In this year-end episode, I reflect on a simple but often overlooked truth: real connection is not created by language alone. You can study a foreign language for years and still feel no bond with certain people, while sometimes sharing deep understanding with someone despite limited words. Communication goes beyond vocabulary and grammar—it rests on values, worldview, and shared emotional rhythm. I also explore how “being natural” or “speaking honestly” is often an act, especially in politics and public life. True understanding comes from sensing what lies beneath words. Thank you for listening this year, and I wish you a thoughtful and peaceful new year.

This episode explores what “confidence” really means in an age obsessed with self-esteem and certainty. Rather than treating confidence as strength, loudness, or unwavering belief, this talk reframes it as the willingness to act while fully accepting the possibility of being wrong. Drawing on everyday examples from work, politics, and self-help culture, the episode critiques performative confidence and exposes how apparent certainty often masks deep anxiety. True confidence, it argues, is quiet, flexible, and capable of revision. In an uncertain world, the ability to hold responsibility without clinging to absolute correctness becomes the most realistic and humane form of confidence.

In this episode, Shigeki analyzes why “lightness” becomes the optimal survival strategy inside Japanese corporations. This is not a personal attack or a moral critique, but a structural explanation. In organizations where decisions change frequently, responsibility is blurred, and evaluation criteria are unclear, taking everything seriously can lead to exhaustion. Those who survive tend to detach emotions from words, tolerate contradictions, and switch positions quickly. What appears as superficiality is actually a functional adaptation. This episode explains why sincere, logically consistent people often burn out—and why incompatibility with such systems is not a personal failure, but a mismatch of environments.