Meanwhile : What will remain 100 years from now?

Yang Sung-hee

The author is a cultural columnist.

"People of 100 years from now, are you still eating tuna sashimi rolls? Are you still drinking local craft beer? Do you still read scraps of poetry? I regret that I will not live for 100 more years and so cannot hear your answer. Are you happy now?"

Those lines — rendered from the original Japanese text — are from a short poem, the title of which translates to "A Message to the World 100 Years from Now," by Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa.



While reading the poem, I remembered a moment from my high school years. Looking out a bus window, I saw a young mother carrying a baby at a bus stop. Suddenly, I was struck by the thought that 100 years in the future, neither I nor the mother, the child or anyone standing there would still exist. The realization landed like a blow. It may have been my first encounter with the feeling of impermanence.

An acquaintance often repeated the phrase "dust after 100 years." Since everyone becomes dust after a century, he would say, there is little reason to fight or struggle so desperately. The Bible offers a similar reminder: "For dust thou art, and into dust shalt thou return."

Tanikawa, widely regarded as Japan's national poet, gives readers existential resonance through plain and concise language. Without grand declarations, he asks readers a century in the future whether they are happy. Customs may change, but human life continues. His gentle wish for the happiness of unknown future readers carries an unexpected emotional weight.

The quoted poem appears at the end of the 2013 book "Writing Poetry" (translated), adapted from Tanikawa's appearance on NHK's interview program "100 Years Interview" (translated), featuring figures expected to be remembered a century later. In the book, Tanikawa reflects that unexpected words arrive when a person empties themselves of as much as possible. He also suggests that the universe is fundamentally meaningless and that human beings drape it with meaning through language.

Readers of his work sense that poetry is less a search for answers than an attentive way of noticing fleeting things before they disappear from around us.

Several of his poems appear in Japanese school textbooks. One of the best known, the title of which translates to "Living," captures the wonder of ordinary existence: "To be alive now means to be thirsty, to see sunlight shining through leaves, to suddenly remember a song, to sneeze, to hold your hand." The poem reminds readers that life is a magnificent collection of small moments encountered every day.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.