Yuga Kurita
Independent Thinker / Filmmaker / Photographer
Yuga Kurita is an independent Japanese thinker and creator whose work spans photography, filmmaking, music, meditation, and philosophy. Born in Saitama in 1971, he spent much of his twenties backpacking around the world. In India, he pursued “drug-free highs” through fasting and deep meditation, exploring the nature of consciousness through direct experience. He later lived in Oslo as a studio musician before returning to Japan in 1999, where he continued creating music using the sitar, synthesizers, and vocal technologies.
A major turning point came when he casually joined Google+. Seeing photographers interact directly with global audiences inspired him to pursue photography seriously. Immersing himself in image-making, he mastered a wide range of techniques and came to realize that Mt. Fuji was his ultimate subject for him. In 2013 he moved to the forests near Mt. Fuji, later becoming one of the Tokyo Camera Club Top 10 Photographers of 2013 and holding four solo exhibitions in Tokyo.
Between 2022 and 2023, Kurita returned to India for six months of meditation-centered living. The experience pushed his introspection to new depths.
However, upon returning to Japan, he swung briefly to the opposite extreme—immersing himself in games such as Satisfactory, eventually logging more than 3,000 hours on Steam.
Yet this phase became an unexpected catalyst for philosophical insight.
While struggling to optimize impossibly complex virtual factories inside the game, he found himself thinking:
“If I can devote this much effort to a simulated world,
how different is it from the ‘real’ one?”
That moment gave vivid weight to the Simulation Hypothesis and led him toward a new line of inquiry:
What if reality is layered—what if we can create a perfectly convincing simulated world, while the world hosting our simulation is itself nested within an even larger one?
If that’s the case, then living in the “real world” as if it were a game—actively, creatively, and playfully—might be the most honest way for him to exist.
Today, Kurita is pivoting from a career centered on photography and videography toward philosophical reflection and independent commentary. His work explores AI, post-singularity society, digital life, modern spirituality, and the future of human meaning. He believes that living as a philosopher—rather than studying philosophy academically—is one of the last creative domains AI cannot replace, because it requires lived experience, subjective awareness, and authentic insight.
He now expresses his ideas through essays, films, and long-form commentary on YouTube and his website, while continuing to maintain his photographic work rooted in the landscapes of Mt. Fuji.
“My life’s work is to integrate everything I’ve experienced—travel, meditation, music, photography, technology—into one ongoing inquiry: what does it mean to be human in the age of AI?”
Note:
Yuga Kurita is the working name of Hiroshi Onoue.
Business transactions are handled under the legal name Hiroshi Onoue.