From a place with no inherited capital, how does an aesthetic sense rise?
1. The illusion of "a taste I chose"
A thought I keep returning to.
The things I like now — did I really choose them?
Leather goods, perfume, a certain kind of audio gear, the texture of wood grain, the thing people call functional beauty. They all have a definite feel inside me. If you asked me why I like them, I could put words to it. But could I say, flatly, that I chose them by my own will? Probably not.
I did the choosing. But the objects I came to like were shaped, somewhere deeper, before I got there.
2. Distinction — taste is formed by class and history
Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction is known for the claim that a person's taste and aesthetic sense are not pure individual preference, but formed by class and history.
Home environment, the group you belong to, education, what the people around you praise and what they look down on. These stack up, and "the things you'll come to like" are decided before you are. You feel "I like this" only afterward.
There's something uncanny here.
People want to treat their taste as an expression of individuality. Structurally, though, it's also a stamp of belonging. What you find beautiful exposes where you grew up, and who you grew up beside.
3. What catches me isn't "expensive," it's "trying to win with the price"
The sense of finding so-called luxury brands "good," of wanting them, doesn't quite register for me.
For a long time I thought of this as "I dislike expensive things" or "I dislike brands." But that wasn't accurate either. It's not aversion, nothing that strong. The "want" circuit just doesn't fire there.
And to be fair: many luxury brands have genuinely accumulated a craftsman's history. Materials, stitching, decades of trial and error. Real thought and history live in them. Dismissing that as "hollow prestige" is sloppy and inaccurate.
What I can't get onboard with is a different moment.
The moment that accumulated history gets used as a pedestal where the high price itself becomes the victory condition — "so it's expensive," "so it's above you." The moment the price, which should have been a result, swaps itself in as the purpose. The moment a craftsman's history gets repurposed into a token for status.
That's where I feel something cheap. The price is high, but the victory condition is cheap.
What draws me, by contrast, tends to share one quality.
Leather assembled by hand. A tool where the design intent overlaps perfectly with its function. A wood grain revised again and again. A perfume's structure reached after someone wrestled with it for a long time.
There, the history itself is the purpose. The price is a result, not the victory condition.
So what I'm observing isn't high versus cheap. It's whether thought and history are the purpose, or have been made into a pedestal for a token. This isn't a question of superior or inferior taste — it's a question of where the observation is focused.
4. Organizations have an aesthetic sense too
One step up in abstraction.
An aesthetic sense isn't only an individual matter.
Organizations have one too. What gets evaluated, what is felt as beautiful, what counts as "excellent."
Some organizations reward the person who posts flashy numbers; others reward the person tilling the strata. In some, the conspicuous win on a short timescale is what's beautiful; in others, it's the person who can write something that survives five years.
What an organization finds beautiful is its cultural capital itself. And like individual taste, it's formed by the history the organization has accumulated.
So for me, organization design is also a question of aesthetics. How to draw — on the structural side — what counts as "excellent," what counts as "contribution." Part of why I'm building OrbitLens, an apparatus for observation, sits here.
But this piece stays one step before that.
Where does an individual's aesthetic sense come from? If it's formed by class and history, then from a place with neither class nor history — does an aesthetic sense fail to rise at all?
5. An aesthetic that rises from a place with no class
I grew up on Kumejima.
A small island, about 7,000 people, thirty minutes by plane from the main island of Okinawa. It's geographically cut off from the "central" cultural capital. No classical concerts, no permanent contemporary-art exhibitions, no upper-class way of life nearby.
But please don't misread me. Kumejima is a wonderful place.
If anything, a different kind of richness was right there. The sea, the sky, the forest — all on the extension of daily life. The distance between the world and the body is very short. The smell of the tide, the angle of the light, the turn of the seasons, the presence of living things — you know them in the body before you know them as concepts.
And at night, the stars are absurdly close. The Milky Way that thins out in the city comes down whole, right over your head. — Here's a confession: the reason I keep talking about gravity and orbits and stars and the universe in OrbitLens is, probably, this night sky. To be clear, I'm no astronomer. It's just that I spent a little longer than most "seeing the universe with my body."
In hindsight, these were quite valuable cultural capital — only of a different kind than the "central" cultural capital Bourdieu discussed.
What was missing wasn't the richness itself. It was the route that connects that bodily richness to the wider world's aesthetics, stories, and concepts. Classical music, contemporary art, upper-class manners are part of that route — and they didn't reach Kumejima easily.
