this workshop.

I don’t know what I experienced, what we experienced, I don’t know who or what this ”Lily White” is, but I do know that the message, ”spring is coming” is plainly and objectively true. And sometimes something like this is all you really need to hear. Marvin Singh wrote that despite his experiences with shamanism, he doesn’t believe in it allowing anyone access to some kind of external information, because his own experiences felt clearly internal and the figures he met didn’t provide any kind of groundbreaking insight. I don’t know if my experiences are fully internal or not, but I know sometimes we need to hear and experience simple things, even platidutes, over and over and over and over again untill we truly, completely, totally internalize them. Spring is coming. Spring is coming. Spring is coming. Spring is coming. Spring is coming. The horrible winter did not last forever. Nothing in this world is permanent.

I won’t go too much into details about what is coming for the Archive in the future, because I’m trying to learn to plan less. A section about the youkai is however coming, and I have been reading Michael Dylan Foster’s excelent Book of Youkai lately. I think it’s even better for non-academics and even better illustrates how ZUN’s writing draws from Japanese youkai studies, because Foster includes a broader overview of youkai scholars. It also comes with a kind of youkai ”bestiary”, which I not yet gotten to. There’s a few more specific concepts I would like to try to find about in English, like Kazuhiko Komatsu’s ”collective illusions” and youkai as othered people, and Miyata Noboru’s ideas about ”borders” in relation to youkai. But I’m not sure at this point how much youkai studies has been translated into English as I have not yet looked into it. Even if there wouldn’t be, I think I’m pretty comfortable starting work on the youkai section after this, supplemented by research into more specific types of youkai that inhabit Gensokyo as necessary.

There’s a billion sidequests I could do, like studying in more depth about how Confucianism impacted Japan, or studying academic literature on otaku culture, or trying to sus out more in depth the impact and dissemination of Western occult thinking in line with ZUN’s ideas about power of belief, but at some point I have to draw a border of my own, the border of what will go between book covers and what will not. But that remains to be seen. I have all of spring to sow the seeds and summer for the harvest.

I hope you have a pleasant and fertile spring.
-Emi