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Kozuka Art Festival 2025
I feared my offering would be a failure. I had concerns about getting to the venue safely. I was worried that my poor Japanese would be a burden for everyone. I was intimidated by comparing myself to the other artists. I was sure that I’d be a punk misfit in a mix of hippies. Only…
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Summer Attractions
Summer in Japan is full of festivals and events. I feel like a sweaty social butterfly. Kamogawa Citizen’s Fireworks Although we’ve lived in Kamogawa for a decade, this is the first time we’ve taken in the beach fireworks. They were quite spectacular – lots of multicolored rainbow explosions reflecting on the water and waves. We…
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Cat Report
One of the hallmarks of my morning yoga class was the “cat report.” It started as a way for me to keep everyone distracted during a particular movement, and became a regular thing. I miss giving a cat report and yesterday’s activities merit some reporting. So here we are a cat report for you. Beryl…
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Mediatinker is 25 years old
A quarter of a century ago, I wrote my first blog post back when Mediatinker was an experiment hosted on Blogger. Today’s Weather in Tokyo: hot and humid. (It is summer after all!) It was quickly followed by a second post where I described the state of my urban garden. And here I am a…
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Fresh Indigo Blue
Yesterday, the Cotton & Indigo Trust gathered at Oyama Senmaida for summer gardening and our first dye harvest. The indigo is thriving! The seedlings we planted have bushed out. The cotton has been attacked by insects and weeds, but there are a few flowers here and there. It’s backbreaking work to maintain the fields, and…
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One Last Om (for now)
My “Yoga Era” may be drawing to a close. Today I made a difficult decision for the benefit of my well-being and paused my Satoyama Yoga classes indefinitely. Unfortunately, my herniated discs are not healing easily. Even when I take great care to avoid poses and movement that hurt, I still end up straining my…
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Professional Designosaur
I have been a designer for a very long time – 40 years or more. Today I realised what a dinosaur I am. Recently as I was working on a client project, I encountered a strange way of indicating bleed in an Illustrator template – a layer of 20mm rectangles on the edges and overlaps…
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難しいけど
Japanese is hard. I struggle through conversations with awkward pauses, misplaced modifiers, and incorrect verb tenses, not to mention my garbled pronunciation. “I’b leaning moor. Good spek…homework maikey. Existence toward Javanese.” That’s how I sound. The ideas are there but meaning is open to interpretation. Wide open. I am lucky to have people around me…
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Camera Roll
Life is flowing along from rainy season into summer. Every day brings beautiful, memorable, and wonderful moments. Here are a few from recent weeks. There were two notable human interest articles in the local paper – a profile of me now that I’m on the Oyama Senmaida board, and an interview with Iku-chan about her…
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Tanada Yoga 2025
Today is International Yoga Day and I celebrated by leading two yoga classes. At 7 am, my daily Zoom class practiced “Common Yoga Protocol” which is the Indian government’s programme for the event. And at 9 am, I hosted a yoga session at overlooking the rice fields at Oyama Senmaida. It was glorious to be…
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