Dispatch № 51: Communal Waters

Third places are important, but some are disappearing, public baths among them. This is one aspect of Japan’s declining social capital.

Dispatch № 50: Ode to Fuzz

Because my cat is my most-requested topic

Dispatch № 49: Hushed

In relative terms, it’s a cacophony, and it seems so because it has otherwise been so tremendously quiet that minute sounds are magnified.

Dispatch № 48: Lineage

Long after the baby has grown into a man, he sits on a bench in a park in Japan, ten thousand kilometers and thirty-nine years from Lubbock.

Dispatch № 47: Still Smitten

I was single, but really didn’t want to be, and as we were leaving a while later, a thought bubbled up from my subconscious. Wouldn’t it be something if I wound up with her?

Dispatch № 46: Offerings

There was no way to know who had left them or why. No way to know if the offerings had been made for children who had been saved, or lost, or perhaps hoped for by would-be parents.

Dispatch № 45: Repeater

So why would I choose not only to board the train when I don’t really need to, but also remain in my seat for at least one full trip around the loop?

Dispatch № 44: Shuttered

The shutters came down, and the customers stopped coming, but life continued inside.

Dispatch № 43: The Summer Trope

It is a season for the seaside and the mountain stream. A season for eating ice pops while walking over the blistering asphalt of country roads fringed with green foxtail, the green of which has begun to fade to brown.

Dispatch № 42: Chicken and Beer

It was just before Christmas and my friend and I were hanging out in Ikebukuro, an area on the north side of Tokyo. We had been wandering around aimlessly and were outside a convenience store when a man approached us.