The red, bloated sun of a hazy summer shed its light over a new day. Mr. Tanaka had sketched out a map of how and where to meet me. I took a couple trains to get to Okazaki city and then managed to find him after a short walk. He took me in his car and away we went toward Takisanji temple.

Mr. Tanaka turned down the volume on some orchestral music ( Read more... )

If you missed part one, it's here: https://japanshin.livejournal.com/105638.html

I was wondering why I spend all this money, time, and effort going a third of the way across the country just to spend more money to place my art up in a gallery for a mere week. But when David Stones, the ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Sometimes life gets full of loose ends. "I should have done that," "I wish I'd gone there," "I never tried that thing off the menu," "I'd love to meet that person again." This year so far I've been able to close some of those circles. Here are four stories. Mostly I just want to share a ton of pictures.

Kannonji
I always wanted to go back to Kannonji ( Read more... )

This year I've had two art shows and I'm calling myself an Artist now.


( Read more... )

So I'm living in a hotel 4 days a week now in my favorite city, Matsue. Living in a hotel isn't quite my preferred lifestyle, but it's better than hotel jail. And if the company's hotel doesn't suit me, I can always stay at a hotel of my choice on my own money, and pretend I'm on vacation.

I told Matsue - You don't have to be good to me this time.
( Read more... )

People asked me if it was boring to be stuck inside for 2 weeks.

It's hard to explain the exasperation of the first week of trying to get out of Tokyo, my time spent making up various plans, calling friends, helping people in a similar situation, and simultaneously trying to do what I could for my job while not actually being present.

So it was ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Contrary to what my student said, it turns out my bad luck hadn't fallen away at all. Here's all the things that happened on my trip to the US.

アメリカへ行った時のハプニング表

(Disclaimer, this is not great reading material, I'm just venting here)

- I bought a flight to the US in October when they reduced the quarantine period from 10 days to 3 days

( Read more... )

I learned a new phrase from one of my students: yakuotoshi

"yaku" means "evil" or "bad luck"
"otoshi" means that it has "dropped off" or fallen away.

My student told me this because I had some really bad luck recently.

Here's the story:
One day I woke up on my day off at 5 am and thought - What am I going to do today?
Of course, I could always go to ( Read more... )