'The Window of Opportunity: A Guidepost to the Mandela Effect — The Ultra-Secret X-Files' Full Preface by the Author, Aoyama Takuto
(I truly hate to impose, but) among the readers who have kindly taken this book in hand, I think the majority already know the concept of the Mandela Effect phenomenon and have things they actually share or have personally experienced. Did you pick up this book in order to deepen your own reflections and gain new discoveries? Or, from an authoritarian perspective, is it to supplement or reinforce your own experiences by means of some authority of some kind?
As a matter of the author’s policy—and this applies to other occult domains like the extraterrestrial question as well—the Mandela Effect must absolutely never become “Fascism (totalistic, authoritarian, coercive behavior that absolutely and completely denies pushback or backlash, or that arbitrarily raises insulting false flags to control the agenda),” and yet, at the same time, I am constantly thinking that we also need the strength and suppleness to stand up to, without being timid before, the current, frankly fallacious, dogmatic, authoritarian brand of fascistic scientism.
A certain lovely girl YouTuber, currently the trend, who majored in physics at a certain University of Tokyo graduate school, (she didn’t put it exactly like this, but to sum up) said in a certain video that in the world of physics there is a great deal of Fascism, with lots of people who make being the physics police their reason for living, monitoring speech around the clock, and the labeling of things as crackpot science or pseudo-science is ferocious so you can’t speak carelessly,※1 and so on; however, although I, the author, as of now have had neither direct interaction with her nor even met her, Professor Kunio Yasue is also out there, for example, and I think in the end it may be nothing more than a story about the world as seen from the level of undergraduates or grad students. There is an old Japanese phrase, 'shu-ha-ri' (the stages of mastery: follow, break, leave), and I believe Japan’s physics community properly has this shu-ha-ri, and that the soil from which innovation is born is being protected. (Well, anyway, as for me, when it comes to physics I’m at the level of a high-school dropout, I barely even prepped for university entrance exams, and I haven’t even reached the 'shu'—the first stage—of that shu-ha-ri.)
Also, the author believes in the bright-spirited ideal of science. Not in fallacious fascistic scientism, but, for instance, in the innovative power of science—the kind that, if we are talking the natural sciences, eradicated Hansen’s disease (leprosy), or, if we are talking the social sciences, made it possible to resolve the Buraku discrimination problem (Dowa discrimination in Japan). That is something completely different from a fascistic scientism that authoritarianly and peremptorily denies the Mandela Effect phenomenon in an insulting manner. My parents are believers in Happy Science, which is a low-grade new religion, and from early childhood I was made to believe—more as if it were common sense than ideology or thought—in a worldview in which a low-quality, fallacious, authoritarian science, like something out of Beat Takeshi’s occult TV specials, stands opposed to an equally fallacious, authoritarian, low-quality religion or occult. Now I am 27, and at long last I think I have managed to break out of the binary opposition between a fascistic scientism and the religion that stands opposed to it, to gaze at—and even to be able to carry myself within—the boundary where high-quality science and high-quality occult meet.
In reality, science and the occult are not opposing concepts, and rather, from the standpoint of 'paradigm shift', there is even the view that science itself is the occult. Paradigm shift is a concept proposed by the American philosopher Thomas Samuel Kuhn, but today its meaning is often deliberately twisted or misunderstood; what he originally wanted to say with Paradigm shift (in particular, the 'anomalies' that appear in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn)※5 is a concept quite similar to the Mandela Effect.
To begin with, in Western advanced nations outside Japan, the notion that science and the occult are concepts in opposition is faint. In Japan, as people often say, there are words like “scientific” and “unscientific,” but as far as the author knows, there are no truly equivalent words in the major foreign languages. In other words, it seems to be a Galapagos-like dogma unique to Japan. In English, there are words like “occultic” or “occultism,” which, on the contrary, are authoritarian, ideological words that try to exclude science from the occult side. “Scientific” or “unscientific” is nothing more than a Galapagos-like ideology unique to Japan. Japan may be just about the only place where this sort of discriminating/classifying distinction has spread as if it were common sense in general society. People who use this oppositional-concept dogma to authoritatively insult the other side are too dim-witted to merit consideration. They are not even worth talking to.
