Gackt - Excite “Tsumi no Keishou” Interview

 

GACKT: What do you think “gracefulness” is?

-“Gracefulness”? I get the image of being blessed mentally and physically, and having no difficulties. It’s something I really admire.

GACKT: You… admire gracefulness? We should have a graceful lifestyle, a graceful way of spending time, a graceful soul… The word “gracefulness” is deep. When I began living overseas, and decided to live a graceful lifestyle, I clashed with the word “gracefulness”. People think that gracefulness comes from plenty, and having breathing room, but that’s not actually true. For example, I live overseas, and see beautiful scenery and hear beautiful sounds, the sound of the ocean, bird song, that kind of thing, so let’s just spend two or three hours taking it in, that’s what people think spending time gracefully is. But that actually leaves you with nothing to do.

-You become unable to relax?

GACKT: Right. Because there is no breathing room in my heart. I end up toying with my cellphone and when I realize what I’m doing, I think, “This is a sickness”. I’ve realized gracefulness isn’t something that comes from things, it’s a word that describes your heart. To become truly graceful, people who are suffering from modernitis need training.

-Training to become graceful?

GACKT: To avoid modern things like playing with your cell phone, and do your best to just look at only the scenery for two hours or so. But it’s hard to do. This is a disease of modern people. In the past people went to temples and did zen meditation, and just emptied their minds. And to do that, they thought about a lot of things. After they thought and thought and thought, they became completely empty, but I think that was a way of resetting their hearts, and people were able to live balanced lives. That said, I think everyone now is living without resetting their hearts and even if they think, “Oh, that’s pretty” in the moment, it isn’t a reset. It’s not that the “soul” is a physical object, it’s an abstract thing, so modern people take it lightly.

-I feel that humans who take things that should have been important lightly connects to the new single “Tsumi no Keishou”.

GACKT: The words “Tsumi no Keishou” are not meant to be that specific. I think that humans carry sin from the moment they are born. For example, humans are the only living thing that destroys the balance on the Earth. If you think of the planet as a single life-form, the ones who have been born carrying that sin, humans, are a “cancer”. They destroy a lot of things, and are the cause of a lot of things… But, if you ask, “So people should stop existing then?”, absolutely not. That’s why I think perhaps people have to face the fact that they are born carrying sin, and face that sin, and live accepting that. People have the ability to think, an ability that other animals lack, and yet most people don’t think, right? They get up when their alarm goes off, eat breakfast because they “should”, go to work on time, and come home. They’re not thinking about those actions one by one, they’re just reacting. I think that’s very dangerous.

-Harm results from not thinking, then.

GACKT: People who don’t usually think won’t be able to do it if someone suddenly tells them “Think!” In particular it comes from having things like “Pandora’s box” that humans must not open. Things like human sins are contained in that box. If you don’t live your life facing that fact, then human nature is to commit sins before they know what sins are. Though in the first place you should if you are able to acknowledge that “Pandora’s box”, and live having thought about it, you should be able to find a balance… That’s why I say “Think about it” and “Face it”. I’m not the one who will decide right from wrong. Accepting it and living while finding a balance is the task that has been assigned to humans. By the way, finding a balance means, even if you think you’re a biased human, you should live accepting the misalignment between yourself and compatibility with society.

-When I took that message from this song, I thought about how hard it is to recognize your sins and accept them. On top of that, when I saw the music video for the song, I felt the frustration, and something like emptiness, of being unable to stop sins.

GACKT: That’s one more answer. The story of someone who was unable to accept it.

-It was very painful to watch.

GACKT: The music video is like a symbol of society as it is now. This ties in to the telling people to “Think!” thing, but most people in the world now are letting someone else decide what is right and wrong for them. They think what the majority says is right, it’s not something they thought about and decided themselves. But what’s really important is what you want to do about it. How are you going to live getting along with society? Though you can’t agree with 100% of it, you can get along with it, right? So in order to get along with society, you have to face who you really are. If you’re just going with the flow, the result will be that when something big happens, you’ll throw all the responsibility on to someone else.

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