Hackerfarm Residency Prep

I can’t believe it, only 5 weeks left until I leave Japan. Or rather I don’t want to believe it. It will be almost two years to the day when I leave, but I am certainly leaving wanting more, which perhaps is the best way. […]

Complex Simplicity

Yesterday was an amazing day. It really felt like the first day of my favourite season, summer, due to the beautiful intense heat the buzz of the cicadas. I woke up very early and ran down to the workshop to try an idea that I […]

Ideas and Coffee and Mountains

I`ve had an amazing first few days of my residency. My aim for my time here is simple, too work closely with local craftspeople to come up with some new products that can be constructed using local tools and timber, that will appeal to a […]

Welcome to Hida!

This week I start a two week residency at Hida Fabcafe. To start off my time here let me share this incredible space with you! Fabcafe is a super cool collection of cafes which can be found worldwide, for example in Spain, France and Tokyo. […]

mono no aware

Cherry blossom season in Japan, a crazy couple of weeks where whatever the weather everyone, and I mean everyone, will take some time from their normally impenetrable work schedules to bathe in the beauty of the blossoms. This activity is called hanami, which literally translates as […]

合格

So this week I received my pass mark for the JLPT3, which is the mid level of the government run Japanese Language Proficiency Test. This is the exam that I failed last spring, so I`m very happy to have achieved it this time. I doubt […]

Naked Christmas: No wi-fi, no clothes

So this year I decided if I couldn’t do a family Christmas with my people in the UK, I’d go as far as possible in the other direction. I booked myself into a night at a mountain hotspring hotel, a Japanese Onsen Ryokan.   The […]

Yakushima, deep forest dream

Last week I went to Yakushima, a island about two hours by ferry from Kagoshima, a port city at the bottom of Kyushu. I can confidently say it was the best thing I’ve done since I arrived in Japan over a year ago. Best known […]

Sand is water

I recently took a weekend trip to see some friends and have a chance to view some beautiful Japanese sand gardens. Fukuoka is the site of the very first Zen temple, Shofuku-ji was built 1195 by Yosai Eisai, it’s a quiet temple, housing the largest […]

Abundance textures

One of my favourite sights that I keep coming across in Japan is the wonderful occurrence of hundreds or even thousands of small things combined to make a solid wall or object of texture. I’m calling these ‘abundance textures’, and here are some examples:

Moss, mirrors, midori (that’s green in japanese… coundn’t think of another M in english)

The other day I went on a trip to Ama-no-Iwato, a shrine complex that marks the sight of one of Shinto’s most well known myths. The story goes that in ancient times the bad bahavior of Susanoo, the Japanese god of storms, which included floods […]

One year in Japan, Shinto musings…

So I’ve now been in Japan for almost exactly a year, which makes it a good time to think about my original goals and ambitions for my time out here. In some ways I’ve come to see that my original ambition of re-designing my mind […]