But there may be parts of this that are unavoidable. At the point when Japan adopted Western scientific civilization, science was very much still developing, and the longer a nation’s history, the more a nation ends up shouldering a great many time-honored occultisms, both light and dark, so there may have been circumstances in which we first had to sort things out, to set science and the occult against each other as if they were oppositional concepts and have them confront one another—circumstances in which, if the country was to develop and defend itself from the threat of the great powers, there was no other choice. If quantum physics had come in right from the start, then our country—which had absorbed and sublimated Buddhism—might have escaped the pathology of coming to treat science and the occult as concepts in opposition.
Among Japanese people, too, the germ of the idea that science and the occult are not opposites is not entirely absent, but whereas Americans “Fringe” did that, Japanese people “Galileo” starring Fukuyama Masaharu (a Japanese TV drama) produced this. Both works are entertainment produced from the angle that science and the occult are not opposites, and they are works in which actual university professors participated as supervisors, but their approaches are completely the reverse of each other. Or, in Beat Takeshi's (comedian-filmmaker Takeshi Kitano) year-end customary occult special, Professor Yoshihiko Otsuki, a leading authority on plasma research and Professor Emeritus at Waseda University's School of Science and Engineering what he asserts is actually also an approach that science and the occult are not opposites, but many Japanese occult researchers are too poisoned by the authoritarian dogma that treats science and the occult as if they were opposites between different forms of authoritarianism, and they cannot escape the spell of that fixed idea, so it becomes a confrontation between one authority and another, and they end up attacking Professor Otsuki instead, and Professor Otsuki in turn also makes the conflict between science and the occult into something like a confrontation between different authorities. The author thinks this is the unfortunate part about Japan. The only exception is that Nirasawa Junichiro of Tamas Books (a Japanese occult publisher), approaching occult and science not as a confrontation between different forms of authoritarianism, played a manzai (two-person stand-up) routine with Professor Otsuki with an artist's heart, a heart of humor—and that was splendid.
If we seek this too insistently, this book could conversely end up producing a self-contradiction in which it becomes a seed of authoritarianism or dogmatism, so I do not seek it unconditionally and absolutely; but I, the author, if you, my dear readers, read this book through to the end, wish as much as possible that you will, rather than becoming Fascism※1-like, become Cozy※2 in your awareness, find peace of 'heart', and at the same time be able to point out that what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong, to brush off insulting mockery and criticism from authoritarian, mistaken 'scientific' arguments, and to gain the strength and suppleness to protect your own heart.
Originally, the occult world has a confrontation axis between a Cozy※2 awareness and a Fascism mindset※1, and when you tell grand occult tales or Cozy※2 spooky stories, it is par for the course—indeed a fate—that fascists with a Fascism mindset※1 who don’t like mysterious stories will show up to criticize and insult and mess things up; but in the world of the Mandela Effect this was especially awful. I, the author, too, was bashed and insulted more times than I can count. Especially on the internet, and in particular on the occult board (an online forum board), if you write in a state where you’re tired or confused, so that your prose lacks power because of the confusion, there are trolls who try to make it out that 'he’s schizophrenic', so while I can consider as one cause the fact that I first started using it when I was in terrible shape and utterly exhausted, even so, in the occult world there are, for example, topics about aliens and the prophecy/prediction scene and other realms of grand narratives, so why is the topic of the Mandela Effect so much more prone to being trolled than all of those?
Probably, the other (big) occult talks have already more or less all been covered, for example in Beat Takeshi’s year-end occult specials and the like, and at those times, for us ordinary people’s Cozy*2 mindsets and Fascism mindsets*1 harmony and neutralization, one of the go-betweens that mediate is the entertainment world and entertainers, and when entertainers on TV tell stories of mysterious experiences, or, alternatively, split into pro and con camps and have vehement debates (kankangakugaku), or, in the case of alien movies, with works like Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” or those by Michael Bay such as Transformer Series and so on, the point is, these topics have been kneaded and normalized and matured as topics, whereas, the author thinks, with the Mandela Effect, at present that is still insufficient.
