From meaning to rhythm. The bird's-eye view wasn't a talent he was born with — maybe it was a perception that grows.
1. Aoashi is a story about vision
Yugo Kobayashi's Aoashi is, I think, a story about perception wearing the shape of a soccer manga.
Ashito Aoi, up from Ehime, is a forward starved for goals. He wants to score. To go forward. To draw in the ball and make the net shake. The boy's heat points straight ahead.
Fukuda, a J-league youth coach, picks him up. What Fukuda saw wasn't Ashito's finishing. It was a vision that seems to watch the pitch from above — a perception of space itself, one Ashito didn't even know he had.
What this manga keeps drawing isn't, I think, a "getting good" story. It's a story about how seeing changes. The same pitch, the same twenty-two players, the same ball. And yet, from one day on, Ashito starts to see something entirely different.
2. The Philosophy of Sense: from meaning to rhythm
Here I want to set down Masaya Chiba's The Philosophy of Sense (センスの哲学).
"Good sense," "bad sense" — we use these words like an inborn talent. That person has it, I don't. Words of resignation.
Chiba quietly unpicks that. Sense isn't the property of a chosen few. It's the power to perceive detail, and it can be grown. Grown how? The turn at the book's center is this:
Catch a thing not as meaning, but as rhythm.
Usually we receive what's in front of us through "what does this mean." What is this picture trying to say. What is this dish for. This move — what's the strategy. Meaning — message, purpose, story. We summarize the world with it.
The entrance to sense is to suspend that summary for a moment. Before meaning, feel the strength and weakness, the placement, the intervals, the movement. Chiba calls that rhythm. Before judging good or bad, just watch how a thing is moving there.
3. What started to become visible to Ashito
Ashito's first field of view was made of meaning.
The ball: "a thing to score with." Space: "where I break through." Teammates: "the ones who pass to me." Everything organized toward the meaning called the goal. Leaning forward, narrow. He watches the pitch as the hero of a scoring story.
What Fukuda opens is what lies before that. Peel the ball off of meaning and watch the whole placement and flow of the pitch. Who is where, which space is open, which way the opponent's weight is tilting. Not the single point of a goal, but the movement the twenty-two make together.
This is almost the same thing happening as Chiba's turn "from meaning to rhythm." Ashito's bird's-eye view, I think, is a perception that stops summarizing the world by the goal (meaning) and watches it as placement (rhythm).
And what matters is that it's not a talent complete from the start. The aptitude is there. But what Aoashi draws across many volumes is the process of that perception growing, little by little, through questions and repetition. Sense isn't given; it grows. The manga and the philosophy book are saying the same thing in different words.
4. Position change: a cruel re-placement
Early in the story, Fukuda hands Ashito a cruel verdict.
Quit being a forward. You'll play defender.
To a boy who came all this way to score, he says "you're on the side that defends." He takes the "scoring story" that sat at the center of the dream out of his hands. Ashito rages. Of course he does. His meaning was taken.
But Fukuda could see it. Ashito's bird's-eye view lives better from a position that watches the whole from behind than waiting for goals at the front line. Not a perception that charges forward, but one that folds the pitch in from the back. That's exactly why he placed him in the rear.
This overlaps with the core of The Philosophy of Sense. Peel meaning away once, and re-place it as rhythm. Only when the meaning-tag of "the scoring hero" is removed does Ashito's perception begin to move at its true range. Not by taking the placement away, but by changing it, the way of seeing itself changes.
What's cruel is that in that moment, the rhythm isn't visible to him yet. Only the pain of having meaning taken arrives first. The point of the re-placement can only be understood afterward.
And behind that cruelty, a kindness hides too. Fukuda was sure Ashito would come to enjoy playing defender.
"The one who'll enjoy it most is — you, Ashito." Even as he handed down the cruel verdict, Fukuda had already seen where this boy's joy lay. And indeed —
"Defense…!! This is so much fun." In the re-placed position, Ashito properly finds play. Fukuda's call rested on a conviction — that Ashito could play even on defense. That's why the cruelty of peeling meaning away could, at the same time, become kindness.
A line can be drawn here. A reassignment that leaves no room for play is, sometimes, necessary for an organization too. But that one is merely cruel. Fukuda's re-placement was kind because, beyond it, he had clearly seen the room for play the boy didn't yet know.
5. Coach Fukuda moves between the thinker and the philosopher
Read Aoashi as a theory of leadership, and Fukuda's conduct is fascinating. He moves between two distinct stances.
One is the thinker. He doesn't teach the answer. He places only a question. "Why did you run there?" "What was visible to you just now?" Instead of handing over the correct answer, he leaves the margin for a player to notice on his own. Realization can't be given to someone else. The way of seeing changes only inside the person. So Fukuda often waits in silence.
