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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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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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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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Okugome Ochre
My friend Mark brought me a pickle jar full of bright orange sludge that he scraped from a tunnel near Okugome Dam. He saw the color and thought I might like it. Yes, indeed! And now I have a new earth pigment. I’m calling it Okugome Ochre. It’s actually a lot more difficult to identify…
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Coreopsis colors
“Hey! Look! Oooh, yay!” I made Tod stop the car so that I could collect armfuls of freshly mown coreopsis from the ditch where they lay. Easy pickings on our way back from running errands. Coreopsis are on the invasive species list in Japan. It is illegal to plant them. They grow heartily along the…
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Project 2025 Bingo – Game Over
It’s been a hundred days. Here’s where we end on this bingo card: Did we win? Or did we lose? The 14 red stamps are things implemented and in progress. The 3 light red stamps indicate places where the card’s wording was a little off. For example, it turned out not to be “Abolish” the…
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