Learn new approaches to exploring one of the world's most interesting places.
Experimental Walking Tours in Tokyo and Beyond
Journey from the known into the unknown, navigating through the city using experimental means aimed at showing another side of the urban environment. You’ll see the city in new ways, and learn some new skills you can apply to your explorations, no matter where you go.
Photo Walks and Workshops
Photo walks and workshops aimed at enhancing your experience of Japan while sharpening your skills. Workshops and walks draw on my extensive experience as a photographer, educator, and enthusiastic explorer of the Tokyo area.
The Travel Book Project
Based on a decade’s worth of personal experience and observations, I have some thoughts on how to get more out of a visit to Japan. Honestly, I’m not sure when it will be finished, because I’m figuring out how to write it as I go, with a focus on quality over speed.
Recent Posts
Dispatch № 109: Birds and Boars
Spend enough time in the woods and you develop a sense of whether it’s a bird or a deer or even a snake, and it happens before you can even turn your head to see.
Dispatch № 108: Precarity
You admonish yourself for having neglected them until you needed them and wonder why you have also for so long put up with a job in which you are forever making up for the incompetence of others…
Dispatch № 107: Same Place, Different Day
Even when the weather is bad, I go out to wander and make pictures for thirty or forty minutes. Every working day, this is my lunchtime habit, a recursive practice that is exercise for both my body and my mind.
Dispatch № 106: Snow Bridge
Instead, it belongs to a rail-thin teenager who isn’t sure what he wants to do in life…
The State of the Blog, January 2022
Today I’d like to take a break from the regular schedule of the last year and look at the current state of my Somewhere in Japan project and talk a bit about where it’s headed in 2022.
Dispatch № 105: A Perfect Day for Pounding Rice
The air was cold and crisp, filled with the sounds of easy conversation and the rhythmic, sticky thuds of rice being pounded into mochi.
Dispatch № 104: Possibility
With less than a week left in the year, and with less than a week left for me in my thirties, I am feeling an uncharacteristic sense of hope and optimism.
Dispatch № 103: Nothing for the Sake of Something
To my left runs a long row of houses. To my right is a chain-link fence, woven and fringed with weeds. Beyond it, a profusion of railroad tracks.
Dispatch № 102: You’re Doing Me a Favor
Already, I’ve given away a half dozen old film cameras, a flash, a tripod head, two avocado trees, a couple old messenger bags, the fountain pen and ink, and a small variety of other things.
Dispatch № 100: Going Deep
Mounds of burnable garbage, bundles of cardboard, stacks of old clothes bound with twine, old furniture broken down into pieces, sandwich bags full of old batteries—just about anything you can imagine, really, and the volume increases strikingly as December’s days run out and the new year approaches.
Dispatch № 99: Decompression
A walk and a comedy podcast on the quiet back streets between the school and the station.