The topic of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and aliens, too, has by now become fairly well ripened, but at first—or even now—it was a sensitive issue to be handled with caution as military information related to wars and confrontations between Japan and the United States or between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the topic of aliens, in order to stimulate the internal conflict between human Cozy※2 consciousness and fascistic consciousness※1 consciousness, was handled carefully as an issue that could shake the current political system; government authorities (the intelligence sections of national governments and national militaries) took a long time and much effort, through various creative works and TV programs, to acclimate and tame the public and calm people’s minds, and even today, as to what their true nature is, for example, it is sometimes considered that they might be demonic beings visiting from the “reverse universe” (an anti-social terrorism cosmos—in short, hell) or future humans, and it is by no means all just the romantic world of plainspoken occult enthusiasts.
The Mandela Effect, in its very etymology, originally begins in the issue of racial discrimination and political turmoil in the Republic of South Africa (Nelson Mandela—an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa who later became the country’s first Black president—actually died in December 2013 and was given a state funeral, yet many people remembered that he had died tragically in prison in the 1980s), so it tends to become a big subject to begin with, which means that how we handle it, too, requires a caution on par with something like the UFO question.
If you open the Occult board on 5channel, Japan’s largest anonymous forum, there’s a notice at the top that says things like, “This is the Occult board. People who want to pursue the occult academically and people who enjoy it as entertainment are participating from different positions. Let’s respect one another and strive not to cause unpleasant feelings,” but this phrasing is precisely a symbolic wording of the dominant ideology of discipline and governance in the modern occult sphere, which originates in Marxism’s historical materialism※4. It’s an ideology that quite a few people think is common sense rather than an ideology or a school of thought. I myself, too, used to be naturally poisoned by and ruled by this consciousness.
When I myself first noticed the Mandela Effect phenomenon, I thought this was probably, psychiatrically speaking, a mental symptom called depersonalization disorder, and I fell into a state where I was afraid that my own consciousness existed, afraid that my own consciousness would continue, and I couldn’t sleep a wink for about 72 hours, I vomited everything in my stomach, I couldn’t eat anything and could only drink water, my legs would tremble just going down the stairs, and—granted, for example, if we were talking about the Crown Prince of the Imperial Family being in such a mental state I could perhaps understand it, but I’m a public elementary and junior high school grad, my family home is cramped, I’ve got orthodontics... and so on—and I focused my awareness on a directly reachable, seeable-with-my-eyes, hearable-with-my-ears, walkable-to-with-my-feet kind of, It’s a Small World-esque, comfortable Cozy※2 world as well.
Later, as I kept doing introspection, I realized why I had ended up with such a consciousness. It’s because, quite naturally, within me there is a fascistic consciousness※1. I truly, quite naturally, have fascism※1 in my consciousness, and the very fact that I find these things mysterious shows I lack savvy for getting by in the world and it’s something to be ashamed of; I have, up to now, worked as a construction tradesman, a fire-protection equipment technician, and a security guard, and while I don’t know about fascist despotisms like socialist countries or North Korea※1—as for Japan, whether or not countless parallel worlds exist as backups I don’t know, but it feels like people who will do the job come out from somewhere, so the human resources are abundant and don’t run dry, and the quality of personnel seems by no means low; and as for me, when I was doing those jobs, I was in a self-abasing mindset of doing them because I had no other option and figured people around me thought so too, but, surprisingly, that wasn’t really the case—there have been quite a few experiences like that.
If this were, a fascist despotism like North Korea※1 then I think the mindset that that job is something people do only because they had no other choice would get stronger, and there would probably be a shortage of personnel. Because there persists, deeply rooted, an inability to take such things for granted, a fascistic base-minded attitude and gut-level disposition※1 and that is why, at first, I probably felt grossed out. Well, the author was born and raised in Tokyo, but does not much like Tokyo, nor is he necessarily the type to kowtow to the powers that be or to worship academic credentials or deviation-value rankings to the hilt...
