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Life Eras (with data)
In a couple of days, I turn 60. The long-awaited kanreki! In preparation for this milestone, I took a tour through some of my life’s data. What does my life look like as a spreadsheet and a chart or two? I read a long time ago that when life is viewed as a series of…
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Camera Roll
Covering 8 weeks from late winter into spring, here’s the latest compilation from Stories. I know Instagram won’t stick around forever and I will be happy to see these moments again in a few years. Lots of cats. Nature. Creative adventures. You know me, so you know what to expect. 🙂
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Oyama Walking
Always on a quest to improve visitor experience at Oyama Senmaida, I recently created a walking map featuring three of my favorite routes around the area. The green route, 不動の道 (Fudou no Michi), leads to Oyama Fudouson, a 1300 year old temple and registered cultural property. It’s an uphill ramble along a forested road dotted…
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Tane-maki
It’s spring and all the farmers at Oyama Senmaida are busily preparing for rice planting season. This week, I lent a hand with 種蒔 tane-maki, which we’d call sowing in English. On Monday, we prepared 220 seed trays for the Sake Owners program. The sowing is staggered to match the planting dates in late April…
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Pressure Cleaning
Not pressure washing, but deadline pressure to do a cleaning and reorganizing task that I’ve been putting off for too long. The studio. With a guest arriving this afternoon, I decided that Wednesday would be the ideal day to pull the studio apart and rearrange it. My art supplies and tools are pretty much where…
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Serpentine Shores (and Hills)
Our local geology is fascinating. We live along a narrow belt of serpentine that crosses through the Chiba peninsula. Nobody has quite figured out how it got here. On Sunday, Tod & I joined Oyama Senmaida’s geotour – it’s a long-running program coming back after a six year hiatus. Geologists Naoki Takahashi and Nobuko Ushimura…
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Dual Pricing for Tourists
Japan is in the process of considering dual pricing for tourists. The government’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism is meeting now with a plan to make a report this summer. But in the Japanese way, if they have announced they are studying it, the plan’s already made and the report will merely provide…
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Cotton-Indigo Trust 2026
I just registered for the next cohort of the Wata-Ai (Cotton-Indigo) Trust at Oyama Senmaida. I enjoyed the program last year. A second round is going to let me build on the basics that I learned. We use abandoned fields at the top of the rice terraces to grow indigo and multiple types of cotton.…
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Lawrence Bacon
Once a year, we buy a slab of pork belly at Costco and ask our friend Lawrence to turn it into bacon. He learned to cure and smoke bacon at his mother’s side in Georgia and has taken the art of cured meats to the next level with all sorts of exotic charcuterie he makes…
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A lifetime of weaving
Morita Seki is retiring after 60 years of weaving. She is 92. I saw an article in the Bonichi about her “final exhibition” at a gallery in downtown Tateyama and I had to go to meet her and to see some of her work. By the time I got there on the 20th, day before…
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