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 Essays
Dispatch № 95: The Distance
It wasn’t about the cat vomiting behind the couch or the flat tire on the way to work, either. It wasn’t about the spilled water, the broken flowerpot, or the burned toast.
Dispatch № 94: The Light
When you realize that a dream, one that once compelled you into focused action, has all but totally withered away over many years of difficulty, you have a decision to make.
Dispatch № 93: Show-Runner
You can’t control nature any more than you can teach a cat to tap dance.
Dispatch № 92: Sitting on a Mid-River Stone
To simply exist and observe, to notice the small things happening around you, to be aware of your body as an element of the landscape.
Dispatch № 91: Stars and Waters
We’ve been looking up with interest since long before we were human, and when we look up at the night sky now, it may stir within us something ancient and deep…
Dispatch № 90: Sharp Enough
Attention to detail counts for a lot, as does consistency, and both become supercharged by regular and deliberate practice.
Dispatch № 89: Not Giving Up
If it weren’t for the fact that I like the people I work with and I like the kids I teach, I’d have run for the hills a while ago.
Dispatch № 88: Oh, an Earthquake
I had no fear during that earthquake, and frankly never have in any that I’ve experienced. Which some people have told me is strange.
Dispatch № 87: A New Bath to Call Home
When we departed and walked home, I already knew I wanted to go back, soon and often.
Dispatch № 86: Falling Into Patterns
If I am still contentedly cooking her breakfast forty years from now, I’ll consider that a great personal success in a life well lived.
Dispatch № 85: Absent
A thick black line drawn through her name, as she would not be attending.
Dispatch № 84: Conditioning
Almost nobody gives them permission, let alone a push, to question authority or to push against the structures to which they find themselves subject but from which they rarely benefit.