Hi, my name is 😊😊. I’m going to be 😉 years old very soon. I was born and grew up in Japan.
I came to this country 18 years ago to marry a Welsh, with whom I later split.
I live with my 10-year-old daughter in 😊😊, a small town only 15 minutes away from Cardiff by train. I 😊😊 for a living but am planning to do something different.
I enrolled in this course mainly because I wanted to learn the methodology of critical thinking, but at the same time, with great hope of meeting and making friends with like-minded people, say, thinking people.
There’s a bit of backstory to my decision, and I hope you’ll kindly let me share it with you.
I started blogging during the 2020 lockdown. At first, it was an outlet for my creative works, such as drawings, cartoons, short stories and poems that I’d created for fun over the previous decade, but soon I ran out of stuff to upload. So, to fill the gaps between my creative works and keep my blog going, I began writing essays about my thoughts on history, philosophy, religion, science, etc.
Although I have always been a philosophical person throughout my life, I’d never studied philosophy in academic settings nor had anybody to share my thoughts with. I’d never felt the need to reach out to others for that purpose. How wrong was I!
My blog entries about philosophy - in a broad sense, I have to say - earned lots of views and brought stimulating comments from other bloggers who are often far more educated and knowledgeable than me. And this has had an enormous effect on me. With my knowledge rapidly broadened and my ability to think logically drastically improved, I feel I’m almost a different person now. I’ve finally learned that I’m happiest when engaging in intellectual conversations.
Until now, I’ve written and communicated only in the Japanese language, with Japanese people, and only online, but now I feel I should, and want to, talk to other philosophy-oriented people with different national or cultural backgrounds face to face. So here I am.
The topics of my interest are similar to those of the ancient Greek philosophers, such as the truth about time and space, the mind-body problem and religion. I’m fully aware that nowadays, all of these subjects have more or less been taken away from philosophers’ hands and passed over to specialists of various disciplines - theoretical physicists, neuroscientists, sociologists, and evolutionary anthropologists, to name a few. But nonetheless, I feel that philosophical speculation is still a powerful means to understand the world as a whole.