Somewhere in Japan

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Recommended Reading: Morag Rose on Aimless Wandering

An elevated view of buildings in Minato Ward, Tokyo, from a rooftop in Roppongi

Readers of this blog and anyone who knows me even vaguely will know that wandering, especially the aimless sort, is a topic close to my heart. I run guided tours and workshops on ambling exploration, and last year I put out my first zine about getting lost with intention. There aren’t a lot of people […]

Announcement: Applied Psychogeography in Tokyo

Long exposure showing blurred people crossing the street in Kabukicho, in front of the Donki

For a little while now, I’ve offered experimental walking tours in Tokyo, and I’ve decided to start doing more of this sort of work, some of it in a different format. There are a lot of things I want to try, and instead of hoping bookings pop up and clients are on board to experiment, […]

The Staggering Potential of Miso Soup

photograph of slices of green onion floating in a bowl of miso soup

Miso soup is about as pedestrian and unremarkable a dish as you’ll find in Japanese cuisine, or at least that’s the common perception of it. Imagine a bowl of miso soup, and chances are you’ll be picturing a cloudy broth with a few thin slices of green onion, some cubes of tofu, and some bits […]

Dispatch № 118: Parsing

Monochrome photograph showing tall grasses backlit by the evening sun, seen from the other side of a wire fence

Ten years, four months, and twenty-nine days since I moved to Japan, and over that time, many tens of thousands of photographs made. Nearly every day, I aim a lens at something nearby and opening the shutter to project a focused image onto a receiving surface. Sometimes it’s film, though these days it’s mostly digital. […]

Dispatch № 117: Hilltop Heebie-Jeebies

Night shot in monochrome of a stone gate at a small neighborhood shrine

On a cool spring night, I was on a mountain road in Yamanashi well after dark. I had gone out to try to photograph star trails over nearby peaks, but ended up just taking a walk, as there was a fog settling over everything that obscured the view. There were no street lights within a […]

Dispatch № 116: Waiting on the Size of It

Photo of one of my preferred benches in a local park in Saitama City, Japan

Couldn’t sleep, too much on my mind and no way to quiet it down, so I went out. After wandering with the camera for a bit, I sat on a park bench in the dark, well after midnight. At 2:05 AM, an earthquake began. When an earthquake hits, the first thing to enter my mind […]

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