On the “Heretic” Within

Rather late to the party, I have been watching the anime “Orb: On the Movements of the Earth.”

It is a contrary streak of mine, but I don’t much like jumping on whatever is popular.
One of my quiet pleasures is to enjoy yesterday’s trends in private, once the world has cooled on them.

Of course I knew about “Orb.”
With Sakanaction’s theme song adding to the buzz, I imagine a great many people were watching it in real time when it aired.

It seems the wave that came late has finally reached me (laughs).

I started a few days ago and am only around episode five, but it is already very good.
There was a rumor that watching it makes you smarter, and I can see why.

The story is set in fifteenth-century Europe. Heliocentrism — the idea, now known to everyone, that the Earth turns — was rejected on religious grounds in favor of a geocentric universe.
Anyone who advocated or tried to study heliocentrism was branded a “heretic” and, for defying God, put to death.

It is the story of people who risked their lives to prove that the Earth moves.

I won’t say more for fear of spoilers, but the way a single theory that no one at the time dared doubt could stir such passion in people, and be passed from hand to hand like a baton, is genuinely moving.

Not a surface heat, but a passion that keeps a quiet flame burning.
A relentless curiosity, passed from person to person, that goes on to change society itself.

The era and the circumstances are different, but is it only me who feels that a society of black-and-white thinking
looks a great deal like our own today?

Our lives may not be under threat, but I suspect there are a great many people who know they are “heretics” in some way, and yet simply drift through life regardless.

Being the same as everyone else does offer a place to rest for a while.
But even if you can settle there, the sense that something is off never goes away.

Who am I, really? What am I living for?
I believe the answer can only be felt through a kind of “heresy” — being yourself — which lies far from any comfortable settling.

To change the subject a little, I think the same is true of a company when it comes to “passing things on.”

The reason we exist is “to endure.”
And to have endured means nothing other than that, whatever the times, our customers have trusted us and continued to do business with us.

For that, every employee keeps making the effort and keeps taking on challenges.

From person to person, the baton of passion is passed on. Through the name of the company, the traces of people’s lives come to be felt in all kinds of moments, and are carried into the future.

I want to see as many of those moments as I can, together with all of you.

Passing the baton, and building a wonderful future with our own hands.
Whatever comes, facing forward.