Also, in addition to transfers between parallel worlds, I think purification and reorganization of spacetime information by gods/Buddhas, future people, or the dead can be considered. Even now, the basis for denying parallel worlds or past alterations by gods/Buddhas/future people is the view of history called historical materialism, founded by Karl Marx (a view of history that today has come to rule the world to the point that people think it’s not ideology or thought but common sense)※4; but although if you asked whether I am right or left I am rather on the right—indeed anti-communist—and in a position that must confront Marxism, I was, as if it were natural, poisoned by the fascistic consciousness※1 of historical materialism, and when I first noticed these phenomena, I felt sick. It is truly shameful.
This is a slight digression, but there are people who say Japan is shifting to the right and undergoing fascist-ization※1; however, Japan’s left, Japan’s antiwar movement, before the internet became widespread, while saying antiwar—despite being antiwar—had, so to speak, turned into antiwar fascism※1 I think. In schools, the peace education of Nikkyoso (the Japan Teachers’ Union)—sending huge numbers of paper cranes to the atomic-bombed sites, then burning the cranes in garbage incinerators and wasting resources—symbolizes that. Compared to there being places on the internet to share such mysterious experiences widely, or the fashion for creating isekai-reincarnation works, I think the earlier period was far more fascist※1. If you do such things, naturally there will be a backlash. If Japan now looks like it’s shifting to the right, there’s the Chinese threat and so on, but I think the backlash is also big.
The author’s great-uncle (his grandmother’s elder brother, who was also the guardian of the author’s father who was raised in a single-parent household, and there was even a time when the author was nearly adopted by him, so to the author he was like a substitute grandfather) graduated from the University of Tokyo, served as Director of the Yokohama City Waterworks Bureau and as Mayor of Isogo Ward, was like a benefactor who had some involvement when Yoshihide Suga, the 99th Prime Minister of Japan, was starting out his political career, remained someone with whom the author exchanged opinions and the like even into his later years, was decorated by the state, was fluent in English and the sort of person who, even as a late-stage senior citizen, would energetically go abroad, but by generation he was without question a war experiencer and, without question, experienced air raids and such; yet what the author once overheard in old stories was that he never heard any war stories at all, and what he heard secondhand was that he used to talk about being embarrassed that the largest brawl in Japan, set in downtown Yokohama (which I think was probably the Tsurumi Riots), had happened.
A certain grandpa I met at a security company, a former special trainee in arrest techniques and a 6th-dan in kendo, had participated in policing the Narita Struggle, in the security for the State Funeral (the imperial funeral), and in the forced searches of Aum Shinrikyo’s Satyan facilities, but rather than talking about combat and such, he seemed to want to talk about heartwarming everyday stories. The more someone is the real deal who is fed up with fascism※1 the less they tend to want to tell tales of derring-do, or they avoid touching on the big stories much, blur them a bit and make them small, tending to become anti-fascistic※1 I think.
That said, the author is basically antiwar, anti-fascism※1 and a hater of fascism※1; however, it’s not necessarily the case that fascism※1 is all bad. The retired Metropolitan Police Department grandpa I met at the security company (he had, of course, been in the police from the era when there weren’t even security cameras) reacted fiercely when I said: my mother was born in 1960 and knows Yokohama in the 1980s for real, and even now, there’s this sense that “in some places, there still are such things,” that there are a lot of dangerous things that don’t get reported each time and don’t come to light; nowadays if such a thing happened it would all be reported, right?—he pushed back so hard that I yielded and said, well, maybe the MPD has been doing things properly all along, but, like, the Kanagawa Prefectural Police’s functions seem to have been overloaded—and even then he still pushed back. I think this is a lovely fascism, a good fascism※1. If my fascistic consciousness※1 is that strong, maybe I should take the police officer hiring exam and become a cop. As for crackdowns by customs, the drug enforcement bureau, the police, or the Coast Guard on marijuana and illegal drugs, or investigations of sex crimes and murders, that “there’s always some somewhere” vibe is unacceptable. North Korean abductions and spy boats, too, that “there’s some somewhere” vibe or “it just happened to happen” vibe is unacceptable. Not a single case must be overlooked, and crackdowns can be fascism※1—indeed, I think they should rather be fascistic※1. The National Tax Agency is the same.
