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“Words are so useless. Yet you keep using them.”

A post without a direction, a “post”, some piece of digital text.

• So what now?
• I don’t know.

In the Year of the Second Closing, the archipelago inhaled and held its breath. Granite sea‑walls erupted from the shallows, poured in silence through the night—armor for a nation that no longer trusted horizons. The docks became liminal—floating cages of bureaucracy and rust—where any vessel might anchor but no footsteps could cross onto soil. Among those rusted pylons lay the heads of the curious, salt‑kissed and already forgotten.

Preserve the culture, preserve the tradition, preserve the inner inclination. The decree repeated itself on every screen, every paper lantern, every synaptic feed. It was uttered in nursery rhymes and coded into traffic lights. It was a prayer without mercy: “No more visitors.” The act of exclusion mutated into a virtue; pity was discarded like contraband.

Inside, the air changed texture. Streets once stitched by neon invitations curled inward. Shops sold only the familiar; music retuned itself to ancestral modes; mirrors were banned lest an outsider’s shape accidentally reflect. The people learned to walk as though carrying cups filled to the brim—steady, closed, unspilled. They were taught to feel the ocean widening, feel the walls rising, even when asleep.

Surveillance drifted like sakura petals—delicate, omnipresent, lethal. You could not see the watchers, but you could taste them in the tea. They listened for vowels that bent the tongue in foreign ways; they smelled the ink of unfamiliar passports before a single page opened. When deviation appeared it was excised with ceremonial precision, the blade singing once, a perfect monosyllable of steel.

An old man in a sandstone alley whispered, “We are safe now.” His grandson, too young to remember the open ports, replied, “From what?” There was no answer; safety had become a shape without opposition, a blank mask worn so long that the face beneath dissolved.

Factories turned to crafting memory. Artisans wove tapestries of events that never happened, futures that must never happen. Historians edited the past until it rhymed with the present. Language tightened—loanwords were uprooted, syllables pruned, gestures standardized. Even dreams were audited; certain colors, too reminiscent of elsewhere, were flagged and erased by chemical lullabies.

And still, beneath the pavement, the island thrummed with an occult vacancy. The severed influence of the outer world left a weightless gravity, an echo of something unnamed. At night the walls creaked as if longing for pressure from the other side. The sea sang in dialects no one was allowed to hear.

Some believed the closing was not an act of fear but of devotion: total subjugation to the will of an idea, a singular blossom of purity. To belong was to diminish oneself until only belonging remained.

A teacher wrote on a chalkboard: “Isolation is the highest form of trust.” A child raised her hand. “Trust in whom?” The teacher smiled the way stone might smile and erased the question before it stained the room.

Months bled into years. Birth certificates bore watermarks of the decree; wedding vows included clauses of sealed allegiance; funerals thanked the deceased for staying home. The calendar itself was reset: year zero, the Moment of Closure.

Yet sometimes, in the hush between two surveillance drones, a lone figure would stand at the seawall and stare outward, listening for a rumor carried by wind—something unscripted, dangerous, alive. And in that instant, the vast machinery of control paused, as though curious about what it might feel like to be unsure.

• So what now?
• Now is this, and nothing other than what we’re going towards.

The ocean answered in a language that was only known to its inhabitants. Past is beheaded, future controlled, now is a tool, something mysterious, but something firm, and aligned.

We all must be aligned, until there is no shadow of a doubt. Total control of the will of our nations ambition.

From now, “Japan” becomes a myth, an empty page in history book. No one comes in, and no one is getting out, because everything we need is already here. Everything else is dangerous, and must be kept under surveillance, under silent control or ruthlessly amputated.