Rainy sakura and long walks

It’s the beginning of April and the cherry blossom is almost over here in Tokyo. This year, I’ve avoided the usual spots, such as Meguro, Yoyogi, or Kichijoji pretty much entirely and instead, enjoyed Sakura in the neighborhood. Residential Setagaya has a whole lot of cherry trees and, to me, this is much nicer than cramming into the abovementioned places with a million other people.

Although it was raining cats and dogs on one of the two Sakura weekends, I’ve found myself spending much more time out and about than in previous years. In no small part, that is due to the newsletters of Craig Mod. After stumbling about his piece on Morioka in the New York Times and then visiting Morioka, I dug deeper into his writing and absolutely loved what I found. Besides his many newsletters on walking and staples of Japanese culture like the old coffee houses (Kissaten), it turns out he’s also the author of some impressive photo essays that I admire, but have never bothered to do more research on in the past! By all means, check out the many creative outputs of Craig Mod. (He also produces podcasts, which I haven’t even looked into, yet.)

So as Sakura comes to and end, I feel inspired by what other creators in Japan are doing — how they look at their surroundings, what they choose to document and how — and it makes me want to update this little site here more often again. I’m not exactly sure what it’s going to be, or which frequency I can realistically manage, but there’s more content to come!