When I look down at the cityscape of Tokyo from the window of a plane approaching Haneda Airport, I see an immense accumulation of buildings, along with hectic-looking cars and trains; everything appears to follow a strict schedule, as if the entire city operates like a gigantic machine with countless interlocking cogs. It is difficult to find a natural object rather than a man-made artifact; even a small stone left on the roadside is immediately removed for the sake of order. When I observe those buildings, the shapes usually have straight edges and sharp corners; it’s carefully regulated by human intention. There is no space to intrude natural randomness or unpredictable behavior upon these orderly rows of buildings.
Tokyo is a great place to meet many people from across the country. Yet, at times, I feel a deep exhaustion caused by its atmosphere. It’s too artificial. Endless static expanses of concrete gradually create a sense of suffocation.
Stepping into a forest in my hometown, Hokkaido, however, offers an entirely different experience. Every single objects are constantly moving and growing, interacting with others and giving rise to a phenomenal complexity as a whole system. The wind stirs leaves and flowers, birds fly through the air and play with each other, and the flowing river patiently erodes its banks. Compared to the city aforementioned, these innumerable actions may appear rather chaotic at first glance.
Yet nature, quite surprisingly, sustains a profound balance and perfectly keeps order within this apparent chaotic system. When we follow the movement of a snowflake falling from the sky, its trajectory is unpredictable and nonlinear. It drifts left and right, rising and falling randomly, much like a Brownian motion of microscopic particles. Still, it appears so beautiful that every pedestrian pauses and stares upward. In much the same way, while a single bird within a flock seems to waver all the time, the whole flock moves with emergent harmony and grace.
Why, then, does nature remain both beautiful and ordered, even as it is ambiguous and unpredictable? This proposition has always fascinated me since I was about fourteen years old. I came up with this question while I was climbing my favorite mountain, and also my secret place, Mount Sankaku in Sapporo, Hokkaido. Is nature chaos rather than cosmos? Is it essentially ordered rather than disordered?
In my view, order and disorder do not place at opposite ends of a spectrum nor essentially have incongruity. Instead, they coexist within nature, and beauty emerges at the sweet spot between them.
Through this blog, I hope to explore the boundary between chaos and cosmos, between order and disorder, particularly in nature, from various perspectives that include photography, visual arts, mathematics, and physics. While my English may not always be perfectly precise or nuanced, I sincerely hope that readers will engage with these ideas and contribute insights that enrich this ongoing inquiry.
Alongside these topics, I will continue to write about conventional topics, including my studies abroad, since I am also honored to have been selected as a representative of Japan for ISEF 2026 in Arizona.
Thank you very much for reading. I look forward to meeting you again in the next article.
Hikaru Kuribayashi