To return to the point, the question is, why is it that memories like these—while for most people the memories get overwritten or are forgotten—in the case of a subset of people, myself included, the pre-alteration memories tend to remain? In fact, on the internet there already exist communities of people who perceive these kinds of changes in the world and share pre-alteration memories (if this book is your first exposure, please search for Mandela Effect, or the Mandela Effect), and the theories said there include things like: perhaps some distant ancestor married a god or an alien and thus godly genes are in the lineage (for example, that Christ or the Emperor is a distant ancestor, or that one is a descendant of the Mononobe clan); or that in the family line there were people burdened with heavy poverty or illness who suffered fierce discrimination as outcasts, or monks or Shinto priests who trained in Shugendo and such; or alternatively that among the ancestors there was someone in the family line who had a near-death experience and that miraculous efficacy is still genetically inherited; or, rather the reverse, a theory that among the ancestors there is someone in the family line who deviated from the cycle of reincarnation as a gedo (a heretic), and so on—there are various theories.
As I kept thinking through this issue, I arrived at one concern. The author—let me repeat—has parents who are ardent believers in the new religion Happy Science, and I myself am now a ghost second-generation believer with absolutely no loyalty, piety, or actual activity, and since I now live alone away from my parents’ home I don’t get any of that kind of small talk at all, but when I lived at home I was often made to listen to stories about people burdened with heavy karmic misfortunes of poverty, illness, strife, and calamity, and to all sorts of tales about astonishing oddballs, and to stories like the mysteries of this world (I think that’s a common second-generation-new-religion thing; for example, I imagine second-generation believers of “Jehovah’s Witnesses” also grow up being made to hear all sorts of small-talk stories), and, for instance, I once heard about a member who had encountered suicides so often that they had, in a complete set, personally witnessed hanging, jumping, railroad-crossing suicides, diving-in suicides, and fatal train accidents; but I, fortunately, have a strong guardian-spirit constitution and have never once happened to encounter such a scene, and although in my student days I used to go for personal errands to Nishi-Hachioji Station on the Chuo Line, which for some reason statistically ranks worst number one for suicides, I have not once encountered a suicide scene there, and, alternatively, even in security guard work, when some people go on shift they seem to draw an inordinate number of alarm activations, or become a bystander※6 of incidents, it seems, yet I have absolutely none of that (and apparently there are also medical workers who, when on shift, weirdly draw an inordinate number of emergency cases or deathbed moments); or on the other hand, among women, there are sometimes hard-to-believe testimonies like having suffered groping on trains almost every day during their school years, or data comes out saying some percentage of high school girls are engaged in prostitution, but in the reality I observe such things are absolutely impossible, and yet there are cases where they don’t look like they’re lying, either,
However, the social reality of this world at the macro scale, naturally, is not a jumble but must be operated with a certain degree of rigor, and, whatever this is called in theoretical physics—my physics is only at a high-school-dropout level so I may be getting something wrong, but— an event surface? or an event horizon? (the Schwarzschild surface, or Event Horizon)※3 becomes necessary, and I suppose security companies, the police, fire departments, the Self-Defense Forces, medical institutions, educational institutions, the National Tax Agency, the mass media, and so on are what would correspond to that. Or, as I thought during the novel coronavirus disease that began in 2019 and spread worldwide for several years, crematoriums and funeral halls may also be in that category.
People whose memories are so extreme and bizarre that they are even rejected by such institutions are colloquially labeled schizophrenic and the like, or, among those who are deemed schizophrenic and suffer for it, the event surface※3 may be precisely where some are serving in the role of a boundary-ward at the liminal zone bordering a hellish extra-dimensional world. That is why I make it a rule to at least hear out anyone’s story, whatever it may be; and from the same viewpoint and line of thinking, it seems both weekly magazine publishers and the police actually have manuals or departments to at least hear anyone’s story, whatever it may be. The U.S. CIA (Central Intelligence Agency—an externally oriented national strategic intelligence agency) also has such a point of contact, and in all of these cases, since fully ninety-nine percent are delusions or tall tales, the staff regard it as painful duty and try to avoid it.
