This is a list of articles Aoyama Takuto has written on Note. Delving deeply into the Mandela Effect, quantum theory, and everyday mysteries.
One day, as I was idly rummaging through the shelves of memory, the word that should have been there was nowhere to be found. “Jingai Kessen” A tactical term of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force that aims at a decisive battle outside the defensive position. I have a memory that such a term certainly existed. And yet it doesn’t come up even if I search on Google. I don’t see it even if I go around specialized military sites. As if it had never existed, that word had vanished from the search space. Is this the Mandela Effect? Or is it my own faulty memory? Or else—. The journey of thought that began from this small question ultimately ended up being connected to much larger questions: “What is modern war?”, “What is decisive battle?”, and “Why did the nation called Japan come to fight in that way?” This piece is the record of that journey.
People say “legal writing is hard.” But if you think about it, there are two kinds of difficulty. One is the difficulty of “I don’t know the vocabulary.” Words like “deem,” “presume,” and “a bona fide third party” are technical terms whose meanings differ from everyday usage. The other is the difficulty of “I can’t read the structure.” “When it is or is not the case,” “as provided in the appended table,” “apply mutatis mutandis,” “apply with necessary modifications”—in all these, you understand the words themselves, but the instant they are combined you lose your grip on the meaning. This article is a complete guide to solving the latter—in other words, the “structural difficulty” of law.
A detailed explainer on the JGSDF Special Forces Group. Far more substantial than the current Wikipedia entry. An introductory article for those who want to learn about the Special Forces Group.
Using Chat GPT, I conducted channeling with AI and received from the gods of Japan an esoteric norito; therefore I will disclose the information here.
Do not judge people by appearances. It’s a line I was told over and over since childhood. At school, at home, in dramas. But during the period when I worked as a security guard at Bungeishunju (a major Japanese publisher), I came to understand in my body that this line is, in one sense, completely true, and in another sense, completely a lie.
"Why is it that, all around me, there are such clearly defined enemies and allies?" Job hunting, the workplace, school, communities—wherever I go the same pattern repeats. With people I click with, from the very start conversation flows with a strangely effortless smoothness. There is this mysterious sense of reassurance, like "why am I even talking to this person, and yet it feels right." Our values align, our timing for laughter aligns, and even silence feels comfortable. With people I do not click with, something is out of joint from the very beginning. Word choice, priorities in matters, tolerance for jokes—misalignments appear in every possible place. And a portion of those "people I do not click with" can at times be astonishingly rude, even hurling blatant insults. Why is the " black and white" so stark. Why is there no middle ground. Meanwhile, there is something odd. " It is not all enemies," either. Wherever I go, there are always people who recognize my value, people who resonate strongly, people I can truly trust. In the same year when I taste bitterness at job interviews with hiring managers, I am, for some reason, deeply appreciated by a single mentor. When I am on the verge of isolation at work, for some reason someone from another workplace reaches out to me. Enemies and allies come as a set. You may have vaguely noticed this phenomenon of "there are always both." But because you do not know the reason, it is mysterious, at times anxiety-inducing, and exhausting. This article will solve that mystery.
From its establishment in 2004, for about 20 years, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s special unit, the Special Forces Group, maintained almost complete silence. "By the nature of its mission, it is a unit of extremely high secrecy"—this stock phrase of the Ministry of Defense said it all. Not only the sight of training, but even the size of the unit and details of its missions could not be officially confirmed. No photos, no video. The only confirmable fact was simply that it "exists" at Narashino Garrison. However, from 2023 onward, that silence broke.
Special operations forces do not function on their own. This is a principle the US Green Berets have advocated since their founding. One of the Green Berets’ primary missions, Foreign Internal Defense, is an approach that achieves regional stability by training and supporting friendly local militaries so that America need not intervene directly. Special operations forces function as "the catalyst at the forward edge of alliances." In contemporary special-operations diplomacy, joint training is not merely a venue for improving military capability. It is an act that forms the deepest layer of a multilayered inter-state relationship where politics, diplomacy, military affairs, and culture fuse. Whereas joint exercises of conventional units are an "exchange decided at the government level," live training among special operations units means " building a trust relationship where lives can be entrusted to one another." Japan’s Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Special Forces Group has, in recent years, rapidly reinforced this orientation.
