About this article
Episode 3 of coiai's podcast, "coiai's Strategy Meeting."
This episode kicks off with New Year's chat, moves into talk about "staging" the mood for seasonal events, touches on how the hosts feel about the good-luck traditions around kumade lucky rakes, and then in the second half heads into a discussion of an unsolved math problem.
*This article is a transcript based on the audio content, lightly edited for readability.
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Topics in this episode
- The feeling of year-end and New Year's turning into "just another weekday"
- The special feeling of New Year's only exists if you "stage it yourself"
- Hatsumode shrine visits, home altars (kamidana), hamaya arrows / how the hosts feel about kumade lucky-rake traditions
- "The magic wears off" — when you end up seeing lucky charms as a business
- Second half: an unsolved math problem that almost nobody in the world is working on
- Next time: a preview of the chair exhibition (Hans Wegner) and Bauhaus
Transcript
Opening: what did you do for New Year's?
Hattori: Happy New Year. Thanks for sticking with coiai again this year.
Hashimoto: Thanks, likewise.
Hattori: Hashimoto, what did you get up to over New Year's?
Hashimoto: I went back to my parents' place and spent time with family, but honestly I barely talked and mostly just holed up by myself. It's such a different world from my everyday life that I didn't really know what to do with myself…
The conversation turns to the Kohaku Uta Gassen singing contest, and the two agree that "the end-of-year feeling gets weaker every year."
Hashimoto: A company doesn't really have seasonal events, so New Year's ends up feeling like just another ordinary day.
Hattori: You can take time off if you want to, but it's not like the year-end period feels like a special break or anything.
Hattori's New Year: cooking and seeing in the new year
Hattori: I had meetings right up until the 31st, so I scrambled to buy osechi ingredients at the last minute. I made namasu with kintoki carrots, kombu-cured sea bream, chikuzen-ni — cooking did give it a bit of a New Year's feeling.
He also mentions watching a YouTube livestream of the New Year's Eve temple bells, and going to a convenience store right at the stroke of midnight.
Hattori: As an adult, I think that special feeling only happens if you stage it and create it for yourself. As a kid, adults arranged all of that for you, but as an adult, unless you put on that show yourself, it just becomes "one more ordinary day."
Work talk: proposals and closing the books
Even over the New Year's break, there was a bit of work — proposal documents and quotes.
There's also talk about the fiscal year-end closing, with a note like "there's a deadline for submission, so I need to get it done this month."
Hatsumode and the kumade story (when the magic wears off)
Hashimoto: I did go for hatsumode.
Hattori: We have a home altar (kamidana) at our place, so we buy an ofuda talisman and a hamaya arrow.
The conversation turns to kumade lucky rakes, and a comment from co-founder Takemura really lands.
Hattori: I said I wanted a kumade, and he said, "How much is that thing even? That's a shady business if I've ever seen one" — and the magic wore right off (laughs).
With lucky charms, you're supposed to just buy one without thinking too hard and go "alright, let's give it our best this year!" — but once you start viewing it from a business angle, you can't fully commit to the performance of it.
This leads into a broader discussion of "Japanese religious attitudes," and the inconsistency of "celebrating Christmas but only visiting a shrine at New Year's."
Hattori: If you're going to take lucky charms seriously, it's better to have consistency in your everyday life. Trying to catch some good luck with a kumade only at New Year's has a bit of a "bandwagon fan" feel to it — like only liking soccer during the World Cup.
The conversation also touches on Suwa Taisha shrine, and spotting what looked like a kumade craftsman's stall in Kanda.
Second half: math talk (a problem I might be the only person in the world interested in)
Hattori: Come to think of it, I'd love to hear an interesting math story.
Hashimoto: It's about how there's almost nobody else working on my own research topic.
While digging through prior literature to find an unsolved conjecture, it turned out that maybe three people in the world had ever been involved with that particular conjecture.
He emailed one well-known figure and showed them his progress, and got a "nice!" back, but the other two barely responded — they might be retired given their age.
Hashimoto: At that point I had this feeling like, "I might be the only person in the world who's actually interested in this problem right now."
As a research strategy, it becomes a matter of "finding something you personally have a shot at solving" — problems with fewer researchers working on them are easier to get a foothold in.
Hashimoto: Not the famous, extremely hard unsolved problems — the historic conjectures everyone knows — but small, overlooked problems that have just been left sitting there.
But from there, if you widen your view and look at generalizations or related areas, you can approach problems that a lot of people care about, just from a different angle. That's the interesting part.
What field is it? (elementary number theory)
Hattori: How did you even find that problem?
Hashimoto: It comes into view once you read papers and keep digging. Even finding the problem itself takes time.
What he's working on is elementary number theory — something understandable within the scope of high school math. You barely need any prerequisite knowledge.
Hattori: I'd love to do a whole episode explaining that topic someday.
Next time: the chair exhibition and Bauhaus
Hattori: There's a chair exhibition (Hans Wegner) that's about to close, and I want to go. Next time, I'd love to talk about that, plus maybe cover Bauhaus as background knowledge.
Hattori / Hashimoto: Thanks for listening.
Wrap-up
The feeling of year-end and New Year's turning into "just another day," and the hosts' mixed feelings about lucky-charm traditions.
And Hashimoto's ongoing pursuit of a math problem nobody else seems to be looking at.
Both threads quietly tie back to the same idea — making meaning for yourself.