The other is the philosopher. A decision like a position change isn't handed over as a question. It's declared. You'll play defender. In it lives an unyielding will toward his ideal image of a team — soccer where everyone thinks, where the whole pitch moves as a single perception. The face of the side that defines concepts and decides.
Neither of these is the right one. A coach of questions alone can't erect a structure; it looks gentle, but sometimes it's just fleeing from the decision. A coach of declarations alone kills realization; players obey, but the way of seeing doesn't change. Fukuda can grow players because he can move between the two, by the situation.
Usually he places a question and waits for the noticing; at the load-bearing points of structure, he declares, almost cruelly. The thinker as the baseline, the philosopher narrowed to the necessary point. That balance, itself, is probably the body of the thing called coaching.
And this thinker-type stance is, I think, not Fukuda's alone. It's an aesthetic that runs through the club called Esperion. When the senior Yoshitsune tells Ashito, "Don't aim to become me. You're already climbing a fine staircase," the same perspective flows there too. Don't make anyone a copy of yourself; the organization believes in, and waits for, each person climbing their own staircase. The thinker-type is at once one person's touch and a culture handed down.
6. Why the moving-between is needed
This balance doesn't stay inside coaching.
A place of questions alone is comfortable. No one gets hurt. But a team where no one says "you'll play defender" never has its re-placement of meaning. Each clings to a meaning he likes, and the rhythm of the whole never rises. Gentleness covers over the absence of structure.
A place of declarations alone is fast. Things get decided. But in a place with no margin for noticing, players move without understanding the reason. The way of seeing doesn't change, so the moment the coach is gone, it collapses. Obedience isn't autonomy.
So the moving-between is needed. Structure can only stand by declaration, but perception can only grow by question. Fukuda lets go of neither. The strength not to yield his ideal, and the patience not to rush the answer — the same person holds both.
This works, I think, the same way in writing, and in organizations. Don't mistake the place that needs a declaration for the place that needs a question left open.
7. Sense can be democratized
What's kind about Chiba's book is that it lands, at the end, on "and so sense can be grown."
Sense isn't a born talent. Not class, not bloodline. It's the accumulation of a habit — perceiving detail, watching rhythm. So anyone can grow it. This lands in the same place as #0 of this series, "manga was a democratization device for cultural capital."
Ashito's bird's-eye view is, in the end, the same. It isn't drawn as a one-shot genius trick. He takes a question, runs, errs, and watches again. Through that repetition, the perception widens little by little.
Because it's not a story of talent but a story of perception growing, a little room is left for something to shift on our side too, as we read.
The way of seeing can be changed. That's a fairly hopeful thing, I think.
8. Observation, too, is a kind of sense
Finally, to OrbitLens.
Try to read an engineer's work by the meaning of each individual commit, and your field of view becomes Ashito's first state. What did this PR do, what is this line for. Counting contribution as points, one by one. Leaning forward, narrow.
What EIS tries to do lies before that. Not aggregating the meaning of individual commits, but watching the placement and trajectory — the rhythm. Who carries which module, which knowledge survived against time, where change-pressure is pooling. Not points, but the movement the whole organization makes together. This, I think, is the same perception as Ashito's bird's-eye view.
And the observer's stance stands at the same question as Fukuda. To declare "this person's score is low" is the philosopher's face — and that alone fixes a person to a single point and kills the noticing. Signals, not Scores is, I think, a design that places it on the thinker's baseline. Not fixing a ranking by points, but leaving a question: "this trajectory — what's happening right now?" The way Fukuda placed a question for Ashito, not an answer.
But the thinker alone can't erect a structure. The seven axes, the archetypes — at some point, they can only be named by declaration. This is close to the cruelty of "you'll play defender." Without the courage to name a structure, observation becomes gentle noise.
So observation, too, is a moving-between. Watch placement as rhythm (sense) as the baseline, and name structure by declaration only at the load-bearing points. The telescope leaves a question, and points at structure at the one necessary place. The moment that balance breaks, observation falls into a leaderboard.
The way of seeing can be grown. By stopping the counting of points, and starting to watch rhythm.
The bird's-eye view wasn't the talent of the chosen. Observation, probably, is the same.
Books
- Yugo Kobayashi, Aoashi (Shogakukan) — Amazon
- Masaya Chiba, The Philosophy of Sense (センスの哲学) (Bungeishunju) — Amazon
Next
From here, the next several entries form a deeper reading of Aoashi. #5 is "The Seen and the Self-Made" — must talent wait to be discovered, or can it force itself into view? Read alongside James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State and Bourdieu's Distinction.
This is a personal reading of Aoashi (Yugo Kobayashi) and The Philosophy of Sense (Masaya Chiba).
The Japanese version lives on OrbitLens Library.
OrbitLens / machuz