Following Bourdieu's scheme, the "central" aesthetic that would rise from my geographic position should be quite limited. From the inheritance machinery of cultural capital — home, school, local community — certain tastes simply don't come down.
And yet, there's a certain focus of observation left in me. At least, whether something "holds thought and history" or is "just a token," I observe unconsciously.
Where did it come from?
I arrive at one answer.
Manga.
6. Manga was a democratization device for cultural capital
Japan's manga culture has one property that stands out.
In Bourdieu's terms, aesthetic sense, cultivation, discernment, the manners of how to live are normally heavily dependent on home environment and class. Each class inherits its "correct" way to read, to listen, to carry oneself. For someone outside a class, accessing that cultural capital is structurally hard.
But in Japan, manga came to stand in a fairly strong position.
Berserk. Chi. Space Brothers. Aoashi. Vagabond. Slam Dunk. Hunter × Hunter. Attack on Titan. These aren't mere entertainment. They've distributed, at a national scale, an aesthetic of how to live, an ethic, heat, a way of facing defeat.
And per episode in a weekly magazine, it's astonishingly cheap. The collected volumes turn up everywhere — convenience stores, used bookshops, libraries. Almost ignoring regional gaps, the same work arrives with the same weight.
Honestly, my household wasn't wealthy at all. I didn't even have the bracket called "a child's allowance." And still, manga reached me. Volumes stacked at a friend's house. The sun-faded Shonen Jump in the waiting area of a barbershop. It came around even to a kid who couldn't buy it — manga had soaked that far into every corner of society. And as an adult, I'm still reading like crazy.
Of course, mass culture democratizing cultural capital isn't unique to Japan. The West has long had its own devices for spreading stories to the many — pulp fiction, comics, Hollywood, TV syndication. Claiming "only Japan is special" would be inaccurate.
Still, within all that, manga came to occupy a particularly strong position in Japan.
One reason is the breadth of what it carries. Beyond mere entertainment, it has distributed — at high density — an aesthetic of how to live, an ethic, heat, a way of facing defeat. Another is how thoroughly it crosses class. Per episode in a weekly magazine it's astonishingly cheap, and it soaked into every place: convenience stores, used bookshops, libraries, the barbershop waiting room. The world reached even the child of a home that class-wise "doesn't have it."
In that sense, manga functioned especially strongly as a democratization device for cultural capital in Japan. A boy on Kumejima could touch the same aesthetic as a boy in an upper-class Tokyo home. Reconsidered, that's an astonishing thing.
7. Manga's strength — it doesn't over-explain
Here, I want to think one step further about what was especially strong in manga.
Manga doesn't preach its ideas.
Guts's back in Berserk. Badeni's obsession in Chi. Musashi's emptiness in Vagabond. The quiet heat in Space Brothers. Ashito's field of vision in Aoashi.
None of them explain in words, "this is the right way to live." And yet, after reading, something stays in the body. Ethics and aesthetics enter not as thought, but as bodily sensation.
This is probably manga's particular strength. A paper or a critique hands you ethics as a concept. Manga lets ethics enter the body as experience, over a character's shoulder.
What enters as experience is strong against being imposed from outside. What's preached as "the right way to live" provokes resistance; the ethic that entered the body over Guts's back is hard to shake loose.
That an aesthetic rising from a place with no class could still hold a core — that depended heavily, I think, on this property of "entering as bodily sensation."
8. But the body alone wasn't enough
Manga placed an aesthetic in my body. But something that only entered the body is hard to handle as is.
"Why is this beautiful?" "What is this heat made of?" "Why did this organization break?" Unless I put what the body knows first into words, draw it out as structure, I can't share it with others, and I can't reproduce it myself.
What filled that gap was thought and philosophy books.
Bourdieu, Weber, Polanyi, Heidegger. Or Kahneman, Diamond, Harari. They placed concept-names onto what I'd been receiving from manga in the body. "Cultural capital." "The iron cage." "Gestell." "Finite and infinite games."
What's interesting is that the two reach the same place from opposite directions.
Reading Thinking, Fast and Slow alongside Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, this structure comes into view: a person takes a structure trained in System 2 (slow, logical) and, through repetition, sinks it into System 1 (fast, intuitive). Mastery is the state of a concept having descended into the body.
In terms of order, for me it went like this:
- First, manga placed an aesthetic as bodily sensation (System 1)
- Later, thought books gave it the name of a concept (System 2)
To be clear, this is the order in which I received them, not the order the books were written. Bourdieu and Weber were both written long before any manga I read. It's just that within me, one person, the body knew first and the concept caught up afterward.
In that sense, the two aren't separate things. They're the same single observation, confirmed from different entrances. The ethic I received over Guts's back, and Heidegger's "technology turns people into resources," are layered in the same strata inside me.
So this reading log moves back and forth between the manga shelf and the thought-book shelf. The medium doesn't matter. Checking what I received in the body against what I received in concept, on the same desk. That's the actual work of this series.
9. Reading to extract structure
What I want to do in this series isn't to re-read works as a fan.
From manga and from thought books alike, I want to try a reading that extracts structure. Both shelves, read as sample cases of psychological OS and organizational OS.
For instance, from the manga shelf —
- Berserk — the danger of community and dream. The moment an ideal-realizing OS turns a community into an offering (organizational OS)
- Chi. — the ethic of pursuing truth. An incorrect answer isn't meaningless; ethics lives in hesitation (psychological OS)
- Aoashi — organizational structure and field of vision. How a role connects to the whole-system optimum (organizational OS)
- Space Brothers — quiet heat and support. How the heat of the unspectacular person holds up a community (psychological × organizational OS)
- Blue Giant — the purity of heat. Moving on inner motive alone, not outside approval (psychological OS)
- Vagabond — the dialogue with oneself. How the definition of strength turns from outward to inward (psychological OS)
And from the thought-book shelf —
- Distinction (Bourdieu) — taste is formed by class and history. The starting point of this very piece
- Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) — System 1 and System 2. A concept descends into the body and becomes intuition
- Homo Ludens (Huizinga) — play sits at the root of culture. What a civilization you can seriously play in looks like
- Sapiens (Harari) — civilization is made of shared fiction. The myth and aesthetic an organization holds
- Imagined Communities (Anderson) — a nation is a shared imagining. A common language makes a faceless community
- The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) — culture propagates as memes. The speed gap between good culture and bad
- Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond) — the difference between civilizations is set by environmental structure. Before blaming people, look at structure
- Capital (Marx) — when creativity gets absorbed into the capital-multiplying machine
- The General Theory (Keynes) — demand and animal spirits. The hope and fear that move a market
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) — when profit becomes an ethic. The iron cage
- The Great Transformation (Polanyi) — the market isn't natural. Re-embedding profit into the human
- The Gift (Mauss) — civilization is held by circulation. From the duty to repay, to the responsibility to circulate
- Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Hirschman) — three reactions to discontent. The safety valve that keeps a community from sliding into domination
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) — the moment observation slides into domination, and the ethic that holds it back
- Seeing Like a State (Scott) — when legibility kills local knowledge. Complexity isn't noise, it's resilience
- The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger) — technology shifts how the world appears. Which apparatus will OrbitLens become
- Finite and Infinite Games (Carse) — the difference between a game to win and a game to keep playing
None of these as mere impressions, but as sample cases of individual psychological OS and organizational OS. I won't thin out the weight of the original. If anything, by restating in my own words the precision of the structure a work drew, I want to taste it once more.
This is probably also, for me, a return of the gift. As someone who received an aesthetic from manga and concepts from thought books, I want to put both back into the language of structure, and set them down as a clue for someone else's observation.
10. What isn't observed isn't inherited
One last thing.
What this series wants to touch is, in the end, a problem of observation.
What you feel as beautiful is decided by the accumulation of observation. What you feel as "strong," "excellent," "sincere" is decided by the accumulation of observation too. An aesthetic with no route of observation has no reproducibility.
Manga distributed a route of observation to the children of Japan. Across the gap of class, it let them touch the same heat, the same ethic, the same weight of defeat. This is, I think, one civilization.
Thought books then placed concept-names onto that observation lodged in the body. Both, in the sense of handing over a route of observation, are the same. The medium was merely split into body and concept.
As one person who received both, I want to put what I got into words once more, and set it down. Checking what I knew in the body against what I knew in concept, on the same desk. That's the motive behind this reading log.
Next
In #1, I'll take up the Golden Age arc of Berserk.
On the theme "when an ideal-realizing OS turns a community into an offering," I want to read Griffith's strength as a meaning-generating apparatus, and the structure where that very strength flips into danger — set alongside a few cases from real organizations.
This series quotes Uoto's manga Chi. — About the Movement of the Earth (チ。―地球の運動について―, Shogakukan), among other works.
The Japanese version lives on OrbitLens Library.
OrbitLens / machuz
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