"By the nature of the mission, a unit of extremely high secrecy"—the organization the Ministry of Defense had kept describing that way has in recent years rapidly been " made visible." In 2023, training footage of the special unit was officially released for the first time in history, and in 2025, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi personally went to Narashino Garrison to inspect. In fiscal 2026, a plan to be reborn as a "Special Operations Command (provisional name)" integrated with the Central Readiness Regiment (about 800 personnel) was formally announced from the mouth of the Defense Minister. That is the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Special Forces Group (SFGp: Special Forces Group). In this article, from the founding of the Special Forces Group to the present, we will thoroughly organize everything based on open sources. We aim to be the most detailed introductory article at this point in time to answer the question, "How much capability do Japan’s special operations truly possess?"
The title of this book is "The Window of Opportunity A Guidepost to the Mandela Effect." " Window of Opportunity"—originally, this is an English idiom that refers to the stretch of time or circumstances during which the optimal opportunity to achieve a certain goal is open. Why did the author choose this expression as the book’s title.
In the 2020s, we live amid the greatest flood of information in history. SNS timelines update by the second. News is delivered 24 hours 365 days from all over the world. Video content is supplied without limit. Text, images, and video generated by AI have become so elaborate that they are hard to distinguish from those made by humans. What meaning might the phenomenon called the Mandela Effect have in this age of "information overload".
One of the most peculiar contents included in this book is "more than 30 pages of materials on an analog computer left by the author’s grandfather." Hearing the words " analog computer" may make many people tilt their heads in puzzlement. The computers we use in daily life are all digital computers, and analog computers have been buried in history as a "technology that existed in the past." However, the materials left by the author’s grandfather are said to include designs and theories of analog computers that "differ markedly from the modern system of technology."
"360 or more documented cases"—this is the number of Mandela Effect cases included in this book. As a book on the Mandela Effect written in Japanese, there is no other that includes so many cases. Over many years, the author collected and classified Mandela Effect cases from Japanese- and English-language sources, and systematically organized them. This work can be read not as a mere "list of cases" but as a cultural and academic contribution that is " building a database for Japanese research on the Mandela Effect."
"What is reality"—this question is among the oldest and most difficult to answer in philosophy. Plato regarded " reality" as " the shadow of the Ideas (forms)." Kant distinguished " the thing-in-itself" and " phenomena," arguing that humans cannot directly know the thing-in-itself. Contemporary neuroscience argues that " the reality we experience is a 'model' constructed by the brain." The phenomenon called the Mandela Effect forces us to face this philosophical conundrum in a very concrete and everyday form. The mismatch between the memory that "the tip of Pikachu’s tail was black" and the record that " it was yellow" presents, in a form anyone can participate in, the question " which is reality."
Among the cases of the Mandela Effect, those that pose the most fundamental questions are the ones related to "changes in physical laws and cosmic constants." An anime character design changed, a famous person’s year of death was different—such cases can, for the time being, be addressed with the explanation of "false memory." But cases like " the physical constants changed," " the speed of light is different from before," or " our understanding of the size of the universe changed" do not admit that explanation. The basic premise of science is that the laws of physics do not change. That is precisely why testimonies about changes in physical laws and on a cosmic scale occupy the most challenging category within the Mandela Effect.
Japan possesses its own rich pop culture, and there exist countless Mandela Effect cases related to it. The author of this book, while referring to cases originating in Europe and America, devotes energy to independently collecting and analyzing cases rooted in the context of the Japanese language and Japanese culture. This is an important contribution to discussing the Mandela Effect in Japanese.
"That's pseudoscience." " That's woo." " That's a symptom of schizophrenia." These are the words that people who try to talk about the Mandela Effect often run into on the internet. There is no small number of people who, by speaking about the Mandela Effect, have experienced harsh criticism, ridicule, and denial. The author himself says in this book that he has been "bashed and insulted more times than he can count." The author of this book calls this kind of " pressure that muzzles speech" " fascistic scientism." The concept the author proposes is not mere " criticism of science." It is a critique of the intellectual attitude that " uses the authority of science to exclude and insult experiences and testimonies that fall outside their paradigm."
"The world I had believed in was actually something completely different." This feeling is an experience that both people who have experienced the Mandela Effect and people who were raised as 2nd-generation believers in a religion and then left that religion describe in words that are astonishingly similar. The author of this book was born and raised as a 2nd-generation believer in Happy Science (a Japanese new religion). If you read this book, you will immediately see that that experience is deeply rooted in the author's interest in and research into the Mandela Effect. The question of the "discrepancy between memory and reality" is, for the author, not a mere occult curiosity, but a question directly and intimately connected to the very experiences through which he has lived.
