By: Naoki Yamamoto | Date: January 17, 2026 | Substack.com
This is an excerpt from a lecture that will be given in Germany next week.
This project explores the significance of imagining fictional stories and characters rooted in Islamic ethics, Islamic cultural memory, and Japanese cultural worlds. My concern here is not fiction as entertainment alone, but fiction as an imaginative practice through which ethical life can be sensed, tested, and shared.
If traditional cultures can be understood as long term efforts to give form to prayer and to orient human life toward universality, then many dominant forms of contemporary entertainment operate according to a different logic. This is not to suggest that contemporary entertainment is inherently corrupt or devoid of meaning. Rather, the issue lies in the global systems within which much contemporary entertainment is produced, circulated, and consumed. These systems are shaped by capital, geopolitical power, and deep cultural asymmetries.
