It is out
Itadakimasu — A Prayer is now up on YouTube.
I finished this track at the end of 2025. Unusually for me, the words came first and the melody followed. I remember working in a different order from normal.
In a place shared with deer and boar
Since moving deep into the Japanese mountains, families of deer and wild boar have visited my garden almost daily.
Vegetables I raised with care get eaten the moment they put out new shoots. Even fenced off with something simple, it is routine to find them eaten by the next morning. People here have struggled with this kind of animal damage for many years.
So in recent years two-metre steel fencing has gone up around the whole area. There is the question of how it looks, but thinking about maintaining it over the long term, this was also a period when I wondered whether it was truly necessary.
Questions with no answer
This is an area full of animals, so I have also seen the moments in which they die.
At those times I feel how precious life is, and at the same time I think about something like the resolve each creature needs in order to live, and something like sheer helplessness. I turned questions with no answer over and over.
Around the same period I was seeing the word "war" more often, and I think that added to the hours spent thinking.
I am well aware that the historical background, each country's history and its religious outlook are not resolved by lining up pleasant sentiments.
Things closer to home
Problems on that scale are beyond any individual. But conflict exists close to home as well. And there is a great deal that stops being self-evident after you assumed it always would be.
I want people to recognise again that their own life and another's are the same thing. And for that reason, not to treat life lightly. That is what I think.
Life connects onward by being received. I would be glad if Itadakimasu — A Prayer became an occasion to think about what that word means.
(Itadakimasu is what people in Japan say before eating — literally "I humbly receive." It is spoken to the lives that became the meal, not only to the cook.)
What comes next
I will keep making them carefully, one song at a time. Production is slow, but I would be glad of your support.
We receive life, and we carry life onward.