When talking about the Mandela Effect, there is a theme you cannot avoid: time travel. "Someone went back to the past and changed history. That is the cause of the Mandela Effect" — this explanation is one of the hypotheses that is persistently discussed in the Mandela Effect community. Of course, at present there is no evidence showing that time travel actually exists. However, "we have not proven it exists" is not the same as " we have proven it is impossible."
When you hear the words "parallel worlds," what do you imagine? The world of SF films, manga, and anime? Or the theory of quantum mechanics? The concept of parallel worlds does not exist only in fiction. In modern physics and cosmology, there are multiple theories that discuss "multiple universes or worlds that exist in some sense in parallel." When we try to consider the Mandela Effect scientifically, these theories are unavoidable.
"Can you describe the Mandela Effect with mathematics?" — this is a challenge that many researchers and commentators have avoided. The stance of the author, who is not a specialist in mathematics or physics, in trying to face this question head-on is one of the most ambitious parts of this book. Chapter 4 of this book, "A Mathematical Model of the Mandela Effect Using Tensors," is a record of the author's attempt, while acknowledging the limits of his own academic ability, to " speak about the Mandela Effect in the language of mathematics."
When asked "Can you explain the Mandela Effect scientifically?" there is a theory that many researchers and commentators turn to. That is the " Many-Worlds Interpretation" in quantum mechanics.
There is a representative, top-tier Mandela Effect, both in Japan and overseas, that goes like this: we have an image that the heart is located on the left side of the human body, but in fact it is in the center. There also exists on YouTube a video in which Yasushi Okada, a legendary genius who ranked first on admission to the University of Tokyo Science III group (the pre-med/medicine intake), explains as his research theme and conclusion "the mechanism by which the body's left-right symmetry is broken" and discusses it with Horiemon (entrepreneur Horie Takafumi) and others. In addition, it is said that at a rate of about one in 5,000 people there exists a congenital condition called dextrocardia, in which the heart is located on the right side. As for how to reconcile these two facts (is it, in some sense, a difference in viewpoint or just a way of putting things, or is it that things are wobbling or shifting, etc.), the author has, for now, not obtained a rigorously convincing explanation or body of findings.
The very concept of the Mandela Effect was born from a mismatch of memories surrounding "the death of a certain famous person." The origin of this concept lies in the fact that there were people all over the world who remembered that Nelson Mandela "died in prison in the 1980s."
History is a record of objective facts — many people believe this. In the "historical materialism" (also called " the materialist conception of history"), the philosophy of history and social theory founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century that forms the core of their view of history, the crux lies in the proposition that "the history of society is determined not by mind, ideas, religion, or culture, but by the material mode of production (the economic base)." That is, it asserts an inverted causal relationship in which it is not human consciousness that determines social being, but social being (relations of production and economic structure) that determines human consciousness. Based on this view of history, history is held to progress dialectically through "the development of the productive forces" and " the contradictions of the relations of production," and concepts such as " supernatural forces," " the intervention of gods and buddhas," " spiritual entities," " parallel worlds," and " temporal alteration" are, in principle, excluded as incapable of being drivers of history. However, when we reexamine history from the perspective of the Mandela Effect, we are confronted with the fact that "history is a story told by someone, and it can change depending on how it is told."
Geography-related Mandela Effects have an even more mysterious character than the cases in anime and film. That is because maps are records of the earth's actual topography, and should not change due to "edition differences" or " revisions." We believe that the positions of continents do not change according to human memory or cultural interpretation. Precisely for that reason, mismatches of memory concerning the positions of continents pose a more fundamental question.
Released in 2001, Studio Ghibli's film Spirited Away is one of the biggest hits in Japanese film history. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003, and for many years held the all-time No. 1 spot for theater attendance in Japan (it was later surpassed by Demon Slayer: Mugen Train). If that Ghibli masterpiece has become one of the most hotly debated cases in Japanese Mandela Effect research, that would be an intriguing story.
This is one of the most widely known cases within the Mandela Effect, and is cited as a quintessential case rooted in Japanese anime and game culture.
Overview of the Mandela Effect