RYO HIRANO

War is the Absolute Worst. Also, About Dieting.
War is the worst. It’s total bullshit how those pieces of shit sacrifice children, civilians, history, culture, and even our “boring” daily lives just to maintain their own power. Seriously, fuck them. It is unbelievably disgusting.

Anyway, I’m feeling sick thinking about it, so let’s switch to a different topic. I’ve lost about 4kg in the first three months of this year, so I’ll leave my method here as a record.

The Two Core Strategies
-Strength Training: Increase muscle mass to boost basal metabolism.
-Dietary Management: Keep lipid (fat) intake low.

I used AI (Gemini) to support my dietary management.
The human body is built from three macronutrients: Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrates. While low-carb diets (keto) show quick results, they tend to make your brain feel foggy. That’s why I recommend fat restriction combined with strength training.

You can calculate your ideal daily PFC balance (Protein/Fat/Carbohydrate) using sites like this:
PFC Calculator

I set a realistic goal of losing 1kg per month. I fed those calculation results into Gemini and started reporting every single meal. Gemini then estimates the PFC amounts for me. All I have to do is eat while keeping those numbers in mind. If I’m unsure, I can just ask, “How much can I eat for the rest of the day?” and it tells me.

For example, if you eat one piece of convenience store fried chicken, you’ve basically used up more than half of your daily fat allowance. Because of that, I haven’t touched fried chicken once this year. Instead, I eat a lot of chicken breast and gizzards. I still eat ramen occasionally, but I deal with it by consciously cutting fat in my other meals.

A low-fat diet naturally leads to high protein intake. It can be tough to get enough from food alone, so I supplement with protein powder. The best part is that you can still eat a decent amount of rice and noodles, so it feels way less restrictive than a low-carb diet.

The key is to report every meal to Gemini until you develop an intuitive sense of the PFC balance. Gradually, you’ll naturally learn which foods are low in fat.

Strength Training as a Foundation
Adding muscle increases your basal metabolism, making your body naturally leaner and helping to prevent the “rebound” effect.

But if it’s too intense, you won’t stick with it. Doing it for just one minute every two days is what matters. The muscle soreness was brutal at first, though.

My routine is basically squats. Lower body muscles make up about 60–70% of your total muscle mass, so the logic is that if you’re dieting, just hitting the legs is enough. If you have extra energy, a 40-minute brisk walk after training is apparently even more effective. I recommend Noda Crystal’s video for proper squat form.

Once you gain some muscle, squats alone won’t feel like enough, and you’ll want to ramp up the intensity. Out of all the fitness YouTubers I’ve watched, I recommend [The Earth is a Gym] fitness mate—his “agitation” (motivation) is top-tier.

I’ve been continuing this way without pushing too hard. One thing I’ve learned: “Spot reduction” is a myth. If you want to lose belly fat, there is no other way than reducing your overall body fat. None. Period.

That said, I feel that having low fat is actually a disadvantage for a living creature. Having some fat stored probably increases your survival rate (especially in cold places like Nagano, where I live). “Health” looks different for everyone, so it’s best to find what works for you.

The “right to be foolish” is a vital part of living. It’s crucial not to judge others’ bodies or choices. We should all aim for whatever state we personally desire.

Dieting has been a great way to learn about the body. In the book I mentioned before, “How to Walk the Beast Path: A Hunter’s View of Japanese Nature by Shinya Senmatsu”, there’s a story about how bears—normally carnivorously inclined—switched to a herbivorous diet due to the impact of dams and rivers. It surprised me that a wild animal’s diet could switch like that, but looking at it through the lens of dietary management, I now see animal bodies as “devices” that take in PFC from the outside and convert it into energy. It makes sense now.

I want to keep keeping myself in shape. I want to stay healthy so that I’m always ready to stand up for anti-war.
Fascism won’t even let you exist in the state you choose for yourself. It is truly, utterly fuck.

Recently, I was invited as a guest speaker to the graduation exhibition “Me!” for the Media Arts course at Tama Art University. The speakers included video artist Ryotaro Sato, artist/animator Shu Yonezawa, and media artist Akihiko Taniguchi. The overarching theme was “Characters.” We followed a talk-show format inspired by “Lion no Gokigenyou”—a classic Japanese TV show where guests roll a dice and talk about the theme it lands on. Seeing how Sato-san, Yonezawa-san, and Taniguchi-san each engaged with characters and their own works was incredibly fascinating; the session was packed with so much information that it ended in a flash. Above all, the graduates’ works were massive in scale and high in quality, each crafted from a truly unique perspective. It was breathtakingly impressive. Here, I want to record some thoughts I had regarding the theme “Character”—specifically, what I felt like discussing when that topic came up. This isn’t about character design from the perspective of narratology (I don’t know anything about that!).

Characters: An Interface for Pseudo-interaction with a Chaotic World

When I think of the “original” characters, beings like yokai (monsters) or gods come to mind. I started wondering how these superhuman entities were born. From my experience farming a small rice paddy and field in Nagano, dealing with an uncontrollable environment is a hassle. The heat of summer requires constant water adjustment, typhoons knock down the rice stalks, and deer come to eat the crops. Unpredictable and uncontrollable things happen constantly. It’s a real problem. Hunting is likely the same. Even if you can predict things to some extent through experience, you can never control everything. These factors are directly linked to survival. Facing an unpredictable and incomprehensible nature without any means of coping is unbearable. So, what do we do? We give it a name and a body to make it seem “interactable.” It’s about giving a “voice” to things that have no voice. Giving them a voice brings about a story (narrative), which generates cause and effect, making it possible to address the problem. If you have a way to cope, you can make the future predictable and controllable. Isn’t this the very origin of the “character”? That’s what I’ve been thinking.

I say “seem interactable” because that voice is merely a human imagination centered around human perspectives. However, since humans cannot escape being human, the act of reflecting on things other than ourselves remains crucially important.

In Buddhism, the figures depicted as Buddhist statues are not gods. I see them as a crystallization of Buddhist teachings—like a “compressed file,” so to speak. In the Buddhism deep-dive episodes of Coten Radio, they mentioned that these statues serve as “model cases” for what one should strive to become. In Buddhism, characters function as incredibly efficient information compression devices. Even if you cannot read or haven’t memorized every sutra, that information can be “decompressed” at any time. They are intuitively designed so that anyone can easily perform that decompression.

A character is an interface that gives a voice to the voiceless, converting domains that humans cannot handle into a size that allows for interaction. It is a very clever tool for humans—who cannot accept the chaotic world in its raw, chaotic state—to survive. And at the same time, it is an ultra-high-efficiency information compression device.

The artists at the talk session each captured the world through their own unique lenses. I believe they were performing the task of molding those “visions visible only to them” into characters to give them a voice. In Shinya Senmatsu’s How to Walk on a Boar Road: Looking at Japan’s Nature through a Hunter’s Eyes, there is a story about how, as a hunter’s senses sharpen during the season, they can sense the presence of prey just by a slight difference in the angle of a single branch. Human cognition can become that acute. We are constantly living while overlooking things. But when someone discovers something, and that information is too complex or doesn’t fit into language, they can give it a “voice” through the form of a character. It is, of course, just one of many methods. And finding those things makes me happy. Perhaps it’s because a new perspective is born into our accustomed way of living in this world.