Hello. My name is Ray Naito.

For a long time, I wrote almost exclusively in Japanese. With the publication of the English version of my book, I started this blog so that my work could reach people in the English-speaking world more easily.

I have always found it quite difficult to explain who I am, and until now I have mostly avoided writing about myself in any detail. This time, however, I decided to sit down and try to explain myself properly.

My main interests today are Buddhism, society, human beings, and veganism. My activities in these areas mainly consist of writing on note, a Japanese blogging platform, writing and submitting academic papers, and publishing books. I recently published my first book, *Buddhism: 2,500 Years of Misunderstanding*. I have also submitted papers on Buddhism to international academic journals. One of them is currently under peer review, and I hope I will be able to share some good news about it in the near future.

Other than that, I have not achieved anything particularly remarkable so far.

I am an amateur scholar. I like calling myself a “self-proclaimed Buddhist scholar,” because I think that describes my current situation perfectly. I do not belong to academia, and I do not make a living by teaching people or conducting research.

I make my living working at a supermarket. I am also the owner of Naito Beer, a craft brewery specializing in gluten-free beer. The business, however, has not gone well at all, and it is going to close this summer.

This is one reason why I find it so difficult to talk about myself. Information like this is probably necessary if you want to understand my life and who I am. But my profile itself is made up of such a strange collection of different elements that even if I honestly put all of them out there, I am not sure they make me any easier to understand.

So instead, I want to explain why I became interested in Buddhism, society, human beings, and veganism. I think that will tell you much more about what I want to say to the world than simply describing the external facts of my life.

## It Started at a Supermarket

I started working at a supermarket about five years ago.

At the time, I had just started my brewery. The startup business was not making enough money to cover my living expenses, so I decided to work at a nearby supermarket to make up the difference. In the end, I stayed there, and I still work at the same store today.

I loved eating meat, so I asked to work in the meat department.

Soon after I started working there, I began seeing huge amounts of meat being discarded every day.

At our store, discarded food is not simply thrown away. It is donated to a local food bank and distributed to people who need food.

Incidentally, I am also a food bank user.

My unsuccessful business takes so much of my money that I need free food myself.

Anyway, seeing that enormous amount of discarded meat destroyed an assumption I had carried with me for years.

Until then, I had somehow believed that human beings treated meat with respect. We might kill animals for food, but at least we did not waste them.

I had no particular reason to believe this.

Perhaps it is a kind of deceptive value that society collectively maintains in order to ease our guilt about exploiting animals. I do not know why I believed it. What mattered was that I suddenly realized that what I had believed might not actually be true.

I became curious and started looking into the issue. It did not take long to discover the reality of food waste, particularly the waste of animal products.

That was what first made me interested in veganism.

Not long afterward, I became vegan. I was already gluten intolerant, and now veganism became another dietary practice added to my life.

At the same time, I began speaking publicly about veganism.

I created a YouTube channel called *Yukkuri Vegan* (“Slowly Vegan”). The channel is now private because the direction of my thinking at the time was different from where I am today.

My original idea was to talk about veganism—which is widely misunderstood and often disliked—while removing as much philosophy and moral posturing as possible and focusing instead on data and logic.

But as I continued talking about veganism, my interest gradually shifted.

I became less interested in veganism itself and more interested in the tendency of meat eaters to position their own practice of eating meat as legitimate.

Eating meat is economical.

It is traditional.

Wild animals eat meat too.

People use arguments like these to justify eating meat and, at the same time, to dismiss or dislike vegans.

But if you actually look at the data, you cannot simply conclude that eating meat is economical.

And just because something is traditional does not mean that it is right. Misogyny has existed as a tradition for thousands of years. If someone told you that misogyny was therefore justified, would you accept that argument?

The fact that wild animals eat meat does not mean that human beings should continue eating meat forever either.

Male dolphins in the wild sometimes form groups, isolate females, and engage in coercive sexual behaviour with them. Would anyone seriously argue that because dolphins do this in nature, groups of men should therefore be allowed to rape women?

Of course not.

So why do arguments like these exist?

And why do people accept them without questioning them?

The belief I myself had blindly accepted—that “humans treat the animals they eat with respect”—was fundamentally the same kind of thing.

Why had I believed it?

I studied social psychology at university, so I had a little background in psychology. Motivated reasoning, self-deception, cognitive dissonance, cognitive bias—there are many different names for related phenomena, but they all point toward one basic aspect of human beings.

We begin by positioning what we already do as right.

And when we encounter information that threatens that position, we unconsciously select, reject, or reinterpret that information in ways that allow us to maintain the legitimacy of ourselves and our actions.

Gradually, I became more interested in this psychological tendency than in veganism itself.

I wanted to understand this strange habit of the human mind, and especially the way we interpret things in order to maintain the validity of what we already do.

In sociology, I learned that this way of interpreting the world can be understood in terms of **meaning**.

That was the beginning of my research.

I will stop here for now.

Next time, I want to explain how this question of meaning eventually became connected, for me, with Buddhism.