A friend emailed me to say that a Buddhist temple 'Konji chou in' in Kamakura, Japan, was destroyed by fire. The temple is famous for its fire-protection talismans. What?! Are you kidding me? I guess the priest wasn't carrying one! No way.

Last month, I used a multi-agent AI system to create a fake persona that pretended to be me posting on this blog, similar to Torquemada. While it isn't my original idea—it actually traces back to Gödel's incompleteness theorems—I’m not particularly smart when it comes to mathematics.

Reviewing those posts created by the fake persona using the AI system has made me realize that I sounded like Tomás de Torquemada!

I appreciate Wakayama University for their generosity in publishing the database that contains the diary of Lord Miura Nagato-no-kami Tametoki. My investigation of the individual was successful because I gained access to the database.

I particularly appreciate Shuya Nakamura: Tea ceremony in the official diary of Murata Tametoki, house elder of the Kishu domain, Cultural Studies of Chanoyu (Journal of Kyoto University), Vol. 6. pp. 69-136, January 2026. I found the name of the individual in the page of 129 of this article. Unfortunately, the entire content of the article is written in Japanese.

Last night, I successfully identified the individual whose name was inscribed inside the lid of the wooden box. This breakthrough came after I shifted from automated AI searches in samurai registers to the manual examination of Tokugawa family documents available online through museum databases. Every single piece of this jigsaw puzzle is finally complete! I'm excited to share the news with him tomorrow, which happens to be a bank holiday in Japan. Meanwhile, disappointing as it is for someone working in this very field, I can't help but think: what a miserable job the AI did compared to a human eye! 

Today, I received an urgent call from a friend living in Kyoto asking for my help. He, a renowned art dealer, discovered a tea container inside a wooden box dating back to 1836, and it once belonged to a treasury of the Kishu Tokugawa family. The calligraphy style is classical compared to our modern writing. Although we have succeeded in deciphering all the kanji, the issue is that the identity of the name they spell out remains a mystery. I searched for the person in various registers of samurai from the Tokugawa period, but failed to identify him. Hmm... I have never seen such a name in the past. This will require further investigation. Meanwhile, I have no idea when people started calling me an art authenticator. Does this mean it’s time to quit lawyering and research, and start a new career in Kyoto?

We celebrate July 16th, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The Blessed Virgin Mary presented St. Simon Stock with the Brown Scapular, which is worn over the shoulder and associates us with the spiritual family of the Carmelite Order. It is a sacramental devotion that fosters a fraternity among the brothers and sisters who wear it. We rarely see people wearing it these days.