Hello. I write under the name Rikutsu-Kone-Taro.
I am a former Japanese physician, now spending my second life exploring whatever genuinely interests me: driving, boating, sailing, history, psychology, economics, technology, society, and much more.
This site is where I try to understand those subjects through a combination of experience, structure, probability, and human behavior.
The name Rikutsu-Kone-Taro is intentionally a little self-deprecating. In Japanese, it suggests someone who likes to connect things through reasoning—perhaps sometimes a little too much.
That is also a fair description of what I do here.
What This Site Is About
This site is essentially a record of my intellectual wandering.
I observe something, become curious about it, try to understand how it works, organize the problem in my own way, and write down the result.
The subjects may range from the handling characteristics of a car to the behavior of a boat in waves, from Japanese history to human psychology, social systems, medicine, or personal finance.
At first glance, the topics may seem unusually scattered.
They are.
But the way I approach them is fairly consistent.
I tend to look at the world through the interaction of four elements:
- Structure — institutions, mechanisms, technology, physical laws, and other frameworks
- Conditions — the environment, circumstances, timing, and constraints of a particular situation
- Probability — uncertainty, variation, chance, and things that cannot be predicted perfectly
- Human beings — people making imperfect decisions with limited information and limited rationality
Much of what happens in the world seems to emerge from some combination of these four.
That is the perspective behind most of the articles on this site.
Experience and Theory
I do not believe theory alone is enough.
Experience alone is not enough either.
I try to combine the two.
When I write about driving, for example, I may begin with what I actually experience while driving a Toyota GR Yaris on a circuit, and then try to understand it through vehicle dynamics, mechanical structure, and driver inputs.
When I write about boating or sailing, I often begin with what happens on the water and then work backward toward the physics, mechanics, seamanship, or decision-making involved.
The same approach applies to subjects farther away from machines.
History, psychology, economics, social institutions, and human behavior can also become clearer when the structure of a problem is separated from the individual events occurring within it.
I am not trying to present myself as an authority on every subject I write about.
Quite the opposite.
My aim is to take something that interests or puzzles me, examine it carefully, and construct an explanation that makes sense to me.
Sometimes that explanation may also help another person see the subject from a slightly different angle.
If that happens, this site has done something worthwhile.
A Short Biography
My path through life has not been particularly straight.
I left high school before graduating, later passed the Japanese high-school equivalency examination, and spent several years in the United States during my teens and twenties, where I received my first university education.
After returning to Japan and spending some time in working life, I entered medical school.
I obtained my medical license at the age of 35 and worked clinically for many years.
While continuing medical practice, I also studied finance and management in graduate school and completed an MBA.
Later, I entered a doctoral program in the social sciences at a Japanese national university. I eventually withdrew after concluding that the direction of my research and that of my academic supervisor could not be reconciled.
Around the age of 60, I decided to bring my career as a physician to a close and devote more of my remaining time to things I wanted to explore for myself.
That is where I am now.
What I Do These Days
My interests are broad, and I deliberately allow them to remain broad.
I operate a 30-foot powerboat, sail a yacht, practice SUP foiling, and spend time improving my driving technique with two Toyota GR Yaris cars.
I also read and think about subjects such as probability, philosophy, psychology, economics, history, religion, technology, and society.
My approach could probably be described as:
broad, relatively shallow, but serious enough to keep asking questions.
I enjoy becoming deeply interested in something without feeling that every interest must become a profession or academic specialization.
Curiosity itself is sufficient justification.
My Values
The values I place most importance on are human dignity, freedom, equality, and peace.
But I do not think freedom or peace can exist without cost.
Freedom brings responsibility for the consequences of one’s choices.
Peace also requires institutions, restraint, judgment, and sometimes considerable effort to maintain.
I therefore try not to use these words merely as pleasant ideals.
One of my personal principles is:
Before trying to change the country or society, examine what I can change in myself.
Another is even simpler:
Before complaining that the scenery is ugly, clean the area in front of your own house.
Neither principle solves every social problem.
They are simply reminders that criticism is easiest when responsibility belongs to someone else.
Why I Write
I started this site in 2020.
Its purpose has gradually become clearer.
There are three main reasons I continue writing.
First, writing forces me to organize thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain vague.
Second, I hope that something I write may be useful to someone else, or may at least give a reader a new way of looking at a familiar subject.
Third, I enjoy seeing measurable evidence that the site is being read.
Page views are only numbers, but they also tell me that someone found a subject worth opening and spending time on.
That feedback encourages me to think more carefully, explain things more clearly, and improve the next article.
Behind the numbers are real people who decided that something here was worth a few minutes of their time.
I find that deeply rewarding.
How I Use AI
I use AI extensively when researching, organizing arguments, testing ideas, checking inconsistencies, and improving writing.
I think of AI as a kind of second thinking apparatus.
But the opinions, judgments, arguments, and final responsibility for everything published here remain mine.
AI can help me examine an idea.
It cannot take responsibility for what I choose to publish.
I therefore try to distinguish clearly between established facts, reasonable inference, personal interpretation, and speculation.
I may certainly make mistakes, and when I discover one, I try to correct it.
What I do not intentionally publish are fabricated claims or deliberately misleading articles designed merely to attract clicks.
For First-Time Visitors
If you arrived here through one of the English-language articles, welcome.
This is originally a Japanese-language site, and most of its roughly one thousand articles are still written in Japanese.
The English section is gradually expanding, particularly in areas where the subject itself is not specifically Japanese and may be useful or interesting to readers elsewhere.
You are welcome to start anywhere that catches your interest.
Cars, driving technique, boats, sailing, technology, history, society, psychology, or something entirely different—the subjects may change, but the underlying habit remains the same:
observe the world, identify the structure behind what is happening, think it through, and try to understand it a little better.
That is what Rikutsu-Kone-Taro is doing here.