The author once sat for the police officer recruitment exam, and even now I still harbor a bit of admiration for being an intelligence operative or special forces operator in the Self-Defense Forces, but since I have a trouble-canceling constitution, a lucky constitution, maybe if I were to enter the SDF’s intelligence branch or special forces I could be useful precisely as someone with an emergency-canceling constitution; however, if one aims to be an intelligence operative or in special forces, being too lucky and avoiding everything would probably mean you can’t do the job, and if one aims to be a police officer, should one rather have a constitution that draws lots of hassles and trouble and runs into them constantly?—these are the kinds of thoughts I have. Even when I was a security guard, I truly prepared for actual emergencies and carried around a self-made first-aid kit packed with a full set of rescue supplies. I also took the Advanced Lifesaving Course (which anyone can get in half a day).
Because I have that kind of mindset, even now I continue to loiter on anonymous forums and the like related to the Mandela Effect, but I am also concerned and aware that there are enormous risks in that. The Fascism mindsets*1 and Cozy*2 kinds of consciousness that human beings have, and their opposition, conflict, and neutralization are handled in many works (there are countless films and anime. If we are talking light novel/anime works then Hajime Kamoshida’s Seishun Buta Yarō series and the like are popular) so I make a point of not neglecting to take nourishment from such works. Perhaps for that reason, in everyday life no particular hindrance is occurring at present. Now, maybe I have attained a kind of enlightenment, but Cozy*2 mindsets and Fascism mindsets*1 coexist. Synchronicity phenomena are an everyday occurrence too, but there is no particular hindrance.
Besides that, there are many things like this day after day, but for example, YouTube videos sometimes have their back-and-forth nuances subtly changed from when I saw them before. In reports by near-death experiencers there is something called “rewinding the past,” that is, reports that after death one can alter the past in proportion to one’s virtues in life; if so, I sometimes wonder, what am I, that I can observe that all the time? I don’t for a second think I’m at the leading edge of the time progression of humankind on Earth, but I am certain there is something like the authority level of a lower-ranking god or a shrine-official, or something. However, I also, through palpable experience, am convinced that there are gods or beings with higher authority than me—probably the dead, I suppose. The author’s parents are from Yokohama, and there are no roots in Kansai or the like, but in both everyday life and work there is this constant feeling that remarks that blurt out of my ADHD-ish unconscious impulses somehow have the setup and the punchline working, and yet I also fairly often get preempted. Therefore, it is certain that I am not at the leading edge of the time progression of humankind on Earth. And that, in turn, lets me know I am not some outsider to the wheel of rebirth, an outcast from samsara, so it’s a great relief. If there is someone somewhere who is at the leading edge of the time progression of humankind on Earth, what comes to mind would be Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus Christ) whose Y chromosome is identical, a direct-line descendant, working in coordination with U.S. intelligence agencies or the military to fight enemy states or terrorist organizations attempting different time progressions. I want to live quietly, so I’m really glad I don’t have that kind of authority. The light novel series A Certain Magical Index is a work in which the world changes between the Old and New Testaments, and the author is definitely writing with knowledge of something.
That said, I too have all sorts of dreams that are hard to explain, long and complex, and that remain in memory after waking. In Buddhist terms, they probably connect to ālaya-vijñāna (storehouse consciousness)※8 and I have more than once seen terrifying dreams that lead there. However, I absolutely don’t hate it so much that I don’t want to dream, or anything like that; it affects me a bit until about the next morning, but there has been no lingering influence over the long term, and at present no particular hindrance has arisen.
Not all the dreams are scary. Long ago I thought Islam was nothing good and once posted on an anonymous forum a comment tearing Islam to shreds. Then that night, in my dream, a woman—or rather a goddess—appeared and said, “The true Islam is not like that,” and after that, the Five Reflections (Gosei) of the former Imperial Japanese Navy※7—or rather, a flood, a torrent inside my head of information like how to live without making mistakes, how to live without regrets—came rushing through in vast quantities, and I wanted to retain even a little of it in memory, but when I woke up I forgot everything except the afterglow of having read it; after that I have given Islam its due respect, but the very fact that in the dream it was a goddess, despite it being Islam, already makes it something entirely different from the Islam of this world. Also, there have been many occasions on which I received what you could call very human messages, or perhaps oracles.
Preface written October 05, 2025 (Reiwa 7)
As used in the main text, fascism does not refer only to certain specific regimes in history; it is the author’s own metaphorical label that sums up totalistic, authoritarian, coercive behaviors. Here it is a critical expression for a way of cognition that, by uniformly rejecting pushback and backlash, sealing off dissent and the experiences of minorities, and trying to steer the agenda through arbitrary insults and false flags, operates in that manner.
The expressions in the main text such as “scientific fascism,” “physics police,” “a situation where fringe-science certification and pseudo-science certification are so aggressive that you can’t speak carelessly,” and “a binary opposition between a fascistic scientism and the religion that opposes it” are not equating science or religion themselves with historical Fascism. They are used as critiques of the attitude that refuses to accept dissent and shuts down discussion on the basis of authority.
Likewise, turns of phrase in the main text such as “a fascistic mindset,” “a fascist despotism like a socialist country or North Korea,” “fascist-ization,” “antiwar fascism,” “a base fascistic mentality and spirit,” and “a lovely fascism, a good fascism” are critical metaphors within their individual contexts. Even the passages that say “Fascism is fine” with regard to situations like crackdowns or rescue, where a resolute response is needed to protect people from danger, are not assertions affirming a historical system; they are expressions emphasizing operational rigor that leaves no ambiguity.
Accordingly, this footnote’s definition is not a replacement for the academic term Fascism. Please read “Fascism” in the main text as a limited, context-specific term referring to an attitude that suppresses dissent and fixes cognition through authority or peer pressure.
The English word "cozy" is an adjective meaning " comfortable," " snug and warm," " relaxed." In Japanese it is written as " kōjī" in katakana.
This sense of "cozy" also appears in the mystery genre term " cozy mystery (Cozy Mystery)" The cozy mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction that eschews gory violence and explicit sex, centers on familiar settings like small towns and villages or cafes and bookstores, and unravels mysteries within warm, comfortable human relationships. Agatha Christie’s works are cited as representative examples. The word "cozy" succinctly expresses this kind of " a world that is comfortable, safe, and right-sized."
In this book and on this page, by "a cozy mindset" the author means, based on the above sense of the word, a flexible, open, warm, and comfortable mode of cognition that stands at the polar opposite of authoritarian, dogmatic (fascistic) consciousness.
Meaning in general relativity: Grounded in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it is a concept born from the solution Karl Schwarzschild derived in 1916. It refers to the “point of no return” that exists around a black hole, and any matter or light that passes inside this boundary surface cannot escape to the outside by any means whatsoever. The name “event horizon” comes from the fact that an external observer is, in principle, unable to know the “events” that occur beyond this boundary. It is also called the “Schwarzschild surface.”
Meaning in this text: The author repurposes this physical concept as a socio-epistemological metaphor. That is, even if we suppose the existence of parallel worlds or a many-worlds–style diversity of realities, he uses it as a metaphor for the social institutions (police, fire services, medicine, education, the mass media, etc.) that function as a “boundary apparatus” to keep this “macro social reality” from proliferating chaotically and, instead, to keep it operating with a certain degree of consistency and coherence.
Integrated meaning: Just as the event horizon in physics “blocks information and maintains a boundary,” so too might “event-horizon-like” institutions in society be performing an “information-filtering function” to guarantee the order and coherence of social reality amid the coexistence of differing recognitions of reality, memories, and world lines—the author poses that question. This perspective also connects deeply with the question of “why the Mandela Effect is remembered only by some people.”
Related video: a clip of Tsukino Mito
A clip whose gist is “for some reason, the only people who are talking about me out in town are the ones I mysteriously, bafflingly don’t see at all.” Its content resonates deeply with the theme of this text, namely the “event horizon”-like boundary of recognition and the differences in realities observed by an individual.
Scholarly meaning: It is a view of history that forms the core of the historical philosophy and social theory founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century. It is also called the materialist conception of history. At its core lies the proposition that “the history of society is determined not by spirit, ideas, religion, or culture, but by the material mode of production (the economic base).” That is, rather than human consciousness determining social being, it asserts the reversed causal relation: social being (relations of production, economic structures) determines human consciousness. On this view, history advances dialectically through “the development of the productive forces” and “the contradictions of the relations of production,” and concepts such as “supernatural powers,” “divine or Buddha intervention,” “spiritual entities,” “parallel worlds,” and “time alteration” are, in principle, excluded as incapable of being drivers of history.
Meaning in this text: What concerns the author is less the ideology of historical materialism itself than the state in which it has been internalized and naturalized in contemporary society as “not an ideology but common sense.” In other words, he points out that the premises “the past does not change,” “differences in memory are mere errors,” and “supernatural phenomena do not exist” have come to function—regardless of political position, whether right-wing or left-wing, whether religious or atheist—as a widely shared “self-evident cognitive framework.” The fact that the author himself, despite his stance as “anti-communist/right-wing,” confesses that he had been unconsciously captive to this historical-materialist cognitive framework, can be taken as evidence of the depth of this ideology’s penetration.
Integrated meaning: The author diagnoses the epistemic reflex that summarily dismisses the Mandela Effect as a “memory error” as the result of historical materialism having been deeply internalized as modern people’s “common sense,” and this viewpoint suggests that skepticism toward or rejection of the Mandela Effect is not merely a “scientific attitude,” but is rooted in a particular philosophy-of-history and ontological premise (“reality is materially and univocally determined”), an ideological reaction, and that this point sits at the core of the book’s overall epistemological critique.
The essence of the “paradigm shift” proposed by Thomas Kuhn is not merely the buzzword sense of “dramatic change,” but rather a structural transformation triggered by the accumulation of “anomalies” that cannot be explained within the existing scientific framework (paradigm). In Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientific progress is not linear; it is held that when the abnormal phenomena (anomalies) accumulated during periods of Normal Science reach a critical point, a revolutionary transformation (paradigm shift) occurs.
In this piece, the Mandela Effect is precisely an “anomaly” within contemporary epistemology, and when the gap between individual memory and objective fact reaches a critical point, it suggests the possibility that our very worldview could be overturned from its foundations. The accumulation of phenomena that cannot be explained by the conventional scientific worldview is indicating the necessity of a new paradigm.
By connecting the process of academic scientific revolutions with the contemporary phenomenon of transformations in collective memory, it is positioned as an important concept for groping toward a new framework for recognizing reality. In this context, the Mandela Effect is not merely a psychological phenomenon, but an accumulation of epistemic “anomalies” in contemporary society, and it can be interpreted as a phenomenon that foreshadows a transition to a coming, new epistemological paradigm.
A bystander is a term referring to “the person who is there” or “a witness” who happens to be at the scene of an accident or sudden illness. In emergency and medical contexts, it is used to mean a person who performs first aid or calls for help until the ambulance crew arrives.
The Five Reflections (Gosei) are five questions used in the former Imperial Japanese Navy to look back on one’s actions each day. They are given as “Did I do anything contrary to utmost sincerity?” (was there anything that betrayed my integrity), “Do I have anything to be ashamed of in my words and deeds?” (were there shameful points in my speech and conduct), “Did I lack willpower?” (was there any lack of spirit), “Do I have any regrets about my effort?” (was there anything left undone in my efforts), and “Was I slothful?” (was I lazy), and they are known as admonitions for reflecting on one’s sincerity, words and deeds, willpower, effort, and negligence.
Ālaya-vijñāna (storehouse consciousness) is a concept of consciousness taught mainly in Yogācāra thought, explained as a deep-level cognition in which traces of experience, memory, habits, and so forth are preserved. It is also translated as “storehouse consciousness,” and it is a term connected to the view that even if individual experiences do not immediately surface, they can influence the workings of the mind.
In the main text, it is used not to render a medical or religious judgment about the content of dreams, but as a Buddhist reference term when looking back on complex dreams that leave a strong impression even after waking. If dreams or mind-body malaise persist, it is important not to shoulder it alone but to make use of appropriate support such as medical care and consultation services.
Please read this book, which delves deeply into the author’s thought and Mindset presented in this preface through 360+ documented cases and mathematical considerations.