To cultivate is, maybe, to replicate your own heat into someone — and one day be surpassed.
1. I found someone I absolutely want to cultivate
Aoashi has this monologue.
"I found someone I absolutely want to cultivate."
I can't forget this one line. Where does the urge to raise someone come from? Not scoring yourself, not winning yourself, but the heat of wanting to see another person grow. A heat that should have worn down, lighting again at the meeting of one person.
In #5 I read "discover / make them see." This time, the next step — after discovering, turning to the side that cultivates. Two books alongside: Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene and Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
2. The Selfish Gene: the replicator's view
Dawkins's The Selfish Gene recast life as "a vehicle for genes."
The protagonist isn't the individual. It's the self-replicator — that which gets copied and tries to spread. The gene, to survive, builds a body as its vehicle. Living things are the gene's means of replicating itself.
And the book's longest reach is one word at the end. Meme. If the gene is biology's replicator, culture has its replicators too. A melody, a turn of phrase, a form, a thought, a gesture, a heat. They get copied from person to person, spreading head to head.
I want to look at cultivation through this eye. To cultivate is to replicate the meme inside you — a view of soccer, a way of carrying yourself, a heat — into another person.
3. To cultivate is to inherit a meme
Aoashi's coaches aren't only teaching technique.
What Fukuda conveys to players is something deeper. To believe "you are ones who grow." To see. To think. He's trying to copy that very stance into them.
"I can guide you, endlessly." More than technique rides on these words. The will to hand over, whole, the way of seeing the world that you believe in. This is meme inheritance itself.
And here, recall the Fukuda of #5. He was a man who relentlessly demanded verbalization, yet guarded the un-verbalizable hunch. To cultivate is, I think, to hand over both — the meme you can word (form, theory) and the meme you can't (hunch, heat).
4. The blissful moment: when the copy surpasses the original
There seems to be a "blissful moment" for the one who cultivates.
It's when a player you taught surpasses your own imagination.
There's a strange paradox here. Usually, if you hand something over, the giver is above. Yet in cultivation, the handed-over meme surpassing the original, at the copy site, becomes the greatest joy. Being overtaken becomes bliss.
Through Dawkins's eye, this is natural. Success for a replicator isn't the original keeping its throne. It's multiplying at the copy site and spreading farther than the original. When the student surpasses you, the meme, for the first time, leaves your single body and begins to run on its own.
The true nature of the heat to cultivate is probably this. Not that you win, but that you want to see your heat continue beyond you.
5. The will of the one being cultivated
Up to here, I've looked at the cultivator's heat. But a meme doesn't replicate on one side's heat alone. It takes hold only when the receiver chooses it.
Ashito wasn't a player who only waited to be given. He finds, himself, the person to aim at.
That person is Akihiro Shiba. A player who fights with his head, called the "thinking reed."
Ashito looks at him and decides, "I'll become this person." The moment whom-to-inherit is set, the path opens all at once.
This meshes with Dawkins's view too. A meme isn't something you push into a host. The host's side chooses which meme to replicate. The cultivated isn't an empty vessel. They choose, by their own will, whose what to inherit.
So cultivation isn't one-way. Only when the cultivator's "I want to hand it over" and the cultivated's "I want to inherit this" mesh does the meme replicate. Just as, in #5, the discoverer and the one who makes them see were accomplices — the one who cultivates and the one being cultivated are accomplices too.
6. The Protestant Ethic: giving your life to the organization
One more book, Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Weber asked why, in the West, "to keep working" became an ethic. The key is Beruf — vocation, or calling. To throw your whole self into work as a mission given by God; that becomes proof of faith.
In Aoashi, a love close to this calling appears again and again.
"I want to stay here forever." These are the words of an aging coach, near retirement. The very end of a career. He's stepping down, yet this ground alone he doesn't want to let go of. The place where young coaches will go on raising many children — there, even so, he wants to stay. Not mere company loyalty. Close to the last prayer of a person who gave a whole life to cultivation.
Cultivation has no quick returns. You may not be rewarded within your own lifetime. That you can still keep at it for a lifetime is because of Beruf — the explanation-free conviction that "this is what I do." And the aging coach's "I want to stay here forever" is, I think, the quiet prayer at the far side of a calling lived to its end.
And at the end of that life, words like these spill out.
"Even without me, it'll be passed on." Here, the thread from #2 ties into one. A life given over doesn't vanish when the person leaves. Because the handed-over meme — heat, form, way of seeing — keeps living inside the next generation. To live a calling to its end is, maybe, to leave behind what gets passed on even after you're gone. "I'm satisfied now" can be said, I think, only when you've truly seen that it carried over.
7. Beware the iron cage
But Weber left a frightening prophecy too. The iron cage.
Even diligence that began from a calling, as the age turns, loses its first faith and purpose. What remains is just a self-perpetuating system, spinning on. Working without knowing why. The means becomes the end.
Cultivation has the same trap. "Raising people" turns, somewhere along the way, into "KPIs for cultivation's sake." Devotion to the organization turns into "an organization for the organization's sake." The place meant to pass on heat falls into a place that measures heat. The calling becomes a cage.
What unlocks it is, probably, the stance of the Fukuda from #5. Treasuring verbalization (legibility), while guarding what can't be verbalized (heat, hunch). Inherit the form, but don't make it form for form's sake. The key to the cage is, probably, always whether you can re-ask "what is the cultivation for."
8. Trust, replicated sideways
A meme doesn't replicate only top-down (coach to player). It spreads sideways too.
Inherited heat and form move between players, too. One person's way of carrying themselves moves to the next, and becomes the team's "normal." By the time no one remembers who the origin was, it's already called culture.
A good organization's meme replicates sideways like this. One person's heat becomes the team's manner, becomes the air. Trust stops needing words and checks each time — that sense of believing the ball will come there without looking to confirm. The heat to cultivate, in the end, leaves the particular individual and comes to dwell in the place itself.
9. Observation, and the heat to cultivate
Finally, to OrbitLens.
The heat to cultivate is the hardest of all to show in numbers. Mentoring, trust, building the place, waiting for someone's comeback — none of it lands on the quarter's score. In EIS's words, this is dark matter. Mass you can't see, yet it holds civilization together.
The reignition of heat — "I found someone I absolutely want to cultivate." The blissful moment — "they surpassed my imagination." Both spill through the net of observation. Meme inheritance that can't be made legible.
So what's asked of the observing side is, I think, this. Don't nullify the heat to cultivate just because it can't be measured. And don't make cultivation into "KPIs for cultivation's sake," building an iron cage. That EIS tries to keep Anchor and Cleaner, maintenance and inheritance as important axes is close to here. To at least try to see the heat of those who pass it on — outside the ranking.
To cultivate is to replicate your own heat into someone, and one day be surpassed. And that heat, even uncounted, holds civilization together.
Can you be glad to be surpassed? That, probably, is what it means to turn to the side that cultivates.
Books
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene — Amazon
- Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — Amazon
Next
In #7, Aoashi again — the stage moves to Spain. Why is the ground that grows players so different? Strength may be not talent but a product of environment and accumulation. Read alongside Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and, again, Bourdieu's Distinction.
This is a personal reading of Aoashi (Yugo Kobayashi), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber).
The Japanese version lives on OrbitLens Library.
OrbitLens